Category Archives: ECM

The truth about content management

Daft Punk encore

I am going to make a point about content management and better websites, but bear with me.

The web can be a really annoying place. But I found this tweet from Alain de Botton particularly ill-conceived:

A chief effect of the internet is to boost the already unhelpfully strong sense that the answers are ‘out there’ rather than within.

Why did it annoy me so much?

Firstly, because it confuses the medium with the content. There are lots of answers “out there” and not just on the internet. Does a TCP / IP protocol make ideas less robust than if they appear on a printed page? It’s a completely ridiculous notion. It’s one that those of us who work with the web still need to counter in many organisations where people still see the web as a frivolous fad; a notion that runs absolutely contrary to some of the web’s most successful sites, particularly those providing health information.

Secondly, because there’s a hypocrisy in attempting to broadcast aphorisms over the very medium that you’re criticising. This made me wonder if the tweet was a joke, or some kind of ironic experiment to see if people would retweet something non-sensical. And over a hundred did. Were they doing it in jest too?

Thirdly, because de Botton writes and sells books about philosophy and now he seems to be telling us that other people (like him) don’t have the answer, and that we should focus on introspection. This is probably a reference to the Socratic principle “know thyself” but this shouldn’t be at the expense of trying to discover objective truths. You can know yourself but be ignorant about the world around you: Socrates’ pupil, Plato, was a key figure in European philosophy but still defended slavery.

So what does this mean for content management?

There are many objective truths and certainties, but there are many more that are still to be proven. Establishing those truths is a competitive business. Scientists, explorers, researchers, all compete to establish a truth in a particular domain.

Similarly, your organisation holds truths that are more or less well articulated: terms of business, HR policy, progress reports, invoices.

Getting to these truths is a fundmental issue for content management. As users, we know that your website, or intranet, or digital asset management system should hold the piece of information that will answer my question. If we can’t find the right information, we’ll just invent it. But deep down, we know it’s there somewhere.

So problem 1 is: how do we make sure that our audiences can find the right information? Through better classification, more effective tools and encouraging people to tell their peers that this content is the right content.

Problem 2 is: how do I make sure that people get the right message from the information when they find it? By providing clear content that is constructed in a way that is appropriate to your audience: well written, well-produced, accessible.

The truth should be in your systems. If it isn’t, your audience will go somewhere else, “out there”, to find it.

What is enterprise web content management?

I find it hard to believe that there are still CMS vendors telling us that their software manages “enterprise web content”. Does “enterprise” mean just a more expensive way for large organisations to manage web content? Enterprise web content management is missing the point.

Firstly, if you think your organisation’s web presence is only the content generated in your organisation from your processes, you’ve completely misunderstood what the web is about. Your visitors aren’t just going to your site; they’re visiting sites all over the web. If you think they only want your “enterprise” content you’ve buried your head in the sand.

Secondly, if your website has a dedicated editorial team with a content strategy and proper style guides – and it should – they may well be resistant to the idea that anyone can be a web author as long as they use enterprise content management tools and processes.

The website is rarely just an end point or simple publishing channel for the documents your organisation creates. It’s market-driven. It’s meant to provide the information that your audience needs. Whether the website is designed to generate revenue (sell products) or to save money (stop people using more expensive channels like call centres), it needs to be managed so that your visitors can achieve their goals as simply as possible.

It’s because the creation of web content often sits outside enterprise processes that dedicated web content management software exists and stands alone from ECM. A good WCM will simply focus on making it as easy as possible to manage content created solely for publishing to the web, to be read on the web, by a specific audience.

There are of course many organisations who need to relate their website more closely to the rest of their activities. But what’s required isn’t just a piece of software that tacks “web” as a status on the end of a long workflow. You need a process that allows the website to request information from the rest of the organisation so you can deliver your web strategy.

If you view your website as a place where you can publish the “stuff” that your organisation produces, you’ll end up with enterprise web content management, and it will be bad for everyone involved. If you want a good website, make sure it’s a driver in your organisation and not a passenger.

Why do projects cost so much?

Why do Enterprise Content Management systems cost about five times as much as their top-tier web content management equivalents? Do they offer five times as much functionality? Are they five times less likely to fail? Are they significantly more usable? Generally, not.

