Contented Management

The marriage of content strategy and online engagement

Wedding cake

Some people seemed a bit miffed by my last post. All that silence and then I say their product’s not as beautiful as some others. But as Arsène Wenger said, “Everyone thinks they have the prettiest wife at home.”
Well I’m not in the business of software-bashing. I deal with clients who have complex systems that they’re trying to get the most of in order to boost their business. So I do want to highlight a point in the last post that some readers seemed to have missed: Tridion is a really useful tool for supporting a content strategy.

What do I mean by that? Well, as Brain Traffic tells us:

Content strategy plans for the creation, delivery, and governance of useful, usable content.

And isn’t that what you want WCM software to do? I’ve recommended Tridion on the basis that it gives web managers good visibility over who owns content on the site and where it should belong, as well as providing powerful ways to devolve ownership. There are few products that do this as well as Tridion in my opinion; although I seem to be in a minority when I say that I like the way TeamSite does it too.

But that doesn’t mean I have to like everything about the product. User interface may be a matter of personal taste (and one of the posts that I still haven’t written questions how important editorial UI is anyway). But I’m yet to see a really good demonstration of a product that supports both content strategy and customer engagement in an integrated way. I’ve seen bits and pieces in different products, but:

where are the security and content-type models that we see for standard content being applied to UGC?
where’s the personalisation of content based on a visitor’s publicly-shared profile, e.g. Twitter and Facebook?
how are you tailoring your website content to relevant trends on the rest of web?
how are the performance ratings of your page content then reflected in the way other users navigate content? Does your WCM even let you track those KPIs?
can you promote content to a visitor based on what other people – and most specifically people that they trust – found useful or enjoyed?

Those are just examples, but fundamentally I think vendors have found this kind of integrated content engagement strategy a challenge because WCM and UGC approached content from polar opposites. I don’t think they’re wholly incompatible, but I think we’re still in an earlier stage of evolution than most vendors would want to acknowledge.

So let’s just say that true web engagement on content-driven sites is still somewhat immature, as I would suggest that there are others who might prefer to express that more robustly.

Philippe Parker on Interwoven, SDL-Tridion | 16 December 2011 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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Contented Management

SDL’s takeover of Alterian

SDL – who supply Tridion web content management – first announced it wanted to take over Alterian – purveyors of the CMS formerly known as Morello (Mediasurface) and Immediacy – in October. This week the Financial Times confirmed that an offer had been accepted. You can get the financial background to the takeover from the FT article, but while the companies are close to a formal merger, the software they supply remain poles apart.

As SDL continues to release modules and connectors to enhance the breadth of its web engagement offering, many of its customers find themselves operating dated user interfaces and struggling with the obscurities of Visual Basic scripting. If you put Tridion side by side with newer .Net CMS like Sitecore or EPiServer, you’d see the difference straight away.
Alterian’s WCM has a much slicker editorial user interface and delivers dynamic rather than static content. How you scale your website, integrate with other systems and personalise content therefore requires a completely different technical approach.

This personalisation aspect is particularly relevant as both vendors have been positioning themselves in the web engagement / customer experience market. Even though SDL is at the crest of Forrester’s online customer experience wave (and remains firmly ensconced in Gartner’s magic quadrant for web content management), I would argue that neither tool is that well-suited to handling the kind of user-generated content that some lighter weight open source tools like Drupal can offer. SDL seems to me to be particularly well geared to organisations that have a thought-through web content strategy, while what sets Alterian apart in online engagement is its social media marketing tool, SM2. Indeed, this is what SDL seems to covet most:

“We think that there are synergies with the marketing analytics and content delivery,” Mark Lancaster, SDL executive chairman, told the Financial Times.

Allow me to express some degree of scepticism here. Alterian have owned both WCM and SMM technology for over three years and made little (if any) headway in their integration. SDL may have greater resources to achieve this, but we’re looking at completely different products here. Any quick fixes would simply be a rebranding exercise with no under-the-bonnet coordination. Of course, SDL may have a clever plan and I stand to be corrected on that point.

Overall, I’m quite positive about the takeover. I think SDL will benefit from the niche benefits that Alterian brings, particularly in terms of focus on improving editorial interfaces. I think there’s a great opportunity for Alterian partners who previously worked with Immediacy to get to grips with a Tridion CMS that’s similar but more powerful than what they were previously used to. And I think that customers, particularly in Europe, will get a broader set of implementation partners to work with who have great web experience.
Yes, it’s yet another merger and apparently less choice in the market, but actually for the two software development teams, I hope it’s an opportunity for them to learn from each other and for synergy to mean establishing a really good, forward-thinking product rather than just an excuse to downsize.

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 Interwoven | 20 August 2010 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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Contented Management

What makes different WCM different?

