One of the most painful parts of dealing with enterprise software, for me, over the years, has been dealing with the installation process. In a previous life, I worked for a large software company that offered a suite of identity-management products built on Java technology. We were quite proud that we had eventually gotten our installation process down to something that could be accomplished in a morning. There were several individual product installers; each had multi-panel wizards to contend with; and some of the information that had to be entered manually in the wizard panels was maddeningly obscure. Still, we congratulated ourselves for being "better than [such-and-so competitor]" (whose product required two days of on-site activity by company-trained specialists, to lay down a working install of the product).
The first time I saw Day CQ, I was working for another company (where we routinely evaluated WCM products from various vendors). I still remember the bemusement that came over me when David Nüscheler explained to me the one-click installation process for CQ. When he said that the process was so easy even his mother could do it, I thought he was joking. (I half-suspected that his mother was a computer-science professor. There had to be a catch, I thought. But there wasn't: David assured me that his mother knows nothing about classpaths, properties files, JDBC drivers, JNDI names, or any other such arcana.)
Sure enough, it turns out CQ5 (one of the most powerful and sophisticated enterprise-class content management systems available at any price) can be installed with a single click -- and no wizard panels, no setup dialogs, nothing to enter manually. Which is why we get Tweets from customers like the one yesterday from @CedricHaindl that said "Just Installed #day #cq5 in 412 seconds and one single click - I'm gonna love this system!" It truly is the easiest-to-install system of its kind. One click does the trick. And for a world-class WCM system that runs on Windows, Solaris, Linux, AIX, HP-UX, Mac OS X, or SGI IRIX, that's saying something.
If you haven't yet taken CQ5 for a spin, contact Day here (and if you want to be part of the CQ 5.4 beta program, go here).
