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Contented Management

Contented Management

WCM season preview

Leon playing football

The new Premier League season is upon us in England and it was with some surprise that I noted Tottenham were being sponsored by Autonomy, purveyors of Bayesian probability and content management systems.
Professional integrity dictates that I shouldn’t exclude Autonomy from shortlists just because of who they sponsor, but this deal may cause those of you with taste to reconsider whether Autonomy are meeting their corporate and social responsibility targets. Yes, I am an Arsenal fan.
I was going to write an article that mapped each Premier League team to a WCM product, but realised I’d be sued by anyone I associated with Blackburn Rovers or Stoke City. Nevertheless, I think their are a number of useful analogies to be drawn

Beautiful doesn’t always mean effective

Some WCM products have editorial interfaces that entice you to play around with them: thoughtfully designed with user-friendly tools like drag and drop, red-lining, or DAM integration. Others practically repulse: ugly web forms with incomprehensible labelling and non-sensical reference data.

But don’t assume that a beautiful GUI makes for more effective content management processes. Just as Bolton Wanderers are restyling their footballing approach under Owen Coyle to be more appealing, this won’t mean they’ll finish higher than they used to under the ugly pragmatism of Sam Allardyce. Give free reign to your editors’ creative spark and you may find your content strategy going down the pan.

A solid financial basis

Virtually no Premier League football club is without debt. WCM vendors are in a less financially perilous situation but hardly paragons of financial stability. This should make you wary in your contractual dealings with them. Always hold proprietary source code in Escrow. It’s not much of a security but it’s better than none at all. Check the financial stability of services partners and weigh this against their ability to deliver: a team that’s doing badly is likely to have disincentivised staff and the best of them may be looking to leave.

Be wary too of cutting deals that actually disincentivise your suppliers: if you cut their profit margin too much they’ll focus on more profitable accounts when the going gets tough. And the last thing you want to do is see your team go into administration like Portsmouth last season.

Living off past glories?

Just as some Premier League clubs look down on new entrants and see themselves as the established top tier, some WCM vendors subscribe to a similarly blinkered view. Don’t choose a team just because they’re an established player and appear in an analyst’s magic quadrant. Take a look at the wider field and figure out what it is you’re really after from your supplier. Having a vendor with a good reputation in the industry won’t improve your website any more than winning the league 49 years ago makes you a better club today.

The long-term view

So if you’re ignoring the past, what abou the future? No need for Paul the octopus: take a look at company history. Has there been a recent big-money acquisition? If so, you can be certain that the vendor is going to be focussing more immediate efforts on proper integration of that product rather than on new features. Assimilating new players takes time, as Manchester City discovered last season.

Or was the last release community-driven? If you don’t have the means to engage actively with that community, how are you planning on getting the enhancement (and fixes) you need the product to deliver? You’re unlikely to hold any sway over the selection despite your investment.

Where’s the support?

A crucial consideration must be who’s going to support your team once you kick off. Is there a loyal and knowledgable fan base? Are they likely to up sticks for another trendier team the minute the going gets tough? And where are they? If all your support is in a different timezone, you’re going to have problems.

In my experience, transatlantic services particularly suffer from this Manchester United syndrome of long-distance support. Many European vendors have struggled to provide north American clients with the same levels of support as clients in Europe and the reverse is certainly true. The problem is is seldom resolved by takeovers, when a larger company may bring a much larger support team, but product experts remain few and far between.

It’s not about loyalty

In the end, remember the crucial difference between implementing a WCM and following a football team: you’re a client, not a fan. I’ll support Arsenal even when the players all inevitably collapse with cruciate ligament injuries before Christmas; I’m a lifelong fan. But if you’re not getting what you need from your team, relegate them and seek your glory elsewhere.

Philippe Parker on | 20 August 2010

Contented Management

CMS fail: how not to implement a content management system

Envelope stamped with a fail

The attempts of Johnston Press, a publisher of local news in the UK, to implement a new content management system have spectacularly backfired. How can the selection of a CMS lead to a vote of no confidence in the managing director and a ballot on strike action by employees? That’s a pretty colossal project failure by any measure.

