Enter Content Here

Sex doesn't sell... at least not for FatWire

noreply@blogger.com (Seth Gottlieb) — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 07:16:12 -0600

I regretted having to leave the Gilbane conference early because I missed seeing so many friends and colleagues but I had no idea I was missing this FatWire gaff of showing the Playboy as their reference site. I am sure that demo would have been compelling to some audiences but it flew like a lead balloon at the Gilbane. The worst part for FatWire was when the CEO told an offended audience member that she was wrong to be offended. I guess the age-old rule of presenting still holds: know your audience. You can see some immediate reactions on Twitter.

Change.gov content under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License

noreply@blogger.com (Seth Gottlieb) — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 10:20:45 -0600

Change.gov, President-Elect Obama's transition website is licensing all of it's content under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. I think that is pretty cool but I was wondering who owns that content anyway.

Selection workshop slides

noreply@blogger.com (Seth Gottlieb) — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 10:03:36 -0600

Yesterday I presented a 4 hour workshop on selecting a CMS at the Gilbane Conference. I was pleased with the attendance and the audience's level of engagement. People were asking questions and making comments right to the end. Here are the slides.

Gilbane Selection Workshop

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: cms selection)

I wish I could have stayed at the conference longer. So many colleagues/friends were in town and I could only see a couple of them before I had to shoot off to a client.

Interwoven's FOSS FUD

noreply@blogger.com (Seth Gottlieb) — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 13:24:49 -0600

In a throwback to 2003, the Interwoven blog has a post spreading some good old fashioned FUD about open source software. The general message is that, while the software is free, open source will wind up costing you more money in the long run because it lacks the functionality of commercial software (presumably like TeamSite). Like most blanket statements about whole categories of software, the accuracy is dubious. However, like most myths it is built on a grain of truth. Here is how...

In the choice of build vs. buy, it is nearly always cheaper to buy - or share (in the case of open source software). The trick is finding the software that most closely matches your requirements to minimize the amount of customization that you need to write. If the best fit is TeamSite (and sometimes it is), buy TeamSite. It will be cheaper to buy TeamSite than to take another product and make it just like TeamSite. Nevertheless, be forewarned; even if TeamSite is a slam-dunk for your needs, the license is not the only thing you will be paying for. Like any web content management system, expect to spend a considerable amount of money on customization (unless you are totally satisfied with having your site look exactly like the mutual fund demo that the sales engineer prepared for you and 100 other prospects). Having done TeamSite implementations, I can assure you that TeamSite is not cheaper than average to implement. I guess you could say that all CMS are like puppies: some are free, some cost lots of money, but they are all expensive to take care of.

Depending on your requirements, the best fit may be a platform that just happens to be open source software. To give a concrete example, just look at the Interwoven Blog site . You would be crazy to buy TeamSite (at over $100,000 in licensing) to manage a site like this. That is, unless you were Interwoven, in which case it would be very embarrassing not too. In addition to the high licensing cost, the amount of configuration to turn TeamSite into a simple blogging tool would be many multiples of what it would take to set up and theme a pure blogging tool like WordPress or Moveable Type.

I think what is most interesting about this post is why Interwoven felt the need to write it. Are they feeling threatened by open source software in general or a specific open source application? I would much rather them spend the effort in improving their own product than spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt about others.

TYPO3 conference in Dallas this Spring

noreply@blogger.com (Seth Gottlieb) — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 18:59:37 -0600

One of the barriers to select TYPO3 in North America has been the dearth of developers and systems integrators that know the platform. This is in stark contrast to Germany where many consultancies and agencies are quite prolific with TYPO3. In fact, TYPO3 has even has its own German print magazine T3N.

So you could imagine my surprise when I found that there will be a T3Con in Dallas (as in Texas) this Spring. Details are still sparse and the lone organizer appears to be the German TYPO3 specialist punkt (whose website is in German only). If you know anything more about this event, please let me know. I am intrigued.

Four years and still going strong

noreply@blogger.com (Seth Gottlieb) — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 15:19:05 -0600

Four years ago today I started Enter Content Here with a post defining content management. The post focused on what was being managed and how to differentiate that from other types of data. Over the past years this blog has reported and explored lots of ideas but content (or, as Bob Boiko would say "Information") has always remained in the center of it all. I am still interested what distinguishes content from other data but I think the focus needs to shift to the "management" end of the phrase "content management."