But the operational savings that can be achieved with ECM are significantly greater than those typically made by rolling out WCM: there are time savings in information retrieval, cost savings in storage and reduced risk of compliance failure. You would expect these savings to be worth a great deal to most large organisations. Consequently, vendors can sell licences and services at a far higher cost than WCM.

Greater web content management costs can be justified in environments where devolved authorship, strong version control and compliance with web publishing standards are all required. This means that vendors can sell product licences at £200,000 knowing that what they offer can’t be achieved simply by installing WordPress. Commercial open source follows the same approach, but with pricing focussed on support and services.

It’s basic economics, but it’s worth recalling when you feel the costs of your implementation are running out of control. Products and services cost so much because clients tell suppliers that’s what they’re worth. It’s not up to your supplier to calculate your ROI; it’s up to the person paying the bill to do that.

The buyer sets a budget based on the benefits the project will bring, or the cost of not doing the project. Suppliers try to provide a solution that will bring about the benefits within the budget constraints. Together, they set up governance to ensure that the project doesn’t overrun or overspend, so that the business case remains viable.

The goal is not to deliver your project as cheaply as possible. It is to deliver the project in line with the specified business case. If you can save money then great, but if you’ve achieved your objectives, don’t worry that you might have been able to do it cheaper. Just bask in the contentment of having completed a successful project, an achievement that eludes so many.

See also Peter Sejersen’s article on whether you should reveal your budget when inviting tenders.

The future of content management

Julian Wraith has started a discussion about the future of content management. There are a variety of responses to this linked to from the comments section, each with their own focus, but I recommend reading Laurence Hart for a longer-term view.

My own, brief take is that content management has to face a number of challenging questions over the next couple of years.

Will content need to be managed?

Content management currently focuses on providing tools for groups to create, review and retrieve content so that an approved version of that content can be made available to predefined audiences. User-generated content and the broadcast models of social networking challenge that focus.

Anyone can view content: most tweets go to everyone rather than direct to individuals.
Anyone can contribute content in a UGC world.
Distinguishing what’s your organisation’s content and what’s individual is becoming increasingly fraught; just take a look at any blogger’s site for disclaimers even though they’re blogging about their company’s services.

Will content need context?

Even in the least structured repositories (wikis, flickr, twitter) content is still tagged so that it can be retrieved. But the onus is on the user to find the right tag and on a search application to enable this. This is quite different from a CMS, where the software provides contextual models like folders and related documents to guide the user through an information architecture. As search interfaces and technology improves, there will be less need to provide those contextual models. I have my doubts that semantic mark-up will help people create more relevant content, but I do think that improvements to search will mean that content will be “find-able” and “relate-able” anywhere, even if it isn’t in the right taxonomical folder.

Will content need to be deleted?

As volumes of content continues to increase and contextualisation decreases, finding relevant content amid all the dross will become harder. I think that this will be an even bigger business driver than cost of storage for deleting content that’s irrelevant. But because distinguishing “approved” and strategic content will be harder, it will also be hard to identify which content is dross and what might be useful. Socially-driven records management is bound to take a stab at this problem, but whichever content management tool can help people to get rid of useless content is going to be a winner in the long term.

Feed your CMS knowlegde

I’ve gradually been collecting links to interesting blogs and feeds about content management and associated disciplines. Here are a number to share:

CMS news and analysis

CMS vendors

Enterprise 2.0 and Knowledge Management

del.icio.us Bookmarks

Contented Management: del.icio.us bookmarks (feed)

You can also download the OPML export of all the feeds (7KB). Save it and import it into whichever feed reader you use.

The list of vendors in particular is far from exclusive, but if there are blogs missing that you think should be included, let me know.

Is SharePoint viable as a cheap ECM?

Many organisations acquire Microsoft SharePoint as a tool to manage all their organisational knowledge: documents, wiki, web. As such it serves as a cheaper alternative to the top of the line enterprise content management products. It’s certainly cheaper to implement if you just run it as out-of-the-box as possible.

It also addresses the widespread issue of how you manage version control of documents that then need to be published directly to a website, which is why so many mid to upper tier web content management vendors provide SharePoint “connectors”: Morello and Tridion are good examples.

You need to take care before asserting that SharePoint is true ECM, however. It offers practically no document automation, no business process modelling and poor integration to other applications, particularly if they’re not Microsoft based. What you get from SharePoint is a collaborative document repository that offers you pretty limited web publishing capabilities. You wouldn’t want to use it to drive a busy transactional website.

