Give me SUGAR!

January 26th, 2010

Matt Mullenweg

And just when you thought the Dot Coms were “so 90′s”. With the advent of Content Management Systems (CMS) like Drupal and Joomla! along comes bad boy genious Matt Mullenweg in 2003 to create WordPress. Drupal and Joomla! geeks sneered at the possibility that WordPress could beat both of them out in a popularity contest. Unfortunately for them, it has. In 2009, WordPress won the Open Source CMS award by Pact Publishing. Pact couldn’t help but offer second and third place awards to Joomla! and Drupal in fear of the overwhelming gnashing of teeth and a flood of tears.

Perhaps it’s WordPress’ “Multi-User” mode that gives an individual the feeling of Lord of the Blogs by creating multiple blogs and controlling multiple publishing outlets to a selected and controlled demographic of readers. Give me a Vallume and a brick to the head when WordPess competes against itself by co-creating Lyceum, an additional multi-blog system.

Dumping control over to the WordPress users ended up being the best move in the end. While struggling to control Themes with embedded advertising, it allowed the rest of the planet control the look and feel of their own personal space on the Internet.

But, who could come up with something better than a GNU Licensed open-sourced system that could top dimple-cheeked Mullenweg and his band of Merry Bloggers? Enter Customer Relations Management, Sugar CRM. Complete with plug-ins for MS Outlook and marketing campaigns, Sugar allows the CEO of any company a direct connecting to his/her customer base. New product line dwindling in saless? Sugar will be the first to tell you before your Marketing Director will be willing to admit.

While it’s not exactly “Content Management”, handy for broadcasting mega amounts of information for news outlets like CNN and Fox Noise, CRM drags every detail of your customer business to you. It’s Content Management in reverse and it’s brilliant.