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 Metadata, Twitter, WordPress | 4 March 2010 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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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 Alterian, Cloud, Drupal | 2 February 2010 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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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 FatWire, TerminalFour | 14 January 2010 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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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:

select a simple WCM for devolved teams to create pages in predefined templates; or
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 Immediacy, Morello, Taxonomy, Vignette | 8 December 2009 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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Something rotten in WCM

J. Boye’s 2009 Arhus conference was a learned and often humorous affair. The biggest lesson I brought back from Denmark was just how far away all of us who work in the industry — website managers, technologists, vendors, consultants — are from having good web content management.
Chimpanzee performing Hamlet by King Chimp

Alas, poor clients

How many people could say that they were happy with their implementation? Even those case studies I saw were tinged with regret at missing features or how long the process took. The conference was littered with people who’d wasted budget and wanted to share their hindsight. And these were the enlightened ones.

The industry protests too much, methinks

But while those of us in the industry can easily put errors down to naïvety, I think it’s time we took a long hard look at ourselves. How can we tell users that CMS is like complex machinery which should involve substantial training and even change management? That’s an appalling attitude to user requirements.

Don’t try to make people change… do something that can’t already be done. (Euan Semple)

When every survey shows usability as the top area of dissatisfaction with CMS, what’s preventing vendors from making a friendlier system? As Seth Gottlieb points out, they’re all as bad as each other.

Slings (and boxes) and arrows

Creating and maintaining content should be simple enough for devolved editorial teams to perform with little training. The tricky thing is creating high quality content to suit an audience’s needs. Yet few CMS will ease editors through this process or evaluate their content against style guides. We’re beginning to see a few technologies in this area, but these are just sold as add-ons to an already bloated feature set.

The play’s the thing

It seems the industry has been blind to the truth. Features are specified but never used. Vendors add functionality so that they can score highly in analyst reports and avoid being excluded from shortlists, but all they’re doing is making it more difficult for users to create a compelling web presence.
To be or not to be
WCM was once a breakthrough in enabling less technical users to publish web content relatively quickly. But has it really progressed in the last few years? I don’t think so. We just have more modules piled onto re-skinned interfaces. Can’t we have friendlier tools for delivering a content strategy? Otherwise WCM will see some other application usurp its role and seduces its client base, which would be a tragedy for the industry.

More on #jboye09

Philippe Parker on #fixwcm, #jboye09 | 10 November 2009 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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How to read Gartner

Gartner’s Magic Quadrant is stirring up emotions again. This time ZL Technologies have launched a law suit against the analyst firm, essentially claiming that its methods are biased and obscure. We’re not industry analysts, or partners of any of the vendors, so we’re not too bothered about who’s in Gartner’s good books. It makes a big difference to the vendors, however, since Gartner is such a dominant influence in the industry and so many clients assume that if a product’s in the Magic Quadrant, it must be the best.

And yet, this precisely contradicts Gartner’s own advice:

Gartner advises organizations against simply selecting vendors that appear in the Leaders quadrant. All selections should be buyer-specific, and vendors from the Challengers, Niche Players or Visionaries quadrants could be better matches for your business goals and solution requirements.

But what clients and many consultants see is the graph, and this is what they decide on. We’ve worked with many of the WCM products assessed by Gartner and conducted many technology selections for clients. They want the best product, not a niche player.

But what do you want to do with your CMS? Don’t you want to achieve things that other people aren’t doing, within business structures that will be difficult to change, aimed at specific audiences? Isn’t that a niche? Then why wouldn’t you consider a niche product?

Just because a vendor has a more complete vision, doesn’t mean it offers all the features that niche products do. In fact, the completeness of vision is based on many other criteria, including market understanding and strategy, sales strategy, business model and geographic strategy. These are all important, but do they really have a bearing on your business requirements?

We’d rather come and ask you what you’re trying to achieve, point out the things that any CMS will do and some of your issues that only certain products are likely to solve well. We’ll suggest you look at those but warn you about some of their weak points. If you’re then concerned that the vendor’s marketing strategy isn’t up to scratch, go and take a look at their financial viability. But every vendor Gartner assessed had WCM revenues in excess of $8 million in 2008, so they aren’t small fry.

Nevertheless, you have to question the neutrality of a firm that takes a significant proportion of its revenue from advising the vendors on product development, but doesn’t disclose what that revenue is. As a buyer, you should question whether the criteria are relevant and whether the assessments are fair.

So what benefit can you get from the report?

Firstly, you get a list of products. That’s not a trite observation. In a market with several hundred vendors — and seemingly more each day popping out of the Scandinavian CMS womb — it’s useful to be able to limit the products you’re considering to those that have a considerable industry presence. Gartner will shortly be adding open source WCM to the proprietary software it currently evaluates.