I like the saying "content management is a verb not a product" because it emphasizes the effort and process required to effectively create and use information. However, there are better verbs to describe this effort than "management" - a vague word that often connotes what we do with undesirable things like risk, waste, and stress. Content is an asset, not a liability (unless you are getting sued and you need to pay lawyers to read it), and working with it should be described in more positive and active language: communicating, creating, educating, publishing, collaborating, connecting, etc.

There is still much more to write about the processes and technologies that people use to release value from information. It has been four years and I feel like I am just getting started.

Ostatic Interview of Angela Byron

noreply@blogger.com (Seth Gottlieb) — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 08:13:21 -0600

In case you missed it, OStatic's Sam Dean has an excellent interview with Angela Byron about Drupal. Angela works for Lullabot and is an important contributor in the Drupal community. She contributed to the upcoming O'Reilly book Using Drupal.

Best quote:

The Drupal project has an unconventional philosophy on backwards compatibility. During each major version of Drupal, developers are highly encouraged to think up crazy new things that Drupal can do, without fear of breaking legacy APIs. While users' data will always be preserved throughout the ages, if we come up with new standards we want to support, or a much better and more performant way of doing something, developers are given free reign to go off in that direction.

Your content stinks

noreply@blogger.com (Seth Gottlieb) — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 11:34:51 -0600

Gerry McGovern has a brilliant article on CMSWire that compares the common habit of migrating bad content into a new CMS to pouring sour milk into a different bottle. To quote:

Another team is assembled to take the old jug and migrate its contents into the new portal jug. Once all the putrefied milk has been drained into the new portal jug there’s high-fives and lattes all-round. Job well done, Joe! Project complete.

One of the first things that I talk to my clients about during a CMS selection is whether or not they need a new CMS in the first place. This year, I have talked three clients out of buying a new CMS. Sometimes it is just a matter of organizational neglect and bad content - and neither has anything to do with technology. Other times the CMS is difficult to use because the client made it that way by implementing onerous workflows and a bad content model. A simple upgrade and re-customization would fix those problems.

Another metaphor that I find effective is getting a new car when the ashtray is full but then emptying the contents of the old ashtray into the new car. But that doesn't have the visceral impact of rotting milk.

What makes a sexy demo

noreply@blogger.com (Seth Gottlieb) — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 20:03:42 -0600

I am finally going over my jboye08 notes and I found my scribbles from the Web Idol competition. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this event, each vendor gets seven minutes to demonstrate their product. "Celebrity" judges put in their quips (á la American Idol) and the audience votes on what product they like the most. In addition to being entertaining, the event gives insight into what the vendors think are their coolest features (they can't show everything in 7 minutes) and what the audience responds to. Here is what the vendors demonstrated this year (in order of their appearance).

Sitecore showed:

incontext editing
their "site builder" functionality
multi-device preview
their ribbon tool bars
building a slide show

SDL Tridion showed:

incontext editing
integrating translation into workflow
emailing groups
a Forester chart

Hippo showed:

dashboard plugins
drag and drop WYSIWYG control (e.g. dragging a URL onto a piece of text to create a link)
associating content

eZ Systems showed:

contributing content from MS Word
browse to edit
creating a picture gallery
community rating

e-Spirit showed:

database integration through the administrative UI

This year Sitecore won first place and Hippo came in second. Interestingly, reigning champion eZ Systems did not show all the video functionality which helped them win last year. The audience seemed to be the most attracted to clean user interfaces that looked simple to use. Advanced functionality like sophisticated workflow and database integration were less compelling. While an event like Web Idol does not translate into a software selection, I think this result reenforces the importance of simplicity and ease of use in a demo. Power, range, and flexibility gets a product onto a short list but simplicity is what business users find sexy (at least as far as software demos go). If you are running a CMS selection, this means that you need to make sure that all of the products that demo to your selection team meet your core functional and non-functional requirements.

Enter Content Here in Alltop

noreply@blogger.com (Seth Gottlieb) — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 15:04:28 -0600

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

I should mention that being listed top center in Alltop Content Management isn't too bad on the ego either. Thanks to whomever put Enter Content Here there.

