A collection of predictions on how WCM systems will evolve, from now in 2013 - to 4 years out in 2017. The team building the TYPO3 Neos CMS initiated this forecast curation to help inspire our long-term planning of the open source software we produce. And in addition, to tell the story about the massive change taking place in the sphere of digital content production and delivery. Want to know more about this? http://neos.typo3.org/ux/future http://rasmusskjoldan.com/post/56140980507/curated-predictions-about-the-future-of-wcms-published Predictions by: Karen McGrane, Janus Boye, Alain Veuve, Perttu Tolvanen, Boris Kraft, Kian Gould, Martin Goldbach Olsen, Jacob Floyd, Mikkel Staunsholm, Olivier Dobberkau, Daniel Hinderink, Christian Badse, Robert Lemke, Jan-Erik Revsbech, Sebastian Kurfuerst, Anders Bendix Kiel, Christian Nilson, Rasmus Skjoldan

1. Hi future!
How will
the web
be built
neOS

2. neos.typo3.org
International experts, thinkers,
developers, CMS clients, vendors &
architects have shared with
the #TYPO3Neos team their
predictions on how the web
will be built in the future.
This is both their and the team’s
own short stories about constructing
web experiences in 2017 - about
the tools that make the web.

3. FoRECASTS on WCMS
in 2017 by
Karen McGrane Janus Boye Alain Veuve
Perttu Tolvanen Boris Kraft Kian Gould
Martin Goldbach Olsen Jacob Floyd
Mikkel Staunsholm Olivier Dobberkau
Daniel Hinderink Christian Badse
Robert Lemke Jan-Erik Revsbech
Sebastian Kurfuerst Anders Bendix Kiel

4. neos.typo3.org
“In the next 3-5 years, I think two key trends will dominate the CMS space.
First, organizations will realize that WCMS doesn’t always support true
multi-channel publishing. They will need to invest in new systems to
decouple the authoring and storage layer from the presentation and
publishing layer. This might mean adding in middleware, developing new
APIs or even choosing an entirely new CMS. Second, as a result of
decoupling, organizations will also recognize that they can focus on
improving the author experience separate from the front end. This will
change the way organizations think about creating structured content,
because the content model and author experience won’t be designed for a
specific output format—the content will be expected to serve multiple
presentations. Organizations will be able to afford to refine the author
experience, because they won’t have to throw out all that work every time
they redesign the front end.“
Karen McGraneManaging Partner of Bond Art + Science

5. neos.typo3.org
“Strategic leadership and business skills from the customer perspective
seems to be finally arriving in a web content management marketplace,
that has long been unnecessarily complex, confusing and crowded to
vendors, analysts and customers alike.
As we embark on the next phases of the wilder-than-expected roller
coaster ride that is driving digital transformation into organizations of all
types, the need for customers to better manage the web is bigger than ever.
Winning solutions untangle complexity while driving value and innovation.”
Janus BoyeJ. Boye – The international community for web & intranet professionals

6. neos.typo3.org
“Leading Web Content Management Systems will have to be able to create
a stunning Digital User Experience throughout all devices and channels.
Marketers, in any context, must be able to flexibly and freely create
targeted content and functionality.”
Alain VeuveWeb and E-Business Consultant / Business Developer

7. neos.typo3.org
“I believe that the future of Web Content Management is more about
moderation capabilities than about content management. We have to
have a system that helps us control, filter and moderate our content feeds
from different sources. I believe that in the future our “content manage-
ment system” will have dozens of different pieces (for photos, for videos,
for publications, for people, for projects, for services) and the purpose
of our “strategic web content management system” is more about moderat-
ing those different sources and streams between different sites than
managing the master content for those services. I also believe that another
major feature set for our “strategic web content management system” is
going to be preview capabilities. We have to have a system that helps us
understand the different content sets and how they are displayed in
different devices and platforms. We have to have a system that creates
these “illusions of previews” so that we feel that we are in control of our
“web experience” (as we like to call it in 2013). In short: I believe that
the future of web content management is not about master content man-
agement, it is about moderation of streams and creating preview illusions.”
Perttu TolvanenWeb & CMS Expert, Partner at North Patrol

8. neos.typo3.org
“The CMS has become the center, the hub, the nexus of digital communica-
tion. Everybody has become a content creator. Organizations have become
publishers to succeed in digital marketing, services and sales. The world
is on the move – it has become mobile and ever faster changing. Yet most
software products are still stuck in the 90’s style “death by dropdown” user
interaction paradigm. Software creators need to move on, need to provide
the flexibility to keep pace with the evolving web. We need to provide
usability that inspires great content and allows people to produce great
customer experiences. Leave the 90s behind. Define the future. Be bold.
Change the world.”
Boris KraftChief Technology Officer & Co-Founder, Magnolia International