Secondly, you get some ammunition with which to question vendors. If EPiServer is heavily focussed on expanding into the US market, you should be asking how much of their core team is still in Europe and able to deal with your concerns. (This is true of many of the European vendors.) Similarly, if you read between the lines on cautions about Vignette, you’ll need to ask how many of their clients are actually using the latest version of their product which they’re so keen to sell you.

So how should you read Gartner? With interest, and with caution.

Some further reading:

Philippe Parker on EPiServer, Gartner, Vignette | 22 October 2009 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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Contented Management

Three things happening now in web content management

There are many views on the future of content management, but what of the present tense? I wanted to highlight a few trends that we’re seeing from WCM software vendors.

Social WCM
Of course the web is social, but WCM has traditionally made quite clear distinctions between authoritative content that’s created and approved by authenticated users, and content that’s produced by non-authoritative sources, i.e. external users. This distinction has been somewhat blurred by people recently and vendors have had to respond to blogging software like WordPress that makes it far easier to add comments and user profiles. Many WCM vendors who previously didn’t provide social features now tout their software as web 2.0 ready and this is a signficant area of product development. Moreover, if you look at the ECM sector, vendors are focussing heavily on use of these social features to improve internal business processes, aka Enterprise 2.0.

Web campaign management
Your website is a marketing channel: understanding your market and its responsiveness to campaigns is increasingly important. Many WCM vendors are heavily promoting the campaign management side of their products and developing improved campaign reporting features. The aquisition of Mediasurface by Alterian and the inclusion of content management as part of an “integrated marketing platform” is a good indication of where one branch of the industry is heading. FatWire is also developing marketing products as part of what it calls its Web Experience Management Suite.

Content quality
If you’re going to use the web to market heavily and you have a lot of content, you need to ensure that your website meets the standards you have set your organisation. There are a number of tools on the market that help editorial teams assure that quality (such as those from Vamosa and SiteImprove). We’re also seeing vendors like SDL Tridion adding these modules to their core product offering. Assuring the quality of your web content should be a key aspect of WCM and these features are particularly welcome for distributed authoring teams.

Clearly, these three trends represent a far from exhaustive list, but they do go some way to illustrate how suppliers are positioning themselves in the WCM market. Hopefully this will give clients some degree of differentiation and an awareness of possibilities that web content management can offer them now.

If you want to know more about trends in the industry, take a look at this list of feeds.

Philippe Parker on FatWire, Morello, SDL-Tridion | 10 September 2009 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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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.

Philippe Parker on 25 August 2009 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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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.

Philippe Parker on 20 August 2009 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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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.

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.

Philippe Parker on 6 August 2009 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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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.

Philippe Parker on 1 July 2009 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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People or software?

There’s a seemingly never-ending debate as to whether you choose your web content management software first or the team to deliver it. I’ve passed some comment on this myself in the past. It really comes down to Strategy 101. Are you looking to improve productivity or growth?

If you’re trying to improve your website’s revenue streams the software will offer you little. There are of course CMS out there that are sold by integrated marketing campaigners, and there are other CMS that offer strong personalisation capabilities. But fundamentally, it’s the concept and the design that will make your website better, not the underlying technology.

That’s not to say that you won’t make your life more difficult by picking the wrong tool; if you need to deliver personalised content with a CMS that only offers static delivery, for example. But if it takes you 20 minutes longer to produce the right content for your audience and deliver better advocacy and revenue, that’s a hindrance you may well choose to accept.

Nevertheless, CMS are fundamentally about improving editorial processes and governance. So if you’re trying to improve your content classification, link with other systems (like your LDAP directory) or make devolved authorship of your website easier, you must find the right tool to do this. If you pick the wrong product, you will be in for a world of painful customisations that will damage your operations in the longer term.

Of course, projects rarely have a single objective that’s exclusively sales or operations focussed. There is usually a weighting one way or the other, however.

If the operational side is more important, look at the software first.
If the marketing side is more important, go to an agency and ask them to recommend the CMS.
If you’re trying to do both, let the agencies and vendors decide who they want to partner with in order to deliver your requirements.

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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 Morello, Oracle, RedDot, Vignette | 7 May 2009 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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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.

Philippe Parker on 15 January 2009 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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Crystal balls are there to be broken

Guy Westlake, a senior product marketing manager at Vignette, has gazed into his crystal ball for trends and technologies in 2009. This is certainly worth a read, as Vignette continue to have some excellent product features and are one of the driving forces in both WCM and portal software development.
Of course there’s an element here of Vignette promoting its own product set — a case of gazing at navels rather than crystal balls? — but I hope Guy won’t mind if that I contradict some of his predictions. I do agree with quite a few!