Johnston Press selected the Atex content management system. Atex, whose product is based on the acquisition of the Swedish CMS Polopoly, has carved itself a niche in the newspapers vertical and Johnston Press would no doubt have been reassured by their client list. However, the company imposed the choice of CMS on employees at a number of its titles and more importantly, inextricably linked the CMS to changes in working practice. The Guardian provides more background to the dispute.

So where did it all go wrong?

No stakeholder involvement

It’s truly crass management to push through a project without consulting those people who have to live with its consequences.  Johnston Press wanted to cut costs with an integrated cross-channel publishing environment and employees were right to fear that this would put their jobs at risk. So the CMS became an enemy, rather than a product that would help staff to work better and secure the company’s future. There may have been no way to get around job losses, but if there had been consultation about the reasons for the CMS, how it was going to work and the benefits that it would have, there could have been a more constructive dialogue and a greater chance of a decent outcome.

No content strategy

One reason why Johnston Press thought the CMS would bring cost savings was because they thought they could replace the role of sub-editors, getting the journalists who’d researched the stories to also place the stories and create the headlines. This may well have been possible, but it doesn’t look to have been that well thought through. The journalists were interested in gathering stories and information gathering. The sub-editors were interested in promoting the right messages and maintaining editorial standards. These objectives can conflict.

Again, had the management approached the project by identifying a content strategy issue – positioning the kind of tasks they wanted from their readers and establishing relevant journalistic and copy-writing processes to support these tasks – they would have stood a better chance of selling the benefits to their employees and having a successful project.

Lessons learned?

I would hope that your content management project failures haven’t been as extreme as this one, but I wanted to take two highlights from this project.

Firstly, it demonstrates the importance of an inclusive and transparent selection process. You need to involve the people who’ll receive business benefits from the system, the people who’ll support the system and the people who’ll use the system. And you need to communicate the business case to them transparently so that they understand the purpose of the CMS and don’t feel threatened by it once it’s been implemented.

Secondly, you still need people to assure content quality. The CMS can certainly help you build in those processes that assure quality, but you need real writers to write good content and achieve your business goals.

There’s a lesson for the supplier too. This publicity hasn’t been great for Atex. When a project goes so spectacularly wrong, it’s easy to assume that the software is the root cause. But there’s an onus on the supplier to deliver against a clear brief and ensure that the client isn’t being stupid. You may have got your commission, but at what cost?

If you have a more spectacular case of CMS failure than this, I’d love to hear it.

Philippe Parker on , | 9 April 2010

Contented Management

Is my project management useful?

Delivery has been uppermost in my mind recently. My wife is expecting a second child but this one decided he doesn’t want to head in the right direction. Next week he’ll be “from his mother’s womb untimely ripp’d”. Consequently I’ve been thinking heavily both about caesarean delivery and about a number of projects which now share a common delivery date. If I were project managing this birth, I’d just be cajoling the baby to get into position but quite frankly wouldn’t be offering much value. Is this the same for web projects? Do project managers actually help and how can you get more out of them?

According to Douglas Adams’ Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, the population of planet Earth was formed by a spaceship full of middle managers, hairdressers, marketeers and account executives. It’s easy to lump project managers into this mix. When Ford Prefect complains about this group’s inability to get stuff done — “This is futile! 573 committee meetings, and you haven’t even discovered fire yet!” — you can be sure that a project manager was there, maintaining the rolling action item log.

This is often exacerbated by project methodologies that foster a generic culture of project management, where all project management problems are essentially the same and if you can fix the issues around business case, stakeholders, executive sponsorship and resources you’re well on the way to project failure prevention. I’ve no doubt that these rules do apply for all projects, but I wonder that if you have a culture of just focussing on these issues you simply encourage project management by numbers where you get unthinking, standardised responses. As usual, Scot Adams got there first:

Case 1: Dogbert the generic manager: Ted - We need more people on the project. Case 2: Dogbert - Figure it out. Work smarter not harder. Make a plan. Move some things around. Adjust priorities. Just get it done. Give me a status report. Case 3: Ted - That did nothing but make me hate you. Dogbert - I can replace you with someone who will pretend to be inspired.

Even where you have a good project manger trying to help, it’s usually soft skills. Plant any management consultant in there and there’ll come up with the same answers without really having to get to grips with the fundamental issues. Why is the project struggling? Let’s not call lack of sponsorship a root cause when it’s just a symptom.

