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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 , | 14 January 2010 | Tweet this |

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 , , | 10 September 2009 | Tweet this |

Contented Management

CMS trade-in deals

Fatwire is waiving licence fees for clients who migrate to its CMS from Vignette or Interwoven. Both these vendors have traditionally had quite expensive licensing models so there are potentially big savings to be made, although FatWire has a feature set that is probably closer to Vignette than to Interwoven.

The catch is that you need to procure migration services through FatWire, but they’ve partnered with content migration specialists who you’d probably use anyway. You just lose some flexibility on negotiating the price, but you’re going to be saving money anyway.

But does that make it a worthwhile exercise? As Irina Guseva points out, the project inevitably costs more than the licence, so the cost of migrating may well be more than your existing Vignette or Interwoven maintenance costs.

More importantly, the reasons for migrating are wrong. You shouldn’t abandon your CMS just because you can get a better deal elsewhere. It’s not like switching an electricity supplier to get a better rate. Just moving from one CMS platform to another is unlikely to resolve the content management issues you’ve been experiencing. You need to think about which problems you’re going to solve then pick the processes and technologies that will address these.

FatWire’s rescue package doesn’t make a business case to move away from Vignette or Interwoven, but it does put the product on the shortlist if you are migrating. For dynamic-driven Java websites, you have to consider FatWire, but it’s not a shorlist of one. Remember, open source products don’t have licence costs either.

So let’s commend FatWire for their marketing effort, and if you’re looking to migrate from a platform other that those mentioned, ask FatWire if they’ll cut you the same deal. But don’t trade in your existing CMS just to get a better price. Address your issues, conduct due diligence and pick a product that meets your requirements.

A couple of useful links:

Philippe Parker on , , | 16 June 2009 | Tweet this |

Contented Management

Stand and deliver

Adriaan Bloem points to the downtime on Oracle’s website following its acquistion of Sun as an indicator that dynamic delivery is generally unsatisfactory. Certainly that website looked like it needed a decent application server on Monday. I wonder where they could get one.

The static vs. dynamic delivery debate is specific to the kind of content you’re producing. Generally, dynamic delivery is well-suited to:

  1. Time-critical content, such as news or user-generated content.
  2. Content that requires lots of automatic relationships and “see also” type links, including product catalogues. This is easier to generate through dynamic queries than it is through a complex relational static publishing model. This is a particular strength of Vignette.
  3. Segmentation and personalistion of content; a strength of FatWire. It can be really hard to deliver content aimed at specific users if you deploy static publishing, although SDL-Tridion has a go by implementing custom server tags into the application server layer.

More generally, you need to weigh up whether you need a dynamic model because you’re publishing lots of content that needs to be up to date, or a static model because you want to guarantee that the content will continue to be served. Either way, you need to be sure that you can change or remove content quickly as well as publish it, and you should follow best practice for delivery performance:

  1. Ensure caching is in place and decent parameters are set; use a CDN if you have a global audience or lots of very large media files.
  2. Optimise your images, CSS and JavaScript and try not to have too many of these being called from a single page.
  3. Use compression techniques, such as GZIP delivery.
  4. Ensure your CMS gives you a tool to purge your cache when you need to.

If Oracle are really concerned about their own website performance, expect them to buy Akamai some time soon.

Philippe Parker on , , , , | 22 April 2009 | Tweet this |