You also need to look at your website’s publishing model before considering SharePoint in any context. The SharePoint – WCM model is best suited to a very devolved authoring group publishing what’s essentially extranet-type content. If you’re publishing marketing copy, you need a specialist team of copy writers and a centralised platform for publication.

SharePoint is undoubtedly cheaper than implementing true ECM, but you get what you pay for. Before you buy, make sure that:

You only want to integrate with other Microsoft software packages.
Your audience will relate to content being produced by a wide group of authors.
You require minimal automation of business process through the website.

My CMS vendor just got acquired; should I panic?

It’s all the rage for the CMS community; OpenText is acquiring Vignette.

What does this mean for clients of the two companies?

RedDot has been the web content management offering from OpenText for the last few years. It’s a pretty basic tool compared to Vignette, but this has distinct advantages: friendly user interface, quicker to implement, generally cheaper to develop basic functionality. I expect that RedDot will continue to be sold, but that there will be minimal product development. It will probably serve as a cheaper basic WCM in the same way as Alterian market Immediacy as a cheaper alternative to Morello.

The big challenge for the new company will be how to consolidate and exploit LiveLink and Vignette’s core content management offering, VCM. The offering that OpenText should be providing is end-to-end content management from documents and business process to web, but it’s going to be a substantial task to provide this through two pieces of software that are so established. LiveLink does the trick with documents and VCM does it with complex web content. But this certainly doesn’t mean that the two fit together neatly.

A significant benefit for OpenText is the acquisition of Vignette portal (VAP). This will enable OpenText to market web applications rather than just content-driven websites. Again, there will probably have to be some significant work done on the API level to LiveLink to turn this into a fully SOA-enabled platform. Nevertheless, if you’re doing business via the web — and surely everyone is these days — then a portal offering is a necessity for any enterprise content management vendor.

OpenText will be able to offer a product suite to match any of its competitors. But it will be a suite, not an integrated platform. Indeed the company has a poor track record in integrating its product suite: Gauss and ObTree anyone? Even RedDot stands pretty much alone from LiveLink. Oracle, despite its many acquisitions, has a far smoother integration of document and web content management, as does Interwoven.

So what does this mean for you if you’re about to buy? You still need to be wary of LiveLink’s web credentials; this is unlikely to improve for some time as the company attempts to make the various products work together smoothly. And if you’re about to buy RedDot, bargain hard, because I think the prices are likely to come down.

A few other thoughts on the acquisition:

How to get better CMS support

Janus Boye recently proposed that you cancel your maintenance contracts in order to save money. But before you think of this as a great money-spinner, there are a number of key issues you must consider.

Many maintenance contracts are tied into the licence agreement; cancel your maintenance and you lose the right to use the software. In this case, the vendor may not sue you, but how honest would you be in denying the company its cash?
If something goes seriously wrong with the core product — you discover a security flaw or an issue with the schema — then how do you fix it? Third parties will be extremely reluctant to fix this and any changes to the core product are likely to make re-entering support (when upgrading, for example) extremely complex. We’re talking low likelihood, high impact risks. The question is, do you want to tolerate these or transfer them to someone else?
A good relationship with the vendor is still preferable to a poor one. If you take all money and services away, what incentive do they have to provide you with a good service? The analogy shouldn’t be about not paying your insurance premium; it should be about having to return to work with the person you had a regretful fling with at the office Christmas party…

So what can you do to improve your CMS support?

Educate yourself: have procedures to handle common issues (restarting the servers, clearing the cache, etc.). Train internal staff to deal with these and provide procedures to out-of-hours support teams, be they internal or at your hosting company. This will cater for the vast majority of issues that don’t need any further investigation.
Get to the root of the problem. Are you unhappy with your software (or implementation), or simply with your supplier’s responsiveness. If there’s something fundamentally wrong with the product, you should be selecting a new one. If the issue is service or cost then renegotiate the SLA, don’t throw it out.
Find someone who’ll support you better. If the software vendor cannot demonstrate their ability to meet your service level requirements, then ask them to recommend someone who will.
Negotiate your licences so that you get what you pay for. The help desk should be like any additional module that you’d have to purchase with the product. Why should you pay for something you don’t use?