Sponsors are reluctant when they don’t understand project goals. You can see this for nearly any social media project. The business case is difficult to prove, the executive don’t buy into social media as reducing costs or increasing revenue, and the rigid formulae of business case definition help no one. This isn’t a sponsorship failure where the project manager can go in and mitigate against lack of funding. It’s fundamentally about whether an organisation is culturally ready to adopt social media and understand how they might use it. The project manager can facilitate this debate, but really you need a subject matter expert rather than a journalist who has read a couple of reports from the big analyst firms.

Jerry Manas recently wrote an article in which he suggests that project managers who run agile projects bring a completely different style to the table that’s much more concrete than traditional approaches. While I don’t agree with the entirety of his article, I think the main hypothesis is right. If you can get project managers who are close to the stakeholders, intimate with the issues and prove that they’re not just some glorified secretary, they can bring real value. Specialist projects require specialist experience and expertise and the world (of IT in particular) is littered with projects that have been delivered to industry best practice, but to abject failure.

The better generic project managers will continue to mitigate against failure and they’ll deliver their projects. But it the end, you’ll be judged on what you’ve delivered, not how you delivered it, and that’s where domain knowledge is essential.

My son will be just as precious to me whether he comes via forceps or scalpel. But it’s the people with the hard skills, not the soft skills, whom I’ll to put my faith in to ensure that he gets delivered safely.

Further reading

A recent presentation I made to the J. Boye community of practice on speeding up project delivery using techniques from Scrum and Prince2.

Philippe Parker on | 8 March 2010

Contented Management

What makes different WCM different?

NMNH beetle specimens by Mr T in DC

I’ve recently been working on a number of web content management system selections. My preference is to carry these out in a two-stage process (see the one-sheet guide to selecting a WCM). The first stage pre-qualifies suppliers according to client attitudes to cost, risk and technological preferences. The second stage then gets into the real tasks that you want to perform, discovering how the WCM enforces and informs processes.

Like most other people in this business, I approach this from the point of view that there is no best WCM, just different products that may be viable for different kinds of tasks. It’s about finding a product that will allow you to get started as quickly as possible without precluding later ambitions. I try to show clients what a WCM could do for them, and in turn client aspirations suggest product features. These usually centre around a number of core areas:

Editorial interface

How is content updated? Is it through a browser, a document template, or some other application? If it is through a browser, which browsers does it work in? Does it require a plug-in? How viable are those constraints within the organisation? If the organisation is planning to devolve editing, how appropriate are WYSIWYG and in situ editors? If content entry needs to be more controlled via forms, how will users preview their work? Can the WCM offer different editorial interfaces for different types of users? And hand in hand with the interfaces, if you have lots of devolved editors, how does the WCM assure concurrent contribution and secure access for different kinds of users?

Pages vs. elements

Some WCM only really have the concept of pages and associated assets, making it hard to re-use fragments of content across the site. This simple model is generally appropriate for two scenarios: where there are many devolved, occasional contributors who would be confused by having to perform multiple tasks to get a piece of content to update on one part of the site and wouldn’t immediately understand the implications of a more complex editorial change; and for sites which have quite user journeys with little information appearing in more than one place.
For sites which need to re-use content a lot, where there’s a central editorial team assuring that changes are propagated correctly, more advanced systems that use “fragments” of content in multiple locations across the site in an “edit once, publish many” model can bring significant business benefit. These content management models usually bring more flexible templates but they can also make it more difficult to audit content: what did a given page look like on a specific day and who made the content changes? They are also reliant on robust link cohesion, so that if you move a piece of content, the WCM continues to link to its new location.

Content structures

Absolutely central to most WCM is the concept of a content type. This is the model that allows you to define which fields editors need to complete to publish a page and the constraints on those: e.g. title (no more than 200 characters), summary (plain text), main body text (rich text), location (postal code), category (list of valid values), etc. These structures are important for a number of reasons. They allow you to create business rules for linking content, such as get me the three latest news items about Germany. They allow you to create different presentations for different types of content, so am event looks completely different from an FAQ. And they allow you to contol which information must be completed before content can go live and how it will be presented on different platforms once it’s been published.
There are other metaphors that WCM use to relate complex content: hierarchical metadata structures such as folders, categories or channels enable you to group content together in more complex ways. Flatter metadata structures also allow you to “traverse” across website structures and relate content in differnt part of the information architecture that don’t sit into this hierarchy. It’s often useful to have multiple kinds of metadata, particularly faceted taxonomy, if your content is particularly complicated and needs a lot of content relationships in order to achieved desired user journeys.