1. Enterprise 2.0 takes off

The use of web 2.0-style tools (micro-blogging, RSS, tagging, etc.) as part of daily communication within a business should be a no-brainer, but many organisational cultures are way behind the curve. Early adopters are reaping the rewards of improved knowledge sharing, but the ethos of control, hierarchy and compliance hamper efforts to implement Enterprise 2.0. How do you convince people who send email attachments to half a dozen people for approval that there’s a better way of communicating if they can’t see beyond their clogged up inboxes?
One compelling case for web 2.0 tools is their use in project management: posting on project status with comments for feedback, using shared calendars and discussion boards for meetings, building networks of friends across departmental and organisational boundaries. But if you’re used to out-of-the-box services, be prepared! Implementing these kind of tools within the firewall is often considerably more complex: LDAP integration is just the first hurdle you’re likely to face.

2. Life in the cloud

So many cloud-based applications offer real benefits at seemingly ever-falling costs that the cloud appears to be the saviour of the web, particularly when recession hangs over IT budgets. But security questions remain: how sure can you be that information you want to keep in your organisation remains there? Businesses will have to become a lot more savvy about encryption methods before they start to really take advantage of what the cloud has to offer.
Nevertheless, those applications that are external to the firewall — including email — are ripe for cloud computing and I expect we’ll see many organisations taking “a punt” on these services just from a cost perspective.

3. Web 2.0 in the financial services sector

This is a banking compliance officer’s worst nightmare: anyone posting all kinds of comments to a bank’s public website. However, financial services have been the trail-blazers for web 2.0 on internal applications and I think we’ll see them pushing these applications to the public too.
The question is: what is the killer app? Social comparison sites for mortgages, savings and the like similar to Trip Advisor in the holiday industry are bound to become more prominent. But retaill banking is going to have to think long and hard about applications that they can find for online social media to gain market penetration.

4. Personalisation and the rise of ‘My Web’

Personalisation has not been the trend for web content and I see no evidence that it will become one. Personalisation has proven many times to be both costly and ineffective. The trend has been and will continue to be “our web” rather than “mine”.

Even the oft-cited Amazon example isn’t enclosing the individual in their own world: it’s making recommendations based on what other people bought who bought the same product and there’s a heavy use of communal rating functionality. I expect we’ll see more in the way of sites suggesting links other people followed (even Google is moving this way) rather than offering visitors options to configure the kind of content they want to see.

5. The future of online media is video

This is a marketeer’s dream. Unfortunately, the market is willing but not yet ready. There are significant challenges in engaging users with video based on current browsing habits. If you’re online at work, watching video is still viewed as at best anti-social and at worst as skiving. Watching at home still isn’t the experience that it should be, sat a few inches away from a small monitor displaying an even smaller video. Video on mobile devices is improving significantly however, so if mobile bandwidth prices start to fall, expect to see a rise in video clips for handheld devices. What’s more, these devices are likely to be far less effective at blocking out this content than most PC browsers.

6. The integrated brand experience

There’s is a slightly chicken and egg situation going on with multi-channel delivery. Sites won’t develop for small audience shares and those audiences won’t visit sites that don’t cater for them. I expect that we’ll see a few niche players here — probably around news and software sites for mobile devices — before we see any real obvious example (in Europe, at least) of business catering for multiple channels.

7. Social media – what next?

Social media has been about individual sites allowing lots of people to comment and contribute. The next step (we’re already seeing on many sites including BBC news) is for the site themselves to be social and provide links to resources they don’t control. I think this is a really good thing. For too long, organisations have focussed on enclosing themselves in their own “enterprise” models rather than seeing themselves as part of the web. Now they’ll begin sharing content and resources with each other more freely in order to become the “hub” that visitors come to on a regular basis. It’s best to be the daily starting point for browsing rather than the infrequent end point.

8. Semantic Web

Has the semantic web lost all meaning? It’s pushed so heavily by vendors, but how many compelling examples are there of it? Some of the technology is exciting, but let’s see a compelling business proposition for it.

Tidying up your content, organising it better and making it more search-friendly are still more effective ways of improving your website or intranet than the implementation of a semantic engine.

If the crystal ball isn’t right, what is?

I’m not disagreeing out of hand with Guy (apart from on personalisation and possibly the semantic web), but if I disbelieve his predictions, what do my own tarot cards propose?

There will be more opportunities to reach new audiences across multiple channels, but a correspondingly increased need to justify the costs of these new channels.
Intranet projects will struggle for attention. Challenges and costs associated with application integration in comparison to a cloud-based model will cause many internal implementations to be delayed. The focus will turn instead to communication beyond the firewall for market penetration and retention.
Websites will become social, sharing content not just from their own resources but from off-brand and off-message sites too, through the increased use of RSS.

