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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.

  1. Anyone can view content: most tweets go to everyone rather than direct to individuals.
  2. Anyone can contribute content in a UGC world.
  3. 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.

Philippe Parker on 6 August 2009

Contented Management

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.
Philippe Parker on , , | 11 May 2009

Contented Management

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:

Philippe Parker on , , , | 7 May 2009

Contented Management

Setting standards

CMS vendors are under constant pressure to improve their products. They add features their competitors lack (or that are perceived as lacking in their own product), provide what they hope will be prettier and more intuitive administration interfaces and increasingly integrate with other applications.

Increasingly we see vendors trying to make their products meet industry-defined standards. This could be CMIS, ECM maturity, or feature tables that are readily comparable.

But how do these standards help you as a buyer or end-user of the CMS? A multi-lingual installation package or a product rated as highly mature do not guarantee a successful solution to your content management requirements. I applaud the vendors who are trying to improve the technology, but I don’t think the analysts and architects would be doing their clients a good service by telling them that these standards somehow make the products better.

As a client selecting or supporting your content management software, you need to think about the tasks that are most critical (e.g. must run on my infrastructure) and most frequent. If your CMS is easy to install but you can’t tell when content you’ve published will go live, you have a really serious problem. If your workflow requirements can’t be met, it doesn’t matter if the content sits in a JCR-compliant repository.

You need to focus on your own day-to-day needs, not on the industry telling you what a great product it offers. Set your own standards and be sceptical about other people’s.

Philippe Parker on | 31 March 2009

Contented Management

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?

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.

Philippe Parker on 15 January 2009

Contented Management

Shortlisting your CMS

Having asked yourself what problems your content management system should address, you reach the stage in the selection exercise where you can shortlist some products. This does NOT mean going to Gartner, Butler or Forrester and picking whatever’s in the magic quadrant. That is a recipe for expensive mistakes.

There will be a lot of software on the market that can help to overcome your problems. You can whittle these down by placing other constraints on your selection process.

Due diligence: have you involved the right people?

Your project will need buy-in from various stakeholders. If you haven’t got their buy-in by the time you shortlist products, you’ll be facing all kinds of political issues even if you pick exactly the right tool. But you need input from all the relevant parties. What benefit do you get from excluding people in communications or marketing, hands-on content editors, technical support and development (whether these are in-house or a trusted service provider), the people in charge of your IT strategy, and of course, procurement. Not only do all these parties have a stake in the selection process; they’ll be able to contribute something constructive too.

How long will you keep the technology for?

Clearly your shouldn’t be looking to keep the technology for longer than the duration of your web or content strategy. If you’re planning to keep something for longer than you know what you’re going to do with it, you’ll probably get into a mess. So, if you have a clear strategy, you’ll want a product with a roadmap to match. If you’re just trying to satisfy short-term goals, you’ll probably want something that’s easy to deploy rather than highly extensible. Having an awareness of how long you’ll want to keep the software for will also help to inform your business case.

Do you really need just a single content management system?

Firstly, you need to understand the limitations of a CMS; it won’t do everything you need. You may need an additional search engine, it won’t satisfy eCommerce requirements, it probably won’t allow much in the way of personalisation, forms created in it will be pretty limited, it’s unlikely to stream live audio or video… these are all best served by distinct applications (which can mean a difficult integration project). So manage your stakeholders’ expectations and constrain your project objectives.

Now consider whether a single CMS is right for your organisations. Are different departments contributing to the CMS likely to need to share content or code? Or could they each have their own devolved system with a common interface for delivery, such as a portal? Will there be licencing or training cost benefits from a having a single CMS?

Work out your budget

Figure out what you can afford, then build your business case. As a rule of thumb, in order to get something workable and fully tested, you’ll need to spend upwards of 75% of your budget on services as opposed to software and database licences. This is likely to cross a whole range of software off your long-list right away.

Baseline your technology

Why does your CMS need to be Java or .Net? Is this your existing in-house skill set? If not, do you really want to invest in re-training? If you have no in-house team, do you really care what technology the CMS is built in? Shouldn’t it just be the cheapest available? Java and .Net are useful if you know you’re going to have a number of integration exercises with applications in those technologies. Otherwise your technological prerequisites may be a costly red herring.