9. neos.typo3.org
“Enterprise WCM in 2017 will be all about one thing: Relevance. The times
have passed where you can simply dump all your content unfiltered onto
your website visitors. Personalization is king, using big data to drive
customized content experiences will be key and having a content manage-
ment platform that can both utilize the power of sophisticated development
techniques while still delivering an exceptional usability experience to its
users will be the winning technology for the web. WCM is no longer about
managing massive data for everyone but breaking it down to the most
relevant data for each individual.”
Kian GouldCEO of AOE media / TYPO3 Head of Marketing

10. neos.typo3.org
“I believe CMS in 2017 is a revolutionary thing we could not even imagine.
4 digital years is like a 100 ordinary. But it is still based around creating
content of relevance in any shape or form for a target group gone
completely mobile. The CMS should and will be a cross media production
tool for all kinds of genres, devices and medias. The “back-end-site-tree”
as we know it is dead. Users wil have tasks and apps. Intranets will be big
again and emerge in a new shape and form with video and virtuality as the
driver, virtual meeting rooms and all imaginable social media features.
But whatever the digital landscape looks like, customized and personalised
content will still be king.“
Martin Goldbach OlsenWeb Editor, FTF - Confederation of Professionals in Denmark

11. neos.typo3.org
“The latest trend in CMS development has been to make WYSIWYG inline-
editing (What You See Is What You Get) a first-class feature for a first-class
user experience. That trend serves content editors very well, however it
does not meet the needs of content creators and content authors. So often,
content is repurposed in a variety of templates and contexts, so content
editors need to see content without templates. Wireframe mode in TYPO3
Neos is a good start in this direction, but we need it to push it even
further. I think the future CMS development should embrace the concepts of
What You See Is What You Mean (WYSIWYM) editing where the meaning-
or to use the popular buzzword, the semantics--of content is easy to see.
Authors should find it natural to say ‘this is a heading’ instead of just hit-
ting the bold button. Lyx is one of the best examples of a WYSIWYM editor,
and would be a good model for the next big trend in CMS development.”
Jacob FloydTYPO3 Neos Active Contributor

12. neos.typo3.org
“Content should be at the center of any CMS. And easy access to all relevant
content should be at the center of any organisation. We need to find a way
to easily navigate and present any information available from a single
centralised content hub, spanning all digital platforms.”
MIKKEL STAUNSHOLMSENIOR Frontend and Mobile Developer, CREUNA

13. neos.typo3.org
“I like to think of content as a multi dimensional object that can be touched
and moved on many dimensions, including time. Content management in
the future will allow me to morph this object and design the relations and
the model of its usage. Best case the content itself will be the CMS as it will
contain all information about its designed look, its entities, API endpoints
and the way to work on it.”
OliviEr DobberkauHead of R&D at dkd Internet Service

14. neos.typo3.org
“A CMS has a lot of tasks to solve, if it is to be considered of value: easy
and powerful content editing functions, support for individual processes,
capabilities to exchange data with other systems, to name a few. The top
contenders all do this and more, still Content Management has become a
commodity, even stale in terms of innovation. Everyone in the market is
struggling to come up with the next big thing to get the exitement back. I
believe the answer lies in going where content is going: into social
media, spanning from networks to publishing platforms. In the future
Content Management Systems will have to think and act beyond the website
- or die.”
Daniel Hinderinkfounder and managing partner of dpool

15. neos.typo3.org
“Awesome content will still be king. Yet, rather than just taking care of
distribution and managing content, supporting collaborative content
creation within and across the organisation will be key to the CMS.”
Christian BadseCreative Director, Danish BroadcaSTing Corporation

16. neos.typo3.org
“A traditional web content management system is the monolithic, isolated
application for producing content and publishing it for the web. The future
role of a CMS must focus much more on the “management” part and become
the central hub for your web publication activities. Users will spend more
time curating content, compiling articles from different sources and
enriching content with comments or by embedding or linking to other
media.
Editors need to tailor content for different contexts - be it different
devices or target groups. And naturally you want to know if your publica-
tion was worth the effort: how many people did you reach? How did they
liked it? How much did it cost producing and discussing it? And then again,
content management is only one piece of the puzzle, since many websites
really turned into dynamic web applications than being an online version
of a company brochure.”
Robert LemkeLead Developer TYPO3 Neos and TYPO3 Flow

