Sitecore OMS vs. Sharepoint….hmmmm

I had an initial reaction from my VP of Marketing, Aaron Branson, regarding my take on Sharepoint as being great on audience-profiling, targeting, personalization, and workflow in my previous post.  Aaron says, “What about OMS?”, who, by the way, is one of the first OMS Certified Professionals.  I just want to quickly clear things up that I have not misspoke since I think that Sharepoint is good for these.  I never mentioned OMS because I wasn’t trying to make that connection.  Note: For the workflow feature, it’s more between Sitecore and Sharepoint.

Well, now I would like to make that connection.  The Online Marketing Suite (OMS) is an evolutionary product that changes how a CMS can display marketing-appropriate content to particular users.  Its foundation is its behavioral engine that allows it to analyze how to best show particular content and target the correct audience.  OMS is marketed as an analytics tool, which compared to Sharepoint’s audience targeting, personalization, and targeting is totally different.  How so, you ask?

Although both products may be using similar words/phrases to market their products, they actually have different purposes and basis on how they do it.  There’s a reason why the OMS product name has “Marketing” on it.

Audience Profiling
OMS Sitecore OMS profiles its users based on the visitor’s site behaviors.  The keyword is “behavior”.  I’m sure there’s a way to incorporate additional user information to fine-tune the profile but that’s when you know who the users are.  This means, OMS profiles anonymous users  to be able to deliver better contextual content.	Sharepoint Sharepoint profiles is based on “known” information about the user.  As I said before, it’s initial intent is for internal sites where users are in some database.  For Sharepoint, it’s the Active Directory (AD).  The AD contains organizational, demographic, departmental, and others that help content authors deliver appropriate content that pertains to them.
Targeting
OMS OMS targets based on its behavioral analysis of the user.  It does its analysis using tests such as classic multivariate and A/B splits.  Whichever combinations perform better, the marketer can fine-tune particular pages or areas of the page.  Targeting in OMS sense is meant more to improve conversion rates.	Sharepoint As mentioned before, Sharepoint uses stored known information about its visitor because they are logged in.  With this information, Sharepoint can target content appropriately.  For instance, a St. Louis picnic outing announcement will not likely show up for someone who lives in New York.
Personalization
OMS OMS’s personalization is a “push” from marketing.  It makes the site seemingly personalized to the user because of his/her site behavior.  For instance, if I visited a particular camera, I might see tile ads pertaining to that camera in the future (similar to the Nicam demo).  So, OMS personalizes the content for me instead of the other way around.	Sharepoint As a portal software, one of it’s strengths is giving the user control over what content he/she sees.  This is the basis for Sharepoint personalization.  Unlike OMS, it’s personalization is dictated by the user’s preferences and not necessarily by behavior.    Thus, the user “pulls” the content instead of marketing or whomever is “pushing” content.
Workflow
Sitecore Notice I changed this to Sitecore and not OMS.  The main thing to consider is the type of date stored in each of these systems.  For Sitecore, it’s primarily Web content.  The content goes through various department staff and reviews, approve, denies, or publishes them.  The primary “work” involved is reviewing the content.  Sitecore’s workflow mechanism is great for this.  It’s highly customizable and flexible to a point to where it’s possible to have Sharepoint-like workflow (not necessarily better, but has more out-of-the-box features).  We’ve done workflow where content actually goes out of the CMS into a preview server for outside approval.	Sharepoint Workflow in Sharepoint is a totally different monster.  It’s not just for reviews although in the end, that’s essentially what people do.  But, it’s more on the type of data that goes through workflow.  Basically, anything goes through its workflow such as (of course) simple Web content.  But, Web content is only one type of data it supports.  An organization can create workflow that adheres to its business processes and allows business users to collaborate on documents, although Sitecore can certainly be extended to do this. By the way, Sharepoint is essentially a host for Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF), thus making it pretty customizable and very powerful.

I’ve cited differences between OMS and Sharepoint (and with Sitecore as well) and the main concept to consider is that OMS is behavioral while Sharepoint fact-based (at least on these features).  I know each one can be retrofitted somehow, but out-of-the box this is what you have.  I hope this clears up any misnomers that I may have mentioned before in my previous post.