Invite both software vendors and integration partners together

Encourage all participants to do pitch together. In my experience, no web CMS vendor has sufficient in-house experience to address all the services issues in a web project: information architecture, interface design, even systems integration. Conversely, the only services companies you’ll find who know a product inside out will be those who have ex-employees from the vendor. And even then, these developers won’t know the product roadmap or the best practice that the software supplier has gleaned from its many clients over the years. Get them together and have a happy menage-à-trois.

You now have your requirements and your constraints. You should be in a better positioni to shortlist suppliers. If you don’t know where to start in drawing up this list, you can contact us.

Philippe Parker on 12 December 2008

Contented Management

More enterprise myths

It’s true to say that enterprise is a loaded word: it means a lot more to some than to others. We have enterprise content management (ECM), enterprise search, enterprise portals, enterprise resource planning… People like Nicholas Carr have been railing against these all-encompassing applications for years now, questioning how applications that cost so much to install and configure can deliver tangible business benefit, particularly compared to smaller, more targeted systems. The Gilbane Group on the other hand dislike the term enterprise because they believe it’s pure marketing spiel, particularly in the case of content management where few vendors offer the full range of content management products.

It is of course possible to go to a single supplier and get the full WCM, DM, RM, DAM, JCR and IDM gamut of acronyms. The leaders are IBM and Oracle, but Day, Vignette and Open Text all have products covering the main functionality. You have to take care of course that just because the products are owned by the same company and are labelled as a single product family, this does not mean that they can actually talk to each other. Many is the client persuaded to implement a product portfolio from off the shelf, only to spend months and hundreds of thousands on systems integration.

Leaving aside the truth that vendors relate and the more palpable realities their clients are faced with, ask yourself this: why would you need an enterprise application for content management anyway?

Enterprise means not simply across your whole organisation but unique to your organisation. Your ECM will be different to someone else’s, with different security privileges, workflow, storage and retrieval requirements.

Except it’s not.

What you’re trying to do in your organisation is being attempted in every other organisation of a similar scale or vertical. All your competitors, all your partners, all your suppliers and clients will need to control their information and distribute it to the right people. And they want to do it in similar ways, which is why all these vendors are able to sell their content management technologies to so many clients. The thing is, if your requirements aren’t unique, do you need a system that’s unique?

Of course you don’t.

People like Andrew McAfee and JP Rangaswami have been using and writing about disruptive technologies for years. Technologies like wikis, blogs and tagging are disruptive because they upset standard business models and processes where you procure a single technology and then tell everyone how to use it. Under the disruptive model, you let people use a set of tools the way they find most productive. You can add anything to a wiki without it going through workflow, you use blogs instead of email, you use tags instead of a taxonomy. Depending on where you look, these technologies have been more or less successful.

But for me the issue is that it’s not blogs and wikis that are disruptive, it’s the enterprise technologies themselves. Why do organisations feel the need to procure these tools that few people know how to implement and even fewer know how to use? Why not just pick a few technologies that are out there already? The procurement and implementation of these systems actually disrupts the things your organisation is good at, often having a greater negative impact than the business benefits the system will eventually entail. Yes, an enterprise system gives you one butt to kick, but you still have to do some butt-kicking.
For example, why set up a massive LDAP directory that a bunch of systems administrators need to maintain, when you can use OpenID? If you used this to authenticate people, they can use the same username and password for their social life as their daily business. Isn’t this simpler for everyone? Why set up project team servers? Just let each project team set up a blogger account with a new blog for each project and restrict who can view it. They can use the same email address for their email, calendar, and even documents. And those documents could be shared as a wiki. Some of these technologies will work better than others, and there are of course security implications.

Your organisation does not need to control technology, it needs to exploit it. So before you procure a new CMS ask yourself:

  • Am I trying to do something that is already being done by some of my staff using existing tools?
  • Why can’t I extend those tools to support my business?
  • Do I really want to manage a new supplier, a new project and on-going support?

Isn’t it easier to view web technologies as a facility your enterprise makes use of, like roads or a rail system? Let your employees make their own way to work, don’t go out and buy a bus to round them all up in.