Technology

Where the WCM isn’t a standalone application but needs to integrate with other systems in a web platform – user directories, CRM, eCommerce, transactional tools – you need to validate how it will communicate with other systems. Is it through the Application Programming Interface (API), web services, or some other method?
The maintenance and extensibility of the system can also be important requirements. If I need to change a content type, what does that involve? If I need to get data from another application, can I do this in a de-coupled way?

Some other factors may come into play, such as workflow, internationaisation and personalisation. If one product is particularly strong in one of these areas and it’s a key requirement, then it may get into a shortlist even if it’s weaker in some of the other areas identified above.

This all brings me to the recent debate about whether WordPress is a CMS, with numerous contributions on Twitter as well as from:

My experience of WordPress is that it’s really good at two key features where some established content management systems are relatively poor: search engine optimisation and comments. On SEO, it ties your blog post title to a friendly URL, enables good internal linking (as long as you don’t move any pages), allows tagging and categorisation and offers some great SEO tools. Comments meanwhile can be quite tricky for some WCM that operate separate content contribution and consumption environments, but WordPress does this easily, with useful anti-spamming tools and the ability to follow the comment conversation by RSS or email.

When it comes to the question of whether WordPress is or isn’t a WCM, the best analogy I could come up with was a camera phone. A camera phone does take pictures, it is convenient, some phones even have a flash and autofocus. But would you get a camera phone specifically to use as a camera? I think not if you’re serious about photography, It is a camera, but a very limited one.

WordPress is a blogging tool with some shared characteristics of a WCM. If you apply some of the many available modules to it you can come up with a really nice proposition, up to a point. But you’re effectively hacking the software to get it to behave as many WCM already do. You can get any software to do pretty much anything in the end, but that still doesn’t make it a WCM.

WordPress is widely used by many organisations as a web content management system and there are a lot of photos taken on camera phones. But you need to understand the product’s limitations and if these don’t affect you and you’re achieving what you want, then no one should criticise you for your choice. But let’s be sensible about it and say that even if there’s no such thing as the best WCM, you know that it wouldn’t be WordPress.

Philippe Parker on , , | 4 March 2010

Contented Management

I know why the caged bird sings

Small tropical bird in a cage

Janus Boye recently provoked an indignant response from the Twitterati when he proclaimed that he unfollows anyone with more tweets than followers. You should read the comments to gauge the general feelings about that view. It provoked some reflection on my part — which I guess Janus will say was his aim — and I went back to look at how my use of Twitter has evolved over the last two years. And it went something like this: Bewilderment » Discovery » Catharsis » Promotion » Engagement

Bewilderment

Like most people first dipping their toes into a new service, I came to Twitter slightly perplexed. What do you tweet if you have no followers? The thing that first drew me was trying to find out how micro-blogging might be used in a business collaboration context. I’d already used SharePoint and Ning and I was intrigued by the broadcast nature of theses services. It was so Enterprise 2.0! It reminded me of how J.P. Rangaswami had made his emails public to all employees in the organisations he was working and I wondered what effect that had on an even more public scale.

Discovery

So I kept relatively schtum and decided to follow some people I know: @draml, @izahoor, @mcboof and see what they were saying. And they were talking about web content management and I thought, that’s cool: I can find out some new stuff. It’s quick to scan tweets and I’ll read up on a daily basis.

Then I followed the people they were following — which was easier then because Twitter used to show all replies. And I discovered CMS people well worth following, like @sggottlieb and @piewords, as well as people I knew about already like @irina_guseva and @TonyByrne.

So Twitter effectively became a recommendation engine for blogs, of which I amassed quite a few and continue to add to. That gave me plenty to read to keep me on the bleeding edge of the industry.

Catharsis

But then I realised I was saying nothing myself. Resolutely ignoring the adage that it’s better to stay silent and be thought the fool than to speak and remove all doubt, I started to tweet my frustrations at various projects. It was these tweets that put me in jeopardy of Janus’ Law. I was re-living Joachim du Bellay:

Je me plains à mes vers, si j’ay quelque regret,
Je me ris avec eulx, je leur dy mon secret,
Comme estans de mon coeur les plus seurs secretaires.