Fierce Content Management lists Enter Content Here in its top 10!

noreply@blogger.com (Seth Gottlieb) — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 14:57:23 -0600

Fierce Content Management just named Enter Content Here in its top 10 list of content management websites. The rest of the list is:

Here is how Enter Content Here was described:

This site offers a more technical perspective on content management than you get from the other sites on this list. Author Seth Gottlieb is an industry consultant who helps clients implement enterprise content management solutions. In addition to the free blog, he sells in-depth reports analyzing different content management packages.

Being mentioned in this group is a true honor and I am grateful for the consideration.

Struggling publishers continuing their investments in digital

noreply@blogger.com (Seth Gottlieb) — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 08:51:07 -0600

The venerable PCMag is discontinuing its print edition - the most recent in a long string of similar announcements from other publishers. I am seeing a consistent trend in my media and publishing client base. While their overall businesses are struggling, they realize that they cannot afford to stop investing in online publishing. Instead, they are cutting back in their editorial departments and even discontinuing their print editions in order to sustain their online investment (which accounts for an increasing percentage of their revenue as advertising dollars move online).

This has been going on for a long time. Early in 2008, there was an article in the New York times that said that newspapers are reducing their traveling campaign coverage. Paper magazines have steadily been shrinking or disappearing entirely from news stand shelves. Still online investment appears to be steady. In fact, one of my clients recently sent out a letter to creditors excusing delayed payments because of a cash flow problem and they still have the go ahead for a new WCMS deployment.

This is an interesting time to be in digital publishing as companies are investing to squeeze as much revenue as possible out of their digital channels. Some companies are being deliberate and methodical in their digital strategy. Others are aggressively (and desperately) experimenting with lots of ideas hoping one will turn out to be a winner. One thing I am not seeing is digital strategies that look beyond banner advertising sales. Today's strategies are still focused on driving traffic and seeking the best CPMs. I am a little concerned about the future viability of traditional banner advertising as content becomes increasingly consumed on alternative (banner unfriendly) platforms and "banner blindness" spreads to the larger online audience. However, I do think that until that new content business model emerges, the best thing an online publisher can do is continue to invest in creating a great digital product that attracts a loyal audience.

Leading requirements

noreply@blogger.com (Seth Gottlieb) — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 07:55:40 -0600

You have just mentioned that maybe the pain you are feeling in managing your web content may be eased by implementing a web content management system (WCMS) and, all of the sudden, I.T. paratroopers are sliding down ropes with their software selection methodology and other "artifacts." You get suspicious as you recognize the same faces that "helped" you the last time around but are reassured that they have "learned aLOT" from their recent time and expense system procurement.

Spreadsheets are opened and fingers are poised over keys. They cue you with "R00001. The system shall be....?"

"easy to use?" is your diffident response.

"R00001. The system shall be easy to use. OK. R00002. The system shall...?"

Three months later, you have a spreadsheet with a thousand rows of "shalls" that any WCMS vendor (plus most ERP vendors) will say "yes" to. But, worst of all, they mean nothing to you. You are now back to precisely where you started.

What happened here?

Generic requirements gathering processes are self absorbed. They are optimized to comprehensively find business requirements, not understand them within the context of business goals. And the more the requirements are abstracted from the goal of managing content, the less they mean. Quantity and completeness are measurements of success rather than usefulness. What is more, most generic requirements analysis techniques are designed for building custom software rather than selecting software. While custom software development goes from requirements to design, when implementing an existing WCMS, much of the design is already in place. The trick to finding a WCMS is to match your needs with a pre-existing design. Generic requirements are an indirect path to that result.

In a WCMS selection, requirements gathering should stop when you have enough information to filter down the marketplace for a (3 or 4 product) short list. After that, the selection process takes a more experiential aspect where you look at the usability of the software and organizational compatibility with the suppliers that will help assemble the solution (software vendor and systems integrator). To be sure, this part of the process seems overly subjective to some - but, honestly, how objective is an aggregated "user friendliness" score of 3.2?

I like to focus on what I call "Leading Requirements." A leading requirement has at least one of two characteristics: it is important to the organization and/or it is a powerful filter on the marketplace. To be important, a requirement must critically affect daily usage or primary functions of the system. Powerful filter requirements get to the big demarcations of the marketplace - things like baking vs. frying, technology stack, content modeling, content reuse, workflow modeling, licensing strategies, etc. By focusing on leading requirements I can usually get down to 3 or 4 viable solutions that (based on industry gossip) appear to be working well at like companies and are sustainable.