17. neos.typo3.org
“Across our many large-scale danish WCMS clients, I see this tendency:
The need to focus on the content itself. Not the presentation, user
management, or the fancy feature-of-the-day, but instead focusing on
making the editor experience as smooth, easy and fast as possible. This
does not mean that the enterprise content management system of 2017
will be less advanced. On the contrary, it will feature integration with many
other tools that focus on their specific task and letting the CMS do its part
in a greater content strategy. But the editors’ interface will be simpler,
cleaner, and more abstracted from the layout than that of current WCMS’es.
The current tendency to have a closer coupling of content and layout
(ie. WYSIWYG editors), will shift towards a much more abstract content
approach, driven by the use of multi-channel publication.
I also believe that many enterprises will need an extremely mobile
interface, enabling editors to instantly publish content from whatever
device they happen to be using that moment. The WCM of 2017 will feature
a mobile, simplistic interface, enabling editors to focus on the right content,
at the right time, instantly delivered to the right channel.
Jan-Erik RevsbechCEO OF MOC

18. neos.typo3.org
“The focus will be on the content itself. A WCMS cannot dictate how the
information you want to share is organized, but it will provide tools to
manage both well-structured content and loosely structured content
residing in “information clouds”, also being adaptable in multiple
content dimensions (such as languages, devices or target audiences).
Content “lives” on its own, that’s why Embracing Change is another key
principle: change of content, of information structure, of connected
infrastructure.”
Sebastian KurfuerstTYPO3 NEOS DEVELOPER

19. neos.typo3.org
“In the coming years, one of the main challenges for any WCMS will be to
bridge the gap between the organization’s external and internal work-
flows. Depending on industry and product category, companies should
either create their products through dialogue and crowdsourcing - revo-
lutionize support by utilizing open platforms like Twitter and Zendesk -
or maintain a cross-platform presence and dialogue that is consistent and
meaningful. A WCMS can target a niche or the broader market. Either way,
workflow customizability, built-in integrations and open APIs are crucial
factors to success in the market place.”
Anders Bendix KielFounder and Podio Work Architect

20. neos.typo3.org
“At axxess2 we predict that the way we think about Web Content
Management will experience a focus shift from responsive content design
for end devices towards responsive content design for the user.
The content will be displayed depending on user preferences instead of
device specifications. Concerning overall display of content on web sites;
the way we think about web site design will change completely. Today 90%
of all www pages are still designed according to the same principles as 20
years ago, reflecting the page to page print media design, in the future the
content display will move towards the navigation we are seeing today in
some native Apps”
Christian NilsonManaging director, axxess2

21. neos.typo3.org
“First and foremost, by ‘17, we will have figured out how to make editors
feel safe while doing the abstract task of publishing layout-independent
content into both known and unknown channels. A WCM in ‘17 can’t just
rely on “better previews” as many channels or frontend variants will not be
known at the authoring moment. Our brains have never done this at large
scale before which calls for new methods of establishing trust in the system
- to let editors rest assured that their content “is there” and behaving.
Secondly, WCMS can become a software space that better helps users
collaboratively plan the experiences and relationships going on at the
touchpoints with end-users. If we draw in this practice of planning and
collaboration, currently going on outside the CMS, the process of actually
improving digital experiences can become significantly easier.
On that path, the CMS can become a fine place to prototype and design
- with real content. Content-first will be a natural part of that shift.”
RASMUS SKJOLDANneos designer / Creative lead at moc

22. Writing the roadmap of a WCMS is a remarkable challenge. Paradoxically, it’s about building
a tool to do things we don’t fully know what are. To help inspire the TYPO3 Neos team plan
beyond our 1.0 release, we asked these experts from around the world on their takes on the
future of CMS - and blended it all with our own thoughts. We wanted input on how organizations
will likely manage their content - and organize the overarching experiences that people deliver
through CMS products.
With TYPO3 open source software, we will be responding to both market demands, business needs,
technology opportunities and general ideas about publishing on the web. Our technology is an
answer to many different questions and phenomonae. That’s why we asked such different kinds
of people to join this fascinating discussion.
These extracts of knowledge and experience will now go into our thinking and further planning of
the TYPO3 Neos software. We hope it will also be inspirational to anyone else interested in digital
publishing, the web, content management or software planning.
All the quotes are kindly given to the Neos team specifically for this collection. Feel free to share
via #typo3neos
Questions about the 2017 WCM forecast can be sent to Rasmus Skjoldan at rasmus@typo3.org
BACKGROUND story of
the 2017 WCM forecast