That was a mistake. Fortunately I never resorted to telling people I was on public transport or making toast.

Promotion

So I just started retweeting links to useful CMS resources and that got me some followers. And it dawned on me that there was a whole world of business leads out there, so I started searching for key CMS terms and following people who tweeted on the subject, trying to engage with them and see what they were after. It was a bit rough but drew some small successes. So then I just promoting my blogging instead.

Engagement

That was a turning point, because I could engage more with people on Twitter than through my website. And because I was following other people’s blogs, I could engage with them on Twitter more easily and involve other people through broadcast messaging, just like JP Rangaswami! Twitter has become a sounding board for my thoughts: I can test things out on the Twitterati and get feedback before I have to let my ideas loose on clients. I hope that it’s actually improved the quality of my work.

I had one big #unfollowfriday when it all got a bit too much, but I won’t generally unfollow unless you annoy me, and I’ve a pretty passive character. I also find some kind of moral obligation to follow people who’re following me and can’t bring myself to unfollow people I’ve known for a long time in the real world, no matter how much rubbish they spout. Those that I really like to follow are those who know stuff and are funny; although having now met @adriaanbloem I’m convinced he uses some kind of ghost tweeter.

But the best things are seeing people get involved in real conversations. Take a look at @jameshoskins‘ Paxman-esque interrogation of @iantruscott about the Alterian roadmap. Or the discussions around #cmshaiku. Twitter can be fun and informative.

So how do I use Twitter for work? I still haven’t figured out if Twitter has a place in the enterprise, but it does allow me to keep engaged with a continually-evolving industry whose ideas appear online in less than 140 characters.

Philippe Parker on | 15 February 2010

Contented Management

From bad CMS to verse

Jon Marks recently ran a CMS haiku competition on Twitter. It had some worthy winners, but the 140 character constraints proved too much of a limitation for other forms of verse.

So, I thought I’d try a sonnet.

Shall I compare thee to CQ5 Day
Complete with JCR? Or to software
Suites from EMC (with FatWire?). Beware!
OpenText Livelink and Vignette make hay

While Sun’s products are now Oracle’s prey.
Alterian markets acronyms. Share
Point and EPiServer are .Net fare.
SDL can’t decide. But should you pay

For a licence? Consider open source
From Joomla, Squiz, Liferay… or Drupal of course.
Just don’t assume that it will cost you less:
Calculate carefully the TCO
Of products that seem free like Alfresco
And if you have no budget use WordPress.

All right, so the pentameter isn’t truly iambic, but it is a sonnet. So I tried this instead:

There was a young man from Nantucket
Who used his CMS like a bucket.
Although his pater
Said “apply metadata”
He just didn’t know where to tuck it.

Some of my haikus were:

Like autumnal mist
Licence costs remain obscure.
What am I paying?

Drupal has Gardens
Cultivated in the cloud.
I share my first thoughts.

Is 5-7-5
A template, a content type
Or metadata?

You can retweet this
Or change it; open source not
Proprietary

Call that CMS?
Where’s workflow and content types?
Just a blogging tool.

Feel free to add limericks as comments.

Philippe Parker on | 10 February 2010

Contented Management

Early thoughts on Drupal Gardens

Geese in Stourhead gardens

Last week, Acquia launched Drupal Gardens in beta. Speculation might have been more feverish had this not been on the same day as some company in Cupertino launched a new gadget. Nevertheless, Acquia’s offering is worth a second look.

Gardens is effectively Drupal 7 as a service: WCM hosted on the Amazon content delivery network. It includes a number of modules and is aimed very squarely at microsites and perishable campaign sites. It promises rapid deployment without needing a Drupal superhero to set up your site. You don’t need SQL, you don’t need PHP. You pick your URL, your templates, tools and styles, enter your content and you’re live.

And that represents what many people really understand by WCM.

You can create repeatable information architecture and consistent design elements from a library of themes and templates. You can use the Theme Builder to create custome content types. And it’s way friendlier than WordPress.com. Slicker too. People with very limited web knowledge can create websites even more easily than they used to in the days of Frontpage or Dreamweaver and go live with them, since Acquia take care of the hosting.

