I recently volunteered to review several website compliance tools after a colleague’s frustration in trying to differentiate them. When you start searching for these tools you soon find a very crowded market place. However, I was fortunate to be constrained to review just three of the leading vendors, Sitemorse, Magus ActiveStandards and Vamosa Check and Fix. I will summarise what I found by answering some simple questions.
What do website compliance tools do?
Website compliance tools are similar to search engines in that they crawl through the pages on a site or sites based on URLs you supply. As they crawl through sites they analyse pages, content, images, documents, digital assets and code by running a series of predefined tests. The results of these tests are provided as reports highlighting defects such as broken links or failure to comply with certain standards and guidelines such as W3C.
How do they do it?
All these applications operate on two basic principles. First of all they are delivered through Software as a Service (SaaS) platforms and second they work by crawling through a website from a given URL extracting pages, content and digital assets ready for testing.
The question you may ask is why do I need a web compliance tool and what can they do for me?
• Improve code quality and highlight any possible compliance issues during the development and testing phases.
• Provide audits of your web properties across your web estate
• Site optimisation to improve site integrity and areas such as SEO
• Brand governance by ensuring messaging, content and assets are consistent and meet company/corporate guidelines across your web estate.
• Content governance, constancy and quality can be achieved from tests that range from identifying spelling and grammatical errors to tests which monitor key words, phrases, places and corporate terms.
• Compliance to web standards and guidelines such as accessibility, usability and other W3C guidelines.
• Ensure that websites adhere to the relevant laws and regulations
What are the tools strengths and differentiators?
Magus has a very flexible interface built around a dashboard concept. The dashboard provides summary information across multiple sites as well as allowing users to drill down into individual sites and issues. Magus also provides strong workflow to support the assignment and management of issues raised in the test reports and again visibility of assigned issues and tasks are visible from the dashboard. There is a range of predefined tests but in instances where these tests do not fully satisfy the requirements new tests can be constructed by Magus developers. This is particularly useful for non standard tests to support brand and editorial guidelines. Magus also provides a feature called ‘aboutness’ which automatically identifies entities in content such names and companies. This enables a user to find where these entities are used and navigate the reports based on these entities.
The Sitemorse approach cares less about customisation and more about simplicity and rapid deployment. Sitemorse uses an extensive series of tests to create a set of standard reports for all its customers. The fact that all reports are standardised and use the same tests allows Sitemorse to summarise compliance report data to create sector based leader boards. These leader boards are also available for customers to rank there own sites, however, what is not understood is the algorithm used to for generating leader boards and its validity or relevance to particular sectors.
Vamosa originates from content migration with products aimed at analysing, cleansing and migrating content between content sources and management systems. The Check and Fix (C&F) product is a natural extension for Vamosa adding compliance to their solution suite. The mindset of configurability and flexibility required for content migration is firmly set into the C&F product design. C&F is more of a web based framework for displaying compliance reports that are produced from tests that originate from policies that the customer constructs. These policies can also be integrated with content management systems to provide a level of automated fixing. There are a number of preconfigured policies as you would expect for areas such as HTML, SEO and spellings, however, this level of flexibility comes at a price as time is needed to analyse, design and implement policies. As with all other web compliance systems C&F captures content and assets, however, Vamosa also retains different versions of this content allowing you to view content and assets through a timeline.
In a nutshell
Sitemorse is a quick and easy way to audit website compliance issues. Very useful if you need to monitor or test website compliance and have little time to invest for customising the reports or the tests do not require customisation.
Magus is ideally suited for those who need sophisticated governance for large web estates, require issues to be managed through organised workflow or have a need to closely manage brand compliance issues.
Vamosa Check and Fix is suited to providing compliance where complete flexibility is required for creating appropriate tests for complex environments. Also C&F is an obvious choice to support content migrations that are already using the rest of the Vamosa tool set.
Interesting. Two random snippets of information about Magus ActiveStandards for you:
Magus’ Aboutness actually uses the wonderful OpenCalais web service. For example, test it here: http://viewer.opencalais.com/
They have a WordPress plugin called Tagaroo – give it a bash.
Secondly, SDL Tridion now resell Magus under the badge Safeguard
http://www.sdltridion.com/news_events/news/2009_news/safeguard.asp
What is the cost of these tools?
Thanks for the post John.
I didn’t know there was a question or confusion over the rankings, the methodology is online at; http://www.sitemorse.com/benchmark.html
All of the tests we include are listed here; http://www.sitemorse.com/sitemorse.html
Hope this helps
L Shaw
Following the request for pricing, we offer a range of service modules (SMB / Corporate and Enterprise Solutions) launching a ‘lite’ online only service Qtr 2 / 2010. We will be updating our own site very soon with these details as well!
Sitemorse is very transparent, easy to do business and scalable from an SME to any Global Corporation. Excludes any client specific brand integration (includes banned brand alerting / IP/trademark monitoring)
- Web Benchmark
Internal, Performance, Competitor and Best Practice Benchmarking, by running Sitemorse’s Benchmark service across websites (peers, competitors etc) you are empowered with exact results to immediately improve & enhance online capability. Priced by on scale of web estate (25 sites £500 month – 1,000 sites £7,000 month).