Let’s review next year and see whether tarot is more effective than a crystal ball.

Philippe Parker on Adoption, Vignette | 19 December 2008 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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When search is a good way to navigate

If your site has thousands of pages of content that you’re struggling to organise, it’s pretty tempting to scrap your CMS-driven navigation structures and just provide your visitors with a search-driven interface instead. You can achieve this in two ways.

Firstly, by providing a simple search box. After all, this is the way most people find new information through Google. Secondly, by using a search tool to push similar content to users; for example the right-hand column of this page provides links to pages that are classified under different themes. But before you view search as some kind of panacea for all your information architecture woes, let’s pause to reconsider these two methods.

In the first case, how do you know that the search results presented by Google are the most relevant pages to your query? Google has no real benchmark. Then weigh up how much effort people put into ensuring their content is optimised to appear at the top of the search results and then ask yourself what you’d have to do to ensure that relevant content for every search a user undertakes.

In the second case, consider that actually I’ve already (very loosely) made decisions about navigation by tagging every post. This is almost the same effort as organising the content into folder structures as you would in a CMS. In fact, for sites with lots of content it can be more difficult to tag all the content than to drop it into a folder structure; the folders provide a more complete classification metaphor that’s easier for people with less expert knowledge to implement.
So how do you decide when search is better for navigation than in a CMS? Here are my suggested criteria:

You have the money.
Implementing faceted search technologies can be significantly more expensive than using standard content management system functionality. Day rates for leading product professional services are often relatively high, there are licence costs and there’s an additional cost of integration, particularly if you need to tie a security model into the search tool.
You have few content types.
But you have lots of content. Structured navigation from search works well where you have similar kinds of content, with similar structures against which the search engine can execute straightforward queries. A product catalogue is an obvious example. The tool can filter on price, format, location, etc. which have definitive and distinct values.
Your content is distinct.
Categories need to be unique; semantic tools aren’t really advanced enough yet to tell you that apple is a fruit not an iPhone when displayed with orange unless orange is the network provider. Moreover, your pages need to be called something readily identifiable. If you have ten pages called “Help” or “Contact Us”, how will the search tool know which is the relevant resource for the site visitor?
Linking is obvious.
If you use search to provide your navigation, you relinquish editorial control, so it must be clear why pages in the navigation are related. On a medical site, for example, you might link to other conditions treated with the same drug. However, as soon as you’re trying to tell people something you can get in trouble if you automate. An example I often use is a page about health advice for eggs: should this link to information about required protein intake (i.e. eggs are good for you) or about cholesterol (i.e. eggs are bad for you)? Or should you exercise some editorial discretion and explain about balanced diets? There are few search engines that could perform the navigation required to achieve the latter example.

Practically, it’s generally simpler to use CMS to navigate, with a search option to help people who are stuck. The advantage of CMS-driven navigation is that the editorial control you can exercise should help you to push visitors to your site along a route you want them to take. However, if you’re happy to let your intrepid visitors explore your content, and you’ve nothing in particular you want to promote to them, then search engines can be a viable means to provide navigation.

My final analogy is that CMS-driven navigation is like a library, while search-driven navigation is more like a bookstore. In a library you’ve preplanned how visitors can find specific information. In a bookstore you’re encouraging them to browse, but they may never find what they came in for.

Philippe Parker on Taxonomy | 15 December 2008 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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Questions to ask before selecting a web content management system

This is a brain dump of open questions that I’ve asked previously when speaking to clients about their websites and their requirements for a content management system. This assumes that the technical prerequisites are being addressed elsewhere.

You can pix and mix these questions as you feel are appropriate to your context, but generally it takes about an hour to get through these with one or two people at a time. If you need to run larger workshops, I don’t think this approach would work.

Vision and Objectives

Is there a content strategy?
What goals are currently being met?
How do you want to interact with your customers?
How much integration is required with other systems?
Which services should be provided through the website?
What is “the Vision” from your team’s perspective?

Suppliers

Who is creating / editing content? With what frequency?
Who plans content?
Where / what is the content you are responsible for and how is it used?
Who do you work with during the content creation process? How effective are these relationships?
How do you collect information to write your content?
Do you usually know about other initiatives in the organisation and how they affect what you’re working on?
Do other departments see the documents you produce? Do you see theirs?
How do you handle authors working on content that may be published simultaneously to different parts of the site? (i.e. ensure content is the same when it needs to be and different when it needs to be).

Inputs

What are your current content creation processes? Which are effective / ineffective? Why?
What are the problems / frustrations you face in creating content?
What features would you like to see in an authoring, CMS or publishing tool?
How are documents created? Do you use or templates or style sheets?
What tools do you use in authoring? How effective are they?
What is the format of the content you create? What sources is it dependent on?
How do you add metadata?
Do you re-use content from elsewhere on the site?
How do you manage demand for content from customers?