But this is very much WCM for websites that have content only. There’s nothing transactional and no sign yet of secure hosting that establishes private networking to your other online applications. It’s a great template editing tool to give to your design team or for small businesses to play around with, but not necessarily the tool that allows you to devolve complex editorial tasks to distributed authors. While the cloud-based aspect should allow you to scale your website delivery, it’s not clear whether it scales on the authoring side for people wanting to contribute content from around the world (which probably isn’t a central use case). It’s also worth noting what’s on the road map, because these are things that Gardens can’t yet do; such as multi-site search, multi-site configuration, and analytics.

Where Garens is a great fit is for clients who want a rapid time to deploy with minimal fuss. Why should clients concern themselves with APIs and hosting SLAs? Why should they have to engage with geeks just to change a template? Gardens resolves those issues by giving you a website builder and at a great price: it’s free throughout 2010 and only $20 to $40 per month per site after that, with flexibility over multi-site licences. But if you’re hoping that your website should be more than just vanity-ware, that it will increase revenues or reduce pressure on other streams by bringing transactions online, you’ll have to look at a content-driven application that has better integration points with other systems, or wait for this to be developed by Acquia.

I think Acquia’s move has implications for the wider WCM industry. Firstly, that the SaaS model has a valid use case which will permeate higher-end WCM; for example, Alterian CME is sort of available as a service through Verizon. Secondly, because many clients still understand (and want) WCM to be a tool for managing look and feel as well as content. Drupal Gardens achieves both those things. Can other vendors say the same?

Philippe Parker on , , | 2 February 2010

Contented Management

When WCM isn’t enough

Orange and blue liquid forms in a glass

How many websites these days are purely content-driven?

It’s hard to justify brochureware sites. How many people do business with you just because your website looks pretty? Organisations want websites that either generate an income or reduce pressure on more costly channels, like call centres. That means transactional web applications, not just web content management.

Yet content management is still required. Whether you’re updating marketing material to support your service offering or changing form labelling and layouts to ensure fewer drop-outs on transactions, the web team still needs to be able to make content changes without having to go through a lengthy development release process.

The simplest way to achieve this is to run two web applications separately, one driven by the content management system and the other by the transactional software, like eCommerce. You get your developers to style the two applications to look the same, run from similar URLs and hope that the web app gives you enough control to alter content that it’s responsible for, such as labels on form fields. This way you can keep system integration to a minimum. There are a couple of significant disadvantages, however. Firstly, if your site needs to change globally — a change to brand or navigation, for example — you have to update both systems. Secondly, you need to design your site in such a way that you keep content and transactions separate, which is very unlikely to lead to a successful user experience.

So what are your other options? You could take content managed through the CMS and embed it in the transactional application. This means that when you have a form field to complete which needs some guidance, that guidance can come from the CMS without the user having to abandon their transaction. But this creates problems of its own. You lose some of the key benefits of the CMS: relationships are harder to maintain between pieces of content and preview becomes nearly impossible.

This is why the transactional application is often embedded in the CMS. FatWire, for example, has just launched its Web Experience Management Framework, which should make this process easier, while Terminal Four also touts its integration with external systems. Yet irrespective of the CMS you use, you’re going to face some integration problems. There’s bound to be an element of custom code, issues with assuring decent performance from both the CMS and the transactional application, and above all design difficulties ensuring that the security of the user’s transaction is maintained by the delivery layer.

Another option is portal technology. In theory, portals enable you to deliver all your web applications in an integrated fashion and what’s more, do so incrementally, adding applications without having to change the core configuration. They’re also usually pretty good at managing sessions and user credentials. Portals bring their own problems however, not least cost of delivery, increased time to develop and un-friendly URLs.

So all four approaches have positives and negatives. There’s a niche in that market somewhere for a vendor. Until someone proves they’ve filled that niche however, you’re unlikely to be able to deliver a great business-driven website using just a web content management system.

Philippe Parker on , | 14 January 2010

Contented Management

The future of the web is JavaScript

O'Reilly JavaScript textbook

The future of the web is mobile. And by mobile I don’t mean mobile phones. I mean browsing through devices that people carry around with them. All these devices, irrespective of form factor, have a common problem: they are prone to lose connectivity to the internet.