- Discovery
Sitemorse Discovery solves one of the key issues organisations face today – finding out exactly what’s online, and creating a detailed inventory of what’s where, what’s built up and what you are dependent upon to operate online.
Sold as a one off service – 3 packages £6/£12/£24k
- Correction
Sitemorse Web Correction is initiated on the completion of discovery focus on immediate online improvement. Working to agreed quality, compliance and performance requirements, we deliver a 6 – 8 week project starting with a workshop, to focused corrective action. From day ONE we guarantee improvements. Priced as a one off service – 3 packages £1/£2.5/£4k
- Migration
Sitemorse Web Migration its the world’s only automated solution to review and catalogue every element that makes up the entirety of a web estate. There after we prioritise corrective action and step by step migrating requirements, and focus resource on issues that deliver the greatest benefit. Priced as a one off service – 3 packages £3/£6/£9k
- Snapshot
Snapshot empowers Content Editors, Developers etc to instantly test pages at their point of creation – with the use of in browser tool, to allow immediate review of the created / updated page. Delivered within the ongoing monitoring services subscription, or sold on a ‘per seat’ £20-£100 per month.
- ITT Support / Vendor Verification
Sitemorse ITT Support / Vendor Verification helps to address the question those procuring web services face “they all tell me how good there services and systems are – how or where can I go for independent, consistent verification?”. Priced as a one off service – 2 packages £1/£2.5k
- Continual Monitoring
By the minute, hour, day, week, month we continually monitor your availability, compliance, performance – reading the content, checking templates and 3rd parties and monitoring the infrastructure. This ensures the continuous delivery of the very best online experience. Sold as annual subscription service £500 – £38k per month
- On demand testing
Our final service component is ‘on demand’ testing – this allows you to check from a single page, to an entire website – choosing how deep and where to start. Fully self managed, and executed directly from the Sitemorse dashboard. Services are included with monitoring subscription.
Interesting post and a good overview of three alternate approaches to the challenge.
At Vamosa, we have definitely approached this challenge with a pragmatic and ultra leading edge solution to the challenges of real time monitoring of the whole web estate (both inside and outside the firewall).
Although we re latest to the market with monitoring, our pedigree of web site analysis, migration and ongoing care and maintenance goes back to 2003 and we have hundreds of the worlds largest corporations and governments on our customer roll. Being the latest to market, we have taken advantage of this by bringing a totally unique approach to the challenge and recognizing the fact that this is not a problem that can be viewed in isolation.
Uniquely, we offer:
– a full set of solutions for all stakeholders in the web content life cycle – authors, web masters, project managers, marketing teams, information and knowledge managers and IT professionals
– a set of web content governance products to analyze migrate cleanse monitor and maintain all published sites as well as the base content inside of the CMS, to manage and govern a total 360 degree view of the full content ecosystem
– our products are provided as a service via our leading edge cloud based services and can also be licensed to be installed inside of a customer’s firewall to provide the same governance services to closed corporate content as well as public facing websites (in our experience only around 25-30% of the full web estate appear on the world wide web)
– the capability to apply a full set of cleansing and governance processes to all content, and then use these same rules to perform ongoing monitoring of the content
– out of the box we provide over 200 transformation and monitoring processes and it is a simple task to create highly complex customized monitoring capabilities (because one size doesn’t fit all)
– we uniquely offer web records management capabilities that allow for the review and capture of changes through time, storing and reporting on what has happened to each and every change since monitoring and maintenance began
– we offer Check and Fix as a service to web authors, as well as Vamosa Content Analyzer to provide web masters with the ultimate in ad-hoc reporting of all aspects of the web estate – what is published, what is inside of the CMS and what is being accessed
– the ability to fix the issues found as we believe that it is quite annoying to be presented with all of the problems, but no offer of an automated solution.
Pricing is therefore a direct function of the amount of content being monitored and the number of rules being applied. Total flexibility is important as it allows your organization to home in on what is important to you.
There are two components to the fees for the Magus ActiveStandards (www.magus.co.uk) service:
- A one-off setup and configuration fee.
- Ongoing fee for the managed service.
The initial set-up fee is usually between £5,000-£20,000 depending on the number of websites, pages, and extent of configuration required.
The ongoing management fee is typically between £2,000-£8,000 per month, primarily depending on the amount of content covered. The fee includes:
- Hosting and provision of the core application. The platform comes with a comprehensive library of best-practice compliance checkpoints. Additional brand and editorial checkpoints are custom-built for each client.
- Training; both face-to-face, and via webinar
- Unlimited support, by email and telephone help desk.
- All software upgrades
Pilots and other flexible options, available upon request.
As John notes above, ActiveStandards is not so much a “tool” as an entire enterprise governance platform. It provides a framework for managing all your governance policies and processes, including: accountability management, editor training, benchmarking and KPIs, alongside automated compliance and content quality management.
P.S. Nic (Vamosa post) – cut the brochureware, and just answer the question like everyone else. What you got to hide…?
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Along with these vendors, people may want to check out HiSoftware’s Compliance Sheriff.
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