Process

What do you do to control documents? Version / access controls?
How do you handle sign-off / review?
Who edits / transforms content?
How is it classified?
Who relates content across the site?
What workflow review is involved?
How will the content be reused / archived / reviewed?
What works well with the current process?
What are we trying to improve?
What sort of reporting is required?

Outputs

What format does the content need to be in? (Accessibility levels, email, print / DTP, mobile, .CSV)
Where is it stored / distributed / aggregated?
What templates are required?
How much content should be reusable?
What extra site functionality are you interested in seeing?
How much Interaction or interoperability is required with other sites (e.g. client extranets)?
What requirements do you have for searching?

Customers

Who do you consider your target audience?
How much interaction do you have with customers (feedback, surveys, consultations)?
Is there a need for personalised / targeted outputs?
What are your customers’ key areas of interest?
Do you have access to website statistics? How do you respond to these?
What attracts customers to the store?
What information on the site helps your customers get their job done?
What types of information do they look for in a document?
How much information do they find useful?
When do they use the content (on one-off projects or on a recurring basis?)
What do they like best about the content? What do you like least?
How do your customers prefer to receive information?

Philippe Parker on 2 December 2008 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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Han Fei, on content management functionality

Confucianism has long been a predominant philosophy in China, but it was opposed by Legalism, which held that individual opinion meant little in the face of the interest of the state.

In the web content management world, it is the public website that commands our exclusive attention. The only relevant question is: Is the site meeting its objectives and delivering required information and services to its visitors?

Adequate governance needs to be put in place to ensure that it is impossible to break what makes the website successful. If you allow people too much flexibility, they’ll make self-interested decisions rather than good decisions.

When a sage governs a state, he does not rely on the people to do good out of their own will. Instead, he sees to it that they are not allowed to do what is not good. If he relies on people to do good out of their own will, within the borders of the state not even ten persons can be counted on.

So, if you’ve accepted that your templates are well-designed, why would you enable people to move content around? Just give them a web-based form to enter content. It’s less glamorous for the content editor, but much more likely to produce the right effect. Similarly, provide people with enforced structures in which to classify content. This will ensure consistency and a better end-user experience. Otherwise, people will simply drop content into new website sections that they think might be more relevant, rather than those that everyone is used to getting the information from. If you decide your food is spicy, don’t give people an option to make it Mexican or Chinese or Indian. It’s spicy.

Clearly, this command-and-control approach may be difficult for some organisations to implement. But remember what Han Fei tells us: “An enlightened ruler holds up facts and discards all that is without practical value.” If your design and approach can be proven, no one in your team should be allowed to break your website by undermining these principles.

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Managing content management software

InfoWorld publishes annual awards for data management applications. It selected Oracle UCM (formerly Stellent) as the best enterprise content management application and SDL-Tridion as the best web CMS. Both of these products have their strengths: UCM enables you to share documents stored natively in Microsoft Word as web pages relatively easily, while Tridion boasts impressive workflow capabilities likely to meet any web publishing need. Nevertheless, these products have a common shortcoming in a significant area.

While content management software is designed to manage content — words and media are processed, stored and delivered in a controlled fashion — this management itself needs to be managed: workflows need to be created, users added and withdrawn, permissions changed. The most important aspect of this management is changing how content is defined. This generally takes two forms: management of a taxonomy or classification system, and management of the “content types”, or schema that defines whether you’re looking at a press release, event or personal profile. It is extremely unlikely that you’ll get all these definitions right when you first set up your CMS, so the ability to alter and extend the systems is paramount.

Tridion and Oracle both struggle in this area. As a static publishing system, if you want to update a component (content type) in Tridion, you need to republish your schema, add content definitions in each place you’ve made a schema change and then republish the content. In UCM meanwhile, if you can navigate to the relevant administration area to actually make the change and fathom out the unnecessarily ugly interface, you still need to republish the schema and all the affected content even though it’s dynamically driven! You even need to do this if you make a change to the metadata schema, because this isn’t stored in the database as an index, but as a string in a field. This is something you’d expect Oracle to correct pronto with the 11g release due Q4 2008.

You might have thought this kind of thing would be pretty high up most vendors’ agenda, but this is a problem for many CMS. Vignette works ok unless you customise the schema, which many users do. You probably need to look at Mediasurface Morello if you think your content types are likely to change. The product allows you to rename and add fields as required. You need to change the presentation template if you want to see the field you’ve added displayed on a web page, and you run into trouble if your new field needs to be mandatory since your existing content won’t include this information, but it’s considerably easier to manage the content management this way than to republish an entire site.

So caveat emptor. Updating your schema should be an essential part of any CMS product selection, irrespective of awards.