By focusing on leading requirements, I can afford to take the time to document what each one really means. For functional requirements, I write "usage scenarios" that describe users using the solution to complete a business task (like publishing an article). At the bottom of each scenario, I list out the discrete requirements that were identified. These 2-4 paragraph narratives are then useful in the demo process because they become the script for the customized product demonstration.

After the product is selected, requirements are refined to determine what features will be enabled or implemented (and how) in the first release (and subsequent releases) of the system. At this point, you know the platform you are building on so you can explain requirements within the context of the native capabilities of the software. You can also adjust scope to leverage out of the box functionality and even prototype to clarify what you are talking about.

Focusing on leading requirements is not easy. It requires intimate knowledge of the business processes and also the content management industry. Still, there is no faster way to get to a short list of viable products and deeply evaluate them. If you want to learn more about leading requirements, I am teaching a workshop at the Gilbane conference in Boston. Will I see you there?

Guardian Hack Days

noreply@blogger.com (Seth Gottlieb) — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 08:07:23 -0600

Both the New York Times and the Telegraph have been innovating on the newsmedia business model by introducing API's that expose their content and services for outside developers to leverage. Recently The Guardian held their "Hack Day at The Guardian".

To quote:

The concept is simple: take an idea to prototype in a day and then present your work to your colleagues and a panel of judges.

Guardian staff and friends participated in this 24 hour code-fest that ended in 90 second presentations in front of a panel. You can track activity on Twitter and see pictures on Flickr. I still don't know who won yet. I am sure that everyone is a winner :)

CRX and Tar PM

noreply@blogger.com (Seth Gottlieb) — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 20:09:26 -0600

Thomas Müller has a blog post that nicely describes how the Tar PM works. Tar PM is the fastest of Day CRX's pluggable persistence managers. The speed of Tar PM is a major reason why some companies go with the CRX rather than the free JCR reference implementation Apache JackRabbit.

The key to Tar PM's speed is that it only supports write operations and these operations just append the new data to the end of one big file (a TAR file actually). What content objects are stored where is recorded in an index which is also read-only. To prevent limitless growth of the data file, you need to periodically run maintenance programs that compress the file be removing deleted records.

This may seem very familiar to those of you who have managed systems built on Zope (like Plone) and have had to "pack the database" - an operation that does essentially the same thing as the CRX tools plus remove unneeded intermediate versions that were defensively saved during transactions. From my experience with Zope, I know that having a huge, single file database can be scary but not necessarily dangerous. What do you do if you have a corrupt record in the middle of the file that causes the maintenance tools to crash? Usually there is some way to fix it but you need access to the experts. The only issue is that Zope and CRX experts are not as easily found as Oracle, MySQL, or MSSQL experts. Tar PM seems to improve on the ZODB by switching to a new TAR file after a certain point. Longtime readers of this blog may remember my ZOracle Series (part I, II, and III) that described a project to point the Zope Object Database (ZODB) to an Oracle database.

Although both Zope and Day have customers with huge repositories, the general rule of thumb is to keep things small when you can. In the ZODB world there are extensions that store large binary files outside of the database. In the JCR world, the strategy is to segment content into smaller repositories. For example, if you have lots of publications, put each one into its own JCR instance rather that combine them all into one. Companies that pursue this type of segmentation need to have some component in the architecture that can look across repositories and maintain collections of references to show an aggregated view. At the simplest level, this can be a search engine. At a more advanced level there could be hierarchical taxonomy system with references to items in different repositories.

This strategy runs against Oracle's vision of all your company's content neatly organized in one big database. I would argue that putting everything in one place does not necessarily mean that it is well managed or easy to find. More important than how the content is physically stored is that it is cohesively organized (that is, content that belongs together is stored together) and that there are uniform ways to access it. This is the strategy of the JCR and it plays well with service oriented architecture where different applications (services) that manage their own data can be combined to support cross-application business processes. When you have everything in the same database, the tendency is to do your integration at the data level (which can be brittle and proprietary) rather than the application (or service) level. I won't deny that it is handy to have a database that can scale infinitely in size and there are applications that need very large storage (like archival systems). But trying to keep things small and segmented has its virtues as well. I am reminded of the frequently made point that storage is cheap but finding and managing the information can be very expensive.

