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Sitecore, the leading provider of .NET web content management system (CMS) software, has identified three key web content management trends from its second annual customer survey.

These trends are:

the growth of e-commerce

portal and public website integration

increased integration of Web 2.0.

Sitecore said that while these trends began to be seen in 2008, they will have a noticeable effect on the market in 2009, and all trends reflect the evolution of the Web into a strategic medium for enterprises that fosters and increases user interaction.

In addition to the survey results (see more below), Sitecore also announced that the website for the new Women's Pro Soccer League will be managed entirely using Sitecore CMS and will go live at the end of the month. (The first game for the new league is March 29.)

The women's soccer league is just another score in the sports world for Sitecore. The company also has in its huddle the Baltimore Ravens, Atlanta Falcons, New Orleans Saints, Open Golf, and the Women's Sports Foundation.

In the customer survey of 83 U.S. web content management customers, Sitecore found the number of organizations implementing Web 2.0 functionalities increased by more than 250 percent.

Enterprises are finding that it's important that they make it easier and quicker for people to share news, have discussions, and get information via social networking tools. The ability of Sitecore's Web CMS to easily add applications such as wikis, forums, blogs, and surveys has helped its customers meet their social computing goals.

Although Web 2.0 has been a recurring topic in the press, Sitecore's survey now indicates integration with websites is rapidly growing and expects that it will see continued strong growth this year.

Another growing trend is the integration of portals with public websites. The predominant type of portal being integrated with Sitecore's public websites was Microsoft's SharePoint, with a 100 percent growth rate in portal to public website integrations noted. While content sharing is a stated goal of many web projects, to see such a high growth rate of actual implementations indicates the trend is now established.

The final trend was the use of web content management to integrate e-commerce tools into websites. The percent of such integrations increased 39 percent year to year, with the two most frequent e-commerce solutions used being Microsoft Commerce Server and InSite Commerce.

"With our business doubling this past year, we were able to get input from almost twice the number of customers, giving us broader exposure to the trends," said Paul Markun, VP Marketing at Sitecore. "This year, we are seeing that the trends focus more on meeting strategic initiatives. Sitecore will continue innovating to give organizations the tools to deliver truly exceptional, results-driven experiences that give them the ability to meet these goals."

The trends from the prior year included integration of Web CMS into the enterprise, growth of .NET Framework, and adoption of mobile computing, and the survey indicated that they will continue to be strong this year. For example, nearly half of the survey respondents indicated that full compatibility with Microsoft .NET was one of their highest decision criteria.

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