Philippe Parker on Metadata, Morello, Oracle, SDL-Tridion, Vignette | 17 March 2008 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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What should be in a WCM SWOT?

The first step in any brownfield implementation is to assess what you have already. Indeed, you should be assessing your web content management on a regular basis, particularly if your online business is seasonal. But what are the ground rules for that assessment and what should it cover? I’d recommend a rapid SWOT-check.

SWOT analysis is a long-standing if relatively simple technique used across many types of business to provide the executive with a summary of the current situation. It should be easy to read and quick to determine, rather than involve weeks of assessment and long reports. It should be a couple of pages document or four slides that highlight the most salient issues. You can find some templates on Business Balls.

The contents of your SWOT should cover all the facets of WCM: commercials, technical, design, operational.

Strengths and Weaknesses

Does your WCM meet performance and availability expectations?
Is the site W3C compliant and accessible?
Does it meet usability criteria for both consumers and contributors?
Does the content meet quality expectations for target audiences?
Are you able to track key performance indicators? What are they telling you?
Are the business objectives for the WCM in tandem with organisational objectives and strategy?
If so, are these objectives represented in the site’s look, feel and functionality?
What extra functionality are your competitors offering? What advantages does this give them?

Opportunities and Threats

Porter’s five forces for competitive advantage provide us with a good baseline for assessing opportunities and threats. In WCM terms, these translate as follows:

Potential entrants: Are you considering all the delivery channels: syndication, mobile, widgets, etc.
Buyers: Which markets could you expand into? What are your audience expectations as they begin to consume other web technologies (Facebook, Youtube, iGoogle)?
Substitutes: Do collaborative tools like blogs and wikis threaten your content management processes? If you have a large Enterprise Content Management platform, is this challenged by Software As A Service, or by Basic Content Services?
Suppliers: How dependent is the system on a single supplier, whether internal or external? What contingencies do you have in place should you lose this resource? If you’re going to make enhancements, what sort of training or procurement implications would this have?
How do I exploit all the content which might be relevant to my audiences? How do I make the information I’m presenting be cohesive and comprehensive?

Who should make the assessment?

Lots of questions, but who should answer them? You need someone sufficiently distanced from the site as it stands that they won’t simply rubber-stamp the current situation or rubbish it completely. But the person (or people) undertaking the SWOT also needs to be engaged with the site and its users.

So you need to engage an independent expert who then runs a brainstorm with stakeholders around the bullet points listed above, but who you give sufficient licence to that they can be completely honest about your implementation. You’re asking someone to take a sword to the site not to themselves, so expect to hear things that you’d really rather not have known.

Why is this approach useful

Too many times, project teams are given a brief that’s just an abstract assortment of ideas. A SWOT analysis provides a structured way of getting to the root of the problem. As I said at the start, this is just the first step. Steps two and three are about identifying requirements that tackle the issues the SWOT raises and prioritising those requirements so that you can figure out what’s worth changing. I’ll tackle these two steps in subsequent postings.

Philippe Parker on 15 November 2007 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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Suitable content for a CMS

One of the biggest challenges for organisations with complex web architectures, particularly those trying to implement SOA, is deciding just what is appropriate for a content management system and what goes into AN Other application. Oscar Berg has had a stab, but I thought I’d try to give a few guidelines.

An indication that a project may be a good fit is if it meets any of these criteria:

Written (as opposed to numerical) content to be published within or outside the organisation and administered through a web browser.
Documents to be published internally or externally.
Digital assets used in conjunction with web or document publishing.
Information aggregated from other sources that subsequently needs to be edited by staff before it is published to an internal or external website.

An indication of a poor fit would be a project with the following requirements:

Structured numerical databases: this is more appropriate to a bespoke database application.
Draft, unpublished information that belongs to an individual, rather than to the organisation: this can be achieved with a file server.
Loose, collaboratively-created content, such as blogs, discussion forums and wikis, that don’t require peer review. This content is usually best managed through dedicated collaboration technologies.
Aggregated content that can be presented “live” on websites without editorial intervention. This can be achieved through a portal or an application server.
Integration of back-end applications to be presented through a common, browser-based interface. This can be achieved through a portal.
Archiving records to less expensive data allocations based on frequency of access or age of assets. This is a feature of a more advanced records management system.
eCommerce sites requiring automated cross-sell functionality.

There are some grey areas which might combine a CMS with another technology:

“Advanced” personalisation, where a website has to remember who you are while you’re on the website and deliver different content to you based on your profile. This is pretty straightforward in a CMS when applied to the homepage using cookies, but anything beyond this requirement is going to be complex to implement, particularly if your CMS is stateless.
Streaming media will require an additional dedicated server.
Single sign-on functionality would benefit from an identity management tool.
Web-based applications such as polls that need to be included on a website but are unlikely to be managed through the CMS.