If you’re on the move and keep losing your 3G signal, or just happen to live in an area with a poor reception, or in a house with brick walls which slow wifi, or suffer from terrible contention rates in your Starbucks or conference venue, you’ll know that cable-less connectivity is fallible. So you’re in the middle of a transaction, just trying to get to the next step when… enter tunnel / lose packet / connection error and you have to start over.

There is a solution to this problem however. As Michael Kowalski tells us, the future of the web is JavaScript. Or perhaps not JavaScript in its current form, but client-side scripting nonetheless. Why? Consider the options.

If you want interaction that will run reliably on a device with poor connectivity, you can’t keep expecting the browser to go back to a server. So you might make your functionality available as a downloadable app. But it had better be a killer app the user wants to rely on, because otherwise they won’t want it taking up real estate on their phone. And it’ll have to run across operating systems if you want to reach a broad market, not just Steve Jobs’ latest toy.

You could use a rich internet application such as Flash or Silverlight. But the client platform has to support these and the user has to install them, although they’re more likely to do so for a generic RIA than for a specific tool. The big issue with these applications however is that the content is embedded in the interface, which makes them both heavy to download and difficult to make accessible to other applications, such as screen readers and content aggregators. So you’d probably have to create two versions of the content: one embedded in the RIA, the other standalone. That’s not great.

JavaScript has the advantage that it can be used to enrich content, but not contain the content itself; for example, to provide better interactivity on maps. There are also libraries of JavaScript functions that can be re-used and downloaded to the client device with the user barely noticing. Take jquery: Google hosts a copy, so if you use these functions on your site, you don’t even need to host the file. Reference Google’s copy and you’ll save bandwidth and, if enough websites follow the same path, there’ll probably be a cached copy on the user’s machine even before they get to your site, which will significantly improve response times.

Google is of course moving beyond jquery to complex client-side scripting which its own browser / operating system will be capable of handling, but some other browsers may struggle with. Chrome is a replacement for off-line scripting using Gears. It should not only enable mini applications such as Wave to run faster in a browser, but will enable online transactions to continue to function better when connections are poor. Opera has been developing similar functionality for its browser too.

So if you want to provide audiences with a better experience irrespective of platform and location, a lightweight client-side tool that separates content and function and runs in a browser seems like a future-proof idea. And for the moment at least, that means JavaScript.

Philippe Parker on , | 11 December 2009

Contented Management

Devolving complexity

Combined harvester

What sort of editorial model do you follow for your web content management? Do you try to get as many as possible hands-on, or do you run everything through a centralised editorial team?

It’s ironic that WCMS which enable you to perform more advanced content management provide tools that you probably won’t want to devolve to part-time editorial teams. Conversely, simpler WCMS are often chosen by by smaller, centralised teams who often feel constrained by the software they use.

Vignette, for example, enables you to assign content to various taxonomies through folders, projects and channels, so that content can be cross-referenced extensively across your site. Put these taxonomies in the hands of people who don’t understand them and you’ll create convoluted user journeys: the exact opposite of your content management objectives.

Alterian’s corporate offering meanwhile — once known as Immediacy — provides pretty basic content management. Most users should be able to get their head around its tools pretty easily. But if you want to create more complex content relationships or have content fragments re-used across your sites, you’re better off with Alterian’s enterprise product, known as Morello. Devolving editorial responsibilities to part-timers who don’t fully understand the consequences of updating content that’s used in lots of places in your websites is decidedly risky, however.

In larger organisations, lots of people will produce content for the web sporadically. These people will change, have variable knowledge of the software and writing style guides, and limited understanding of your website. The last thing they need is a piece of software that allows them to break stuff because they just don’t get it.

So, do you:

  1. select a simple WCM for devolved teams to create pages in predefined templates; or
  2. select a complex WCM that enables you to perform more advanced content management tasks, but centralise the editorial process.

The more you want to cross-reference and re-use content across your sites, the greater your need for an advanced tool and an expert team to manage it. But if you want to devolve authorship, you’ll need to keep content management tasks and software as simple as possible. Don’t try to industrialise content production by providing everyone with more machinery. For broader participation you need to provide hand tools. Leave the combined harvester in the hands of experts.

Philippe Parker on , , , | 8 December 2009
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