CMS Vendors
Eidosmedia
Méthode and Cobalt
Eidosmedia is a long-standing print content management system (CMS) vendor that has made impressive strides on the digital side, but still lags a bit in terms of architecture and technical debt.
- Eidosmedia's CMS consists of several pieces: the Méthode CMS and Cobalt digital publishing framework; the Swing browser-based interface; and/or Prime Windows client application
- Eidosmedia is best suited to mid-sized chains of news organisations and large news organisations in North America and EMEA that are digital first, but still publish print or publish highly structured content streams (such as newswires).
- Customers include Le Monde and Figaro (France), The Times and Financial Times (UK), the Frankfurter Allgemeine (Germany), The Boston Globe (US) and The Washington Post (US) — the latter two just for print
Likely fit
Eidosmedia is best suited to mid-sized chains of news organisations and large news organisations in North America and EMEA that are digital first, but still publish print and who want to enable more editorial control over digital page and screen layout than most pure 'headless' CMS would offer.
At a glance
Primary customer fit
Mid-sized chain of news organisations
Secondary fit
Large news organisation
Most active geographies
EMEA, North America
Official support hours
365x24x7
Officially supported languages for user interface
EN, IT, NL-FL, FR, ES, DE, JA, ZH-CN
Third-party language support available?
No
Licence model
Not disclosed by vendor
Scope summary
Focused on (digital) content creation with support for print; optionally includes management of front-end experiences, even for headless application, but lacks revenue-generation features (paywall, subscriptions, ads)
Tech base
AWS, Java, React, PostgreSQL, OpenSearch
Cloud model
Single-tenant SaaS
Headquarters
Milan, Italy
Head count
228
- AI Integrations
- Print Automatic Pagination
- Configurable Dashboards
What customers report
- Considered a very stable system with few issues or outages, if any
- Can deal with large numbers of concurrent editorial users
- Highly productised but customers report the company is very flexible with requested product enhancements
- Not well suited to content other than text and images, e.g. poor video support
- Dearth of insights in editorial analytics such as schedules and productivity
- Rapid regular release schedule not always adequately documented for those still running on premise
- The company itself feels opaque sometimes, especially around road maps and concealing technical debt and seems less forthcoming and less open to sharing among licensees
Background
- Eidosmedia was founded in 1999 in Milan, Italy. Since 2010, it has been majority-owned by a series of different investment funds (presently Paris-based CAPZA), though management has retained a stake in ownership. The company has offices in Italy, Germany, US, France, UK, China and Australia with a development hub in Porto, Portugal.
- The core Eidosmedia CMS is called Méthode, with Cobalt as the digital publishing component. The company also supports print with Méthode Layout and Planning. Editors historically worked in the 'Prime' Windows client and many newsrooms still do, with editors having grown accustomed to the conveniences of a desktop client. However, customers have been shifting away to the 'Swing' browser-based interface (which doesn't require deployment on client machines).
- In Swing, editors can arrange their own dashboards to keep the most used functionality at hand. Unlike page-based systems (c.f. Arc XP), articles get created as componentised content (built up in paragraphs) and a variety of rich content blocks can be inserted (such as images, polls and social media). Eidosmedia has paid attention to collaborative features and editors can add notes and annotations; the CMS also has its own integrated chat functionality. This kind of component-based authoring allows for finer-grained reuse but likely at a cost of some editorial overhead and complexity, especially for authors.
- Web and print variants get created through 'channels', which create a snapshot of the content that can then be edited separately (but is still linked to the original article). A common use case is digital-first content creation, where the digital content is on a 'continuous deadline' (and updated as a story evolves). For print, an editor takes a snapshot, which does not contain digital media such as video and can then be further adapted to the page layout. The same mechanism can also be employed for different editions or languages of the content.
- Cobalt started out as a complete website solution (with templating in the common Freemarker framework), though according to Eidosmedia, the CMS is increasingly used 'headless', through the API only. Eidosmedia provides a proof of concept front end built in React using the APIs. This effectively gives you an optional page/screen builder, even when used headless.
- Note that Méthode and Cobalt were originally designed to get deployed on-premises on a Java server architecture; however, Eidosmedia has begun to offer it as SaaS, hosted on AWS.
- Eidosmedia's bread and butter is still in news media, though the company has also added financial services companies as an important group of customers and several corporate/government organisations (such as Union of European Football Associations and the Library of Congress).
- The partner ecosystem remains relatively thin, with two main external integration partners to implement projects. Whether this will be enough to sustain growth remains to be seen but the company is committed to reinvesting 15% of revenues into R&D and recently opened a development centre in Portugal. However, much of that effort seems to have been invested in modernising the underlying architecture (and moving to SaaS) rather than revolutionising the user-facing editorial interfaces.
Package scope (as reported by vendor)
| Core platform - i.e., bundled in product (yes/no/beta) | Add-On (yes/custom/3rd party) | |
|---|---|---|
|
Content lifecycle: author / classify / edit / approve / publish / re-purpose / archive / dispose
|
Yes
|
|
|
Basic digital / voice / media asset management
|
Yes
|
|
|
Support print publishing
|
Yes
|
|
|
Simple social media re-publishing
|
Yes
|
|
|
Optional modules: forms / polls / social widgets / etc
|
Yes
|
3rd Party
|
|
Connector library (OOTB connectors, APIs, etc.)
|
Yes
|
|
|
Bundled CDN (with DDOS protection)
|
No
|
3rd Party
|
|
User registration
|
No
|
3rd Party
|
|
Subscription management and fulfillment - digital
|
No
|
3rd Party
|
|
Subscription or membership
|
No
|
3rd Party
|
|
Personalisation
|
No
|
3rd Party
|
|
Ad management - digital
|
No
|
3rd Party
|
|
Ad management - print
|
No
|
Yes
|
|
Content management
|
Yes
|
|
|
Research
|
Yes
|
|
|
Content management
|
Yes
|
|
|
Video management / OVP
|
No
|
3rd Party
|
|
Audio management / podcasting
|
No
|
3rd Party
|
|
Data journalism and visualisation
|
No
|
3rd Party
|
|
Classifieds
|
No
|
3rd Party
|
|
Commenting / community features/
|
No
|
3rd Party
|
|
Newsletter production and management
|
No
|
3rd Party
|
|
Notifications and alerts
|
Yes
|
|
|
A/B testing
|
No
|
3rd Party
|
|
SEO
|
Yes
|
|
|
Multi-title management with variable inheritance
|
Yes
|
|
|
Complex layout and subsite / subsection cloning
|
Yes
|
|
|
AR- / VR- enhanced services
|
No
|
3rd Party
|
|
Audience segmentation
|
No
|
|
|
Online user / partner forums
|
Yes
|
|
|
Regular user group meetings
|
Yes
|
|
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