Philippe Parker on , , , , | 20 March 2008

Contented Management

Are open standards by-passing enterprise implementations?

A significant challenge for medium to large organisations is managing the exchange of information between all the applications. This might mean having a common login for your users across all your websites, or being able to display different content depending on a visitor’s geographic location.Ordinarily, the approach has been to create complex integrations of content management systems with user directories (LDAP), web services and portals to expose information from back-end systems in a standardised way.The single biggest issue with this approach is cost. You need sufficient kit to ensure scalable dynamic delivery of the applications, licences for all the software involved and significant design and implementation time. You always hit hurdles during the project as you discover data models weren’t quite what you expected, or your LDAP directory has been customised to hold data slightly differently, or you can’t get one portlet to communicate with another… It’s time-consuming and often frustrating.

Once you complete integration to all your applications, they appear as a common platform for everyone interacting with your services. Except that people don’t use the internet to interact just with your services. They want to check their email, spend time on their networking sites, shop… why should they have to go to your site just to get hold of information that should be available anywhere?

Who buys a washing machine by going to the Hotpoint site? They go to a price comparison site or a reliable distributor first. You should be able to syndicate your content any partner site. And when I’ve remembered my login to all your services, wouldn’t it be good to have the same username and password across all these partner sites? For example, you login to check your current account balance, and it’s the same login to check your mortgage status with another bank!

All right, you can retain login credentials in your browser, in a particularly insecure way. And why would you expect Barclay’s and Abbey to share login credentials? Because it’s what customers need.

We’re seeing the emergence now of true data portability. Increasingly, large web organisations (Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr) are subscribing to a model of open standards for information exchange that mean you’ll be able to enter your information once and choose which data you share with which websites. Consider OpenID which already provides single sign-on across many sites on the web. This is exactly what many enterprises are struggling to achieve across applications which they actually own!

So what does this emerging approach mean for enterprise implementations? It means you need to question the value of creating complex data integrations. Service oriented architecture through a portal is no longer the only method for integrating your systems, so you need to conduct some due diligence to satisfy this kind of expenditure.

Data portability is, of course, no panacea. Standards are still emerging. But if you’re going to jump on a web services bandwagon, it’s probably a good idea to be on the same train as Google and other leading web presences.

Philippe Parker on | 16 January 2008

Contented Management

Oracle’s challenge: know your product

Last week I attended the Oracle User Group UK conference, with warm enthusiasm and a heavy cold. User groups can be a great way for clients to share implementation experiences, as well as an opportunity to collar suppliers and get a less sanitised view on product roadmaps. I have heard that the Stellent user community wasn’t particularly active, but Oracle are well used to running user groups for the rest of their product range, so this was part of a very large event.

One speaker (I’ll preserve his anonymity) who seemed to strike a chord with delegates raised the point that his organisation’s implementation partner seemed relatively uninformed about Stellent, and that poor decisions around customisation and bespoke development had led to a poor reputation for the product. We’ve already discussed the product vs. implementation issue in a previous post, but the fact that lots of Stellent clients seemed to have the same problem suggests two things to me.

Firstly, the product may be difficult to implement well. Customisations tend to be required for content entry, so perhaps Stellent didn’t know its audience as well as it should have done. This view is perhaps corroborated by the latest release of version 10gR3 which is now bundled with the Ephox rich text editor (already supplied with IBM content manager and Vignette). This attempts to address some of Site Studio’s issues with cross-platform compatibility and accessibility.

Secondly, there’s a problem with product understanding, not just among implementation partners but within Oracle itself. The Stellent partner base in the UK has traditionally been relatively small. Small systems integrators have focussed on the product’s document management capabilities, with web publishing seen as something of a bonus feature rather than an end in itself. The partners are not web specialists, while the real web specialists — design and build media agencies — haven’t really invested in the product because they see it as more than just web, potentially stretching their capabilities. This is exacerbated by the need to train developers in a proprietary scripting language, IDOC.

Now the limited numbers of the core Stellent team are being swelled by Oracle’s professional services arm. But these aren’t content management specialists, and that’s obvious to many clients who may balk at paying Oracle’s day rates in return for staff on a steep learning curve.