CMS Selection Workshop

noreply@blogger.com (Seth Gottlieb) — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 10:03:04 -0600

Last week I was a panelist in a jboye08 session called "Running a Web CMS procurement." Jarrod Gingras from CMS watch moderated the panel that also included Graham Oakes, Piero Tintori, and Søren Sigfusson. It ran for 90 minutes and, quite frankly, we barely scratched the surface. I must admit, I share the blame because I used my 10 minutes just to ask the audience a bunch of questions (see slides). Fortunately, I will have an opportunity to do justice to the topic when I present my "How to Select a Web Content Management System" workshop at the Gilbane Conference in Boston next month on Tuesday December 2nd.

Over the years of doing CMS selections, I have refined my approach to address the specific challenges that are unique to web content management. In particular:

The huge number of products to choose from and the lack of a clear market leader
The different sources of content technologies: commercial, open source, SaaS, and custom
The flexibility of these platforms
The importance of usability
The spanning of technical and organizational concerns
The different uses of web content management software
Web 2.0 and now Web 3.0
The fact that the platform winds up being a component of a larger solution that includes implementation, process, management, and support
And the wide range of processes that organizations use to manage their content.

I have written extensively about selection on this blog here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. Here is a chance to put it all together in one (hopefully) coherent session. If you are already registered for this workshop, please feel free to email me (seth "à" contenthere.net) with any specific things you want me to cover. If you are not already registered, you can do so so here. You can even get a free iPod Touch if you go for the "all in" Conference Plus package.

If you are going to be in town for the Gilbane Conference but will not be attending any of the workshops, you should consider going to the CM Professionals Fall Summit, which is also on Tuesday. I will be on an expert panel talking about the content lifecycle but I will be sure to save something for the workshop :)

Blogs, Wiki's, etc.

noreply@blogger.com (Seth Gottlieb) — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 09:18:12 -0600

A couple of months ago a WCMS sales guy said to me that when hears the words "we are looking for blogs, wikis, etc." from a customer it is a clear indication that the customer really doesn't know what he is talking about or (at least) doesn't have a clear vision of goals for Web 2.0.

I too am suspicious (and a little surprised) when I hear these terms together because, other than the fact that they are relatively new to the "enterprise," blogs and wikis have little to do with each other. Bob Doyle wrote a very good article differentiating these technologies way back in 2006 (When to Wiki, When to Blog - read the article).

A blog is a publishing system and a wiki is a collaboration tool. A blog author writes articles (posts) which reflect an idea or an observation at a point of time. You don't typically update a blog entry unless you see a typo that annoys too much to ignore (like misspelling your name - as on of my recent posts). Comments provide a forum for a dialog around the topic. These comments may appear within the context of the blog site or somewhere else as in the case of friendfeed but they are a conversation around the article, not the article itself. Occasionally the blog author will highlight a comment by updating the blog with a reference but this is the exception not the rule. If the author changes his mind, he will write another post rather than update the original. To learn from blogs you read lots of posts and piece together a consistent understanding that works for you.

A wiki is a tool to collaboratively build a comprehensive informational resource. Rather than blog posts that a single author publishes to an audience, a wiki page allows a group of people to jointly define a topic, establish a policy, or create some other information resource that needs to be updated over time. Companies that use a wiki (rather than a WCMS) as their intranet have come to the conclusion that potentially anyone in the company could correct or otherwise improve the information there. If these contributions are wrong, their updates can be corrected or rolled back.

WCMS can serve both of these publishing and information management purposes. For example, a typical implementation "corporate brochure" of a CMS will publish "point-in-time" articles (e.g. press releases) and manage fixed pages (e.g. "about us"). If you need to do both with one tool (and want the option to strictly control contribution), you probably need a WCMS. If you need to do one of these things but not the other, you might be in the market for a blog or a wiki but not "blogs, wikis, etc."

CMIS in brief

noreply@blogger.com (Seth Gottlieb) — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 09:15:14 -0600

CMSWire has a nice article briefly explaining CMIS. At this stage of the standards process, this level of understanding of CMIS is probably sufficient for most - especially if you are working in web content management.