Philippe Parker on 29 October 2007 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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Ajax: hero or zero?

As yet another vendor introduces AJAX to their WCM offering, it’s worth considering what benefits these interfaces bring you. Last year, Jonathan Downes and Joe Walker at CMS Watch provided a great introduction to the subject of Ajax in content management systems, but there are a couple of other points you should consider.

Firstly, in the last year or so, users have become much more familiar with these kinds of interfaces. Most webmail systems make use of the tool and there are countless portal-type sites and map applications that use JavaScript to create smoother browser-based interfaces. This should mean that people will be more comfortable with richer interfaces than with simple web forms.

Secondly, Downes and Walker tell us that Ajax generally equates to better performance. While the interface may give the end-user an impression of efficiency, this isn’t necessarily the case for the server. Remember that with each interaction, you’re sending a request — albeit small — to the server. Given that most CMS licences run on a per CPU basis and many environments have as a consequence been under-specified, introducing these tiny rapid requests could put some serious strain on your hardware and your budget.

These interfaces can be more user-friendly than some client software, but as with any CMS selection process you just need to be wary, size your environment appropriately and test with real editorial users to see if they get the desired usability benefits. It’s pretty safe to say that the smaller the number of users, the more benefit and least risk in deploying these kinds of tools.

A final word of caution: in the Iliad, Ajax was certainly mighty. But he was passed over by his peers for a hero with more guile and ended up destroying himself. Is this the sort of technology you want to unleash in your CMS campaign?

Philippe Parker on Adoption, Interface Design, Performance, Vyre | 14 October 2007 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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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.

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 Taxonomy | 4 October 2007 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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Enterprise too? ECM’s long tail

Over the years, the content management market has seen a great deal of consolidation through acquisition, creating vendors with more extensive product ranges that they tout as enterprise almost by default. If you have web, document, digital asset and records management then you must be enterprise.

There are a number of problems with this consolidation that are well-documented, notably the maturity of product integration; just because you buy Oracle UCM (Stellent) doesn’t mean it works out of the box with Oracle WebCenter. But there’s another issue too: not all the clients are enterprise. Once you’ve sold your massive projects into big corporate clients, how do you tap into the long tail?

Increasingly we’re seeing the larger vendors buy up smaller companies not just to become more enterprise, but to reach a broader market that can’t afford enterprise licence fees. We see this in SDL’s acquisition of Tridion, very much a mid-tier WCM. It’s also been in evidence with the RedDot / Open Text product offering, with the RedDot WCM being able to offer trendier features aimed a less “enterprise” installations, such as User Generated Content plug-ins.

Perhaps the most obvious example of this non-enterprise approach is Mediasurface. Even though Mediasurface is a WCM rather than ECM offering, it has many clients who would struggle to pay for the core product licence, Morello client, database licence, and Solaris servers. Yet it has many small clients who it does well from, particularly in UK local government. To increase its stake in this market, Mediasurface has acquired both Immediacy and the SilverBullet hosted CMS offering, rebranded as Pepperio. This enables the company to dip more easily into the long tail.

So why is this important for you, the customer?

On the positive side, it means that if you’re a small customer you can still get a product from an established vendor rather than a high-risk niche supplier. If you’re a large customer, it enables the vendor to leverage the features of the products in its portfolio to provide you with a more comprehensive system, potentially in a more agile way.

On the negative side, if you do go for a small product from one of these companies, you have to ensure that you don’t turn yourself into a small fish in a big pond. If you go for a small WCM package and you need something quick, you’re more likely to get it when you represent 10% of the supplier’s revenue than if you represent less than 1%. And if you are the big fish, don’t expect the small pond to be anything other than a set of nearly joined up puddles.

Philippe Parker on Morello, Oracle, RedDot, SDL-Tridion | 3 October 2007 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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See also:

Beautiful doesn’t always mean effective

A solid financial basis

Living off past glories?

The long-term view

Where’s the support?

It’s not about loyalty

Editorial interface

Pages vs. elements

Content structures

Technology

Alas, poor clients

The industry protests too much, methinks

Slings (and boxes) and arrows

The play’s the thing

More on #fixwcm

More on #jboye09

Will content need to be managed?

Will content need context?

Will content need to be deleted?

1. Enterprise 2.0 takes off

2. Life in the cloud

3. Web 2.0 in the financial services sector

4. Personalisation and the rise of ‘My Web’

5. The future of online media is video

6. The integrated brand experience

7. Social media – what next?

8. Semantic Web

If the crystal ball isn’t right, what is?

Strengths and Weaknesses

Opportunities and Threats

Who should make the assessment?

Why is this approach useful