So the user group is turning out to be a really useful forum for all involved. Clients can avoid repeating each other’s implementation errors, while the supplier gets to grips with the common business challenges their client base is trying to address. It’s a bit of role reversal, but hopefully this form of social networking will lead to ECM 2.0.

Philippe Parker on , , | 10 December 2007

Contented Management

The mirror stage in content management

If you’re considering whether your organisation needs collaborative software or a CMS to fulfil its content management needs, you’re doubtless being confronted by a bewildering range of products that all seem to provide the tools to meet your requirements. So how do you decide if you need a wiki, a portal, or ECM?
It’s down to psychology, not technology.

Psychologist asks PC: So tell me about your relationship with your father.

Let’s refer to the Mirror Stage, a psychoanalytical concept developed by Jacques Lacan during the 1940s. The concept describes how infants imagine themselves to be at one with a mother who satisfies their every need. When a child cries, its mother will feed it, change it, put it to bed, or comfort it. When a child reaches between six and eighteen months old, it starts to realise that its identity is separate to its mother’s. It recognises itself in a mirror, has to learn to feed itself and will be told off by its father. In short, it enters a symbolic order where it now has to conform to social constraints in order to get what it wants. The early imaginary state provides gratification without context, while the symbolic order provides context but imposes boundaries.
Which psychological order do your contributors belong to? Do you want or provide an environment for them to express themselves freely, or do you need to contextualise them and the content they produce?
Collaborative tools assume a shared identity. Just as an infant considers its mother to be an extension of itself that responds to its every whim, users look to collaborative software as a personal tool that instantly fulfils their need for self-expression. In this imaginary order, contributors “write out their question in their blog and look for their community to respond and help them“. Compare this to a content management system, where you have both context and boundaries: contributors recognise that their content can only be published if it meets predetermined social criteria.
Some examples:

  • Folskonomy vs. Taxonomy: The most obvious difference between imaginary and symbolic orders in content classification. In folksonomy, users enter terms that help them understand their content and they imagine that other users understand these terms. In taxonomy, these terms are given a context and only predefined terms can be used according to a preordained structure.
  • Intranets: Is your intranet an environment for generating knowledge or enshrining it? If your staff use it to discover what’s going on across multiple locations and projects, they assume that content is representative of the work they do. If the intranet holds authoritative information that employees want to refer to (for example, HR policy), you need a tool that confirms their place in the organisation and that reasserts social context.
  • Web 2.0 vs. Web 1.0 sites: People who use social networking sites subconsciously assume that what is valid for them is valid for others: that their tags make sense, that their ratings (of YouTube videos for example) are relevant, that people will follow their myspace page. These assumptions may well be right, but context is limited to these assumptions. If I put a photo of Sophie onto Flickr and tag it accordingly, this tells me that there are other photos of people called Sophie on the site, but doesn’t tell me that it’s Sophie Marceau and I’m interested in pictures of French film actresses. It’s not clear of course that this is the information people are looking for, but a content managed system would presume this in its design. So if you go to a report on a football match on the BBC news website, it will provide links to more news about each club involved, league tables, fixtures, weather forecasts for that area and so on. The contributor doesn’t elect to have all this correlated information: the CMS provides the context automatically and imposes an authoritative order.

Of course, collaborative environments aren’t completely without context: any user who logs into the system has a distinct identity within the organisation. But the mirror stage in content management comes when you start to impose structure and workflow. If you need your contributors to put content in a specific place for easier retrieval, or to have their contributions approved before they’re viewed by a wider audience, then you’re imposing a symbolic order.
So when choosing your approach, ask yourself are you a mother or father to your users? Are you coaxing them, encouraging them to express themselves freely, or are you imposing a paternalistic authority?
If your organisation is essentially the same thing as your contributors, then an unstructured wiki is a viable option. This covers social networking sites, or collaborative research intranets. But if your organisation represents something more than the people it comprises, in line with a Gestalt psychology, then you need a content management system that enforces a shared identity rather than assumes it.

Philippe Parker on | 4 October 2007
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