World Plone Day

noreply@blogger.com (Seth Gottlieb) — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 02:36:48 -0600

Tomorrow (Friday November 7th) is World Plone Day (WPD). This event is held in cities all over the world to make Plone experts available to introduce and explain the platform. If you are considering Plone, this is a very good opportunity to understand the technology and meet the people to behind it. There are 54 cities holding WPD events. You may be able to find your city (or one nearby) on the list.

Novelty + Urgency = Chaos

noreply@blogger.com (Seth Gottlieb) — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 00:34:45 -0600

Around a year and a half ago, I coined "Gottlieb's law," which I suppose should officially be a theorem because it has not been conclusively proven. It certainly hasn't been disproved though. Because I will probably never be able to prove that "a company's success in content management is inversely proportional to the amount of information that is exchanged over email," I figured I would move on with a new theorem. Here goes:

Gottlieb's 2nd Law (or theorem)

Novelty + Urgency = Chaos

This comes from an observation that when companies put a development team (or any other kind of team) in a pressurized environment and give them new technologies and tools to work with, chaos ensues. Developers don't have time to learn the new platform so they hastily try to apply legacy practices and ideas which are not necessarily appropriate for the new technology. To make matters worse, this chaos is difficult to work out of the system even after developers have learned better. Time simply hasn't been budgeted to go back and correct the mistakes that were made. Sometimes known bad habits are even repeated just for consistencies sake.

Here is how it usually plays out in the world of web content management. A company buys a new CMS and intends to migrate 50-100 sites onto the new platform. The team takes a deliberately cautious approach of choosing the simplest example as a starting point/test case. After an easy experience building out the pilot site, the team writes out a migration plan that begins with the biggest site (who has been clamoring to be early because they are feeling real pain on the old platform). Before long this project blows up. The additional complexity of the larger site was not adequately accounted for in the project plan and the team is falling behind. Their unfamiliarity with the new API causes them to write hacks and work-arounds for features that are well supported by the platform - if only they knew how to use it. The longer the delay, the greater the pressure that squeezes out general practices like refactoring, code review, unit testing, and even communication. When a developer makes a new discovery, he will maybe apply it to new code but is rarely able to go back and fix sloppy, inexperienced code.

The first big site is delayed but that doesn't mean that the original migration plan is abandoned. A new development team is spun up to work on the next site. Of course, these guys are new to the platform. The seasoned developers are too busy with their death march to release the first site to share what they learned.
The new team either uses the first site as a model or tries to do everything the opposite way. The same things happens for the next couple of sites so every site is built in a different way and it is impossible to maintain them. Three years later, when the CMS is replaced, poor manageability is cited as a primary reason for moving off the platform. The chaotic condition of the code base and content makes the next migration harder. And then cycle continues.

How could this be avoided? It is not so easy. Usually a CMS purchase is supported by a business case that needs to be optimistic about both cost and benefit in order to get the ROI to look right. This innocent little exercise of telling a story that the management wants to hear is where the problems begin. Maybe it would have been better to explore the option of upgrading and refactoring the current platform and comparing the ROIs of the two approaches. Both migration and upgrading are complicated process that are full of surprises.

The next error is the assumption that building out sites will be like turning a crank. It may get that way eventually but the first few are as hard as building custom software. There are lots of choices and lots of places to make mistakes. Ideally, the sequence would be: (tiny) pilot site, medium site 1, rebuild medium site 1, build re-usable components and patterns, build a reference implementation based on the rebuilt site 1. After that the rest of the new sites can be built on a reference implementation that gets gradually improved as new ideas are tried out.

Whoever is holding the budget is cringing right now. Not only is this making more migration work (two+ additional sites), it is lengthening the time to benefit for the most important sites that may be funding this whole migration in the first place. It also means paying developers to do things other than coding: documenting, teaching, learning, and recoding. As expensive as this is, the costs are trivial when compared to the price of doing it wrong and feeling the need to replace the system years ahead of schedule.

Another strategy is to work with a systems integrator who has a long track record of working on the platform you selected. Of course, this only works if a) the consultants you get on the team really know the platform and b) you didn't beat them down on price so they need to cut corners and work sloppily. You really need to trust the systems integrator and partner with them to achieve joint success. These trustworthy partners don't come cheap either because they tend to be honest and conservative in their pricing. At the end of the day you may save money but the initial price tag will be discouraging when compared with others who want to tell you what you want to hear.