Yes, there’s a downturn and you’re under pressure to save money. But you’re probably under more pressure to ensure that projects and services continue to be delivered. Why would you jeopardize these for the sake of a line item already in next year’s budget?

Focus on developing a good relationship with your supplier and you should find the quality of their service improves too.

Keeping content in the system

There’s been a spate of high-profile document and data leaks in UK government recently (although it’s not confined to the public sector). Doubtless this will encourage firms like Oracle to market their information rights software, but is this really addressing the problem?

These data losses generally haven’t come from wilful hacking or from the wrong people getting access to information they shouldn’t have. They’ve come from people taking information outside the system in which it’s normally held securely. What’s provoking this?

Firstly, there’s a poor design in the software themselves.
How can we have a system that enables you to download the entire records of everyone in a pensions system? Under what circumstances would anyone want this data? Under what circumstances should they be allowed to download this data? There are very few occasions when someone would require access to such extensive data, and when they do, why don’t they just access it in the software that displays it normally? There must be a shortcoming in the software design, whether this is in the user interface or its availability across networks. This is the case for both the loss of data from DWP and MoJ. The software allowed people to perform a task that was inherently insecure; secure systems shouldn’t allow that degree of flexibility.

Secondly, there’s the way that wider security systems and processes have been designed.
What are these protecting against? If you work, as we do, for government organisations, you’ll come face to face with real difficulties in distributing information securely using existing systems. You can’t email some kinds of documents, because email systems and firewalls block them out. You can’t put them on an FTP server, because these are inherently insecure and in any case end users’ ports are blocked. You can’t use SSH, as many government networks block this protocol because they can’t monitor the encrypted data.

So you’re left with physical media (USB keys, CDs, DVDs) to transfer data around. And if you’re doing this frequently with large amounts of data, it’s tedious to keep encrypting it. On top of that, you still have to give relevant access to all the people who’re meant to have access to the documents. It’s little wonder that individuals don’t bother and simply copy things locally, even though they know they shouldn’t.

The way that systems have been implemented not only makes these security breaches possible, it actively encourages them through poor design and catering for the wrong kind of security breaches.

Systems need to be designed to keep secure content within the system. If your system is correctly designed, you shouldn’t need to take data outside it. Oracle’s approach is to say you can take the content out of the system but it needs to reference a central server in order to view it; but there are still many flaws in their approach which I won’t go into here. Since when do you have a document that you can’t control by uploading to a CMS that’s accessed over a secure connection, with relevant access privileges applied? As soon as you allow someone to download it, you’re asking for bad publicity.

We have a tendency to blame the people who circumvent the system, when it’s the system itself that’s at fault.

Missing the SharePoint

Let me firstly qualify this post by saying that I’m not inherently anti-Microsoft. I don’t use a Mac, I do use Microsoft Windows (even the mobile version) and Office and I’m using the beta version of Office Live Workspaces. But I just can’t fathom why people choose to use SharePoint.

As a pure document repository it is mostly harmless. It follows Microsoft security models so will only show users documents from file systems and folders they should have access to. Unless you’ve been unbelievably rigorous and consistent in your file naming and metadata conventions, however, its search will be utterly useless. Just search a MOSS intranet for “agenda” if you don’t believe me. The search is also hampered by some strange behaviour when looking at external systems with case sensitive URLs, so try before you buy. No wonder Microsoft have bought Fast.

There are some nice collaboration features: user homepages, instant messaging; but these are bound up in inaccessible HTML. So are the Web Parts, Microsoft’s equivalent of Java-based portlets. This is also true of many Java portals which are heavily dependent on JavaScript functionality and HTML table layouts.

There is a big difference between SharePoint and other portals, however. Java portal technology is built to the JSR standards, notably JSR168. This means that you can take pre-developed portlets and simply expose them through your portal. You can even send these to other portals through WSRP. But not with SharePoint. It doesn’t comply with Java Content Repository standards, so you’ll struggle to put develop a service oriented architecture around it. If you needed a single point of entry for web services that you can develop in .Net, you’d have to look at BEA’s AquaLogic, not SharePoint.

So what is SharePoint for? It doesn’t fit into a service oriented architecture, uses security models from file servers, doesn’t do federated search well and isn’t built to open standards. Do you really want to put that sort of technology at the hub of your organisation?

You can try out SharePoint through the Microsoft Online Customer Portal, although you’ll need a Windows Live ID.