Too often people tend the focus on migrating the content itself during a CMS implementation. Migrating the content can be messy if it needs to be cleaned up first but there are at least some possibilities for automation (or at least hiring cheap temps to manually copy/paste). Rendering and integration code, conversely, is not at all portable (except for CSS - write as much presentation code as you can in CSS) and can be a real challenge to translate to a new platform. Porting the code is most efficient when developers can take the time to learn the new platform and logically break down the site to leverage the technology's native strengths and best practices. When under time pressure, the tendency is to revert to comfortable old ways even if they are counter-productive. And the downward spiral continues...

Alfresco 3.0 Enterprise is Out

noreply@blogger.com (Seth Gottlieb) — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 13:47:21 -0500

It looks like the much anticipated version 3.0 of Alfresco Enterprise Edition is out. I have been looking forward to this release after seeing so much promise in the Community "lab" version. I'm going to register for a 30 day free trial as soon as I get back from Denmark.

Variable control lists

noreply@blogger.com (Seth Gottlieb) — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 13:34:46 -0500

Your typical editor is conflicted. On the one hand, he likes to have direct control over what articles are promoted on every page of the site. On the other hand, he realizes that he may not have the time to exert this control. When editors have to manually place articles in every promotional list, they risk letting the important pages (home pages and section front pages) get stale as they tend to other things. When they allow the templating logic to automatically select articles to highlight, they get frustrated by the judgement of automated filtering rules ("why is that article promoted more than this more important article?"). They want to be able to override the automated logic when they have the idea that they could do better.

Here is a classic trick to establish compromise between the extremes of manual control and automation. I have implemented this on many different web content management platforms and it should work on yours. I call it "variable control lists." The basic idea is that you allow an editor to select 0-n articles to include in a promotional list that displays n items. The template logic shows the articles that the editor selected and then fills in the rest of the positions with the results of a query. So, if an editor picks 0 articles to spotlight, the template logic selects n. If the editor selects 3, the template logic selects n-3 articles and lists them after the editors picks.

A couple of nuances should be considered. First, you want to make sure that supplemental list does not include any of the same articles that the editor selected. Second, you might want to apply some additional rules like having the template disregard the editor's picks if they are past a certain age. That really depends on the type of site you are running.

Try it out and see how it works for you. I am especially interested in learning of platforms that this would not work on.

Kevin Cochrane Joins Day

noreply@blogger.com (Seth Gottlieb) — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 08:10:58 -0500

I was just on the Day Software site and noticed that Kevin Cochrane (who had left Interwoven to join Alfresco) joined Day as their Chief Marketing Officer. This seems like a great fit. Kevin can contribute to Day's already very strong commercial open source strategy (Day is a primary contributor to Apache JackRabbit) and will probably help Day build a U.S. presence. Day's focus on web content management is much greater than Alfresco's so Kevin will probably enjoy more influence in the Day culture. The big question is whether Kevin will bring with him some of his other Interwoven/Alfresco team. Day already has a star-studded technology team and a very strong, standards based content repository.

I am looking forward to seeing Kevin's contributions at Day.

Magnolia: Be back soon!

noreply@blogger.com (Seth Gottlieb) — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 12:06:55 -0500

I just read Boris Kraft's post on losing the the Magnolia.info domain. I have had that happen to me (for a personal site) but never with these consequences. If they can't get their domain back, they will move to magnolia-cms.com - which I think is a better domain anyway. A .com or .org is easier to remember (says the guy with a .net domain).

Best of luck to the Magnolia team in getting their website back and a reminder to everyone else that they should stay on top of their domain registration!

InfoGlue shows some life

noreply@blogger.com (Seth Gottlieb) — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 09:58:09 -0500

I was just catching up on some of the open source web content management platforms that I track and noticed the new InfoGlue site. Around a year and a half ago I had given up on InfoGlue because so little had happened. Then I saw Dang Huu Cu's cmf2007 presentation on the United Nations Development Programme Vietnam's use of InfoGlue. Still, very little was happening on the project at the time.

While, I wouldn't say that InfoGlue is thriving, There appears to be some life in the project. They put up a new release (2.9.3) in this September and the site looks much better. They will be holding an online conference on Monday October 13th.