TeamSite Democratizes Web Site Contribution

by Marvin Pyles

Imagine three dedicated Web administrators being held hostage by 700 content authors. The authors have limited Web publishing experience and consistently need help from the three administrators. Now imagine that the site contains a minimum of 90,000 pages, and that the underlying backbone is a homegrown content management system.

Until recently, this imagined scenario was a living nightmare for David Traynor, assistant to the CIO at utility giant the Southern Company. Traynor says that until recently, the Atlanta-based firm relied on an internally developed system that required the company's Web service support staff to handle most additions and changes to site content.

"If someone in the purchasing department wanted to update pages in staging, Web services had to do it," Traynor explains. "If someone needed special changes to a template, they had to go to the Web services group or to outside consultants."

It wasn't long before the Southern Company began to look for a better way. They settled on XML-based TeamSite 5.0, the centerpiece in a suite of "content infrastructure" products from Interwoven, Sunnyvale, CA.

A totally browser-based solution, TeamSite 5.0 works on the same premise as most Web content management systems - it separates content from presentation, allowing nontechnical users to contribute content in a Web publishing environment. The core TeamSite product incorporates three key modules - TeamSite Templating, DataDeploy and OpenDeploy.

The templating module employs XML forms that allow authors to create and edit content within their own "workarea." New in 5.0 is a WYSIWYG formatting tool that allows authors to format content as they would in Microsoft Word, selecting type sizes, colors, bolding and other options. Also new is an optional OpenChannel module that provides one-click formatting capabilities. With OpenChannel, authors can deploy content to several delivery channels using a single entry template. For example, the same content could be simultaneously formatted for Web, print and Wireless Access Protocol (WAP) delivery. Normally, authors would have to use multiple/separate entry forms to create and edit the same content geared for different channels. OpenChannel makes this unnecessary.

Once an author has submitted content from TeamSite Templating, DataDeploy saves it either to a file server, relational database or both. OpenDeploy automates the process of distributing content from development/staging to a single or multiple production servers. While DataDeploy and OpenDeploy could only be administered at a command line in earlier versions of TeamSite, both modules are now accessed through a user interface new in version 5.0.

Rounding out TeamSite are features including versioning/rollback and customizable workflows. One noted missing feature is full-text indexing and searching, although you can integrate with software from Verity, Convera or others.

"Our main criteria for a content management system were ease of use - putting power in the hands of those responsible for publishing content - and compatibility with Windows NT desktop and Unix/Sun Solaris," says Traynor of the Southern Company. "We wanted to leverage the power of Teamsite to free up tech resources to handle more value-added activities like ebilling, customer service requests, investor information and outage information."

Expanding contribution and approval beyond the templated entry forms, TeamSite 5.0 adds alternative input and approval interfaces including FrontOffice, WebDesk and Email. FrontOffice integrates TeamSite publishing commands with leading desktop applications including Microsoft Office 2000, Windows Explorer, Adobe GoLive 5.0 and Macromedia Dream-weaver 3.0. This allows authors to contribute content without ever leaving these tools. Interwoven plans to expand this functionality to other products, including Adobe Photoshop.

WebDesk is where approvers of content will spend most of their time. Approvers can create tasks, review changes (including audit trails), add comments and, most importantly, reject or approve content. The Email interface allows you send links to content to reviewers as well as comments about specific elements needing approval. With a single click, the content will appear in the reviewer's browser. From there, the content can be rejected, edited or approved.

"We released a whole new user experience," says Kevin Cochrane, vice president of product management at Interwoven. "Anyone can now contribute to the Web site with minimal training."

To create this new "experience," Interwoven held focus groups with 125 Fortune 250 companies. "We watched users doing their work," says Cochrane. "We wanted to move production from 12 clicks to three. The focus groups validated our design focus."

The complete TeamSite 5.0 suite also introduces three additional products: MetaTagger, TeamCatalog and OpenSyndicate. TeamCatalog enhances a commerce site's ability to aggregate and classify SKU (stock keeping unit) item descriptions, pricing information and other related structured content.

MetaTagger allows organizations to develop taxonomies and apply rich metadata to content. For example, an article regarding the New York Knicks may have a metadata taxonomy that uses a hierarchy of terms including basketball, the NBA, a particular player's name and general keywords. The metadata itself is stored in XML on a file server or pushed to a relational database. Third-party applications such as search or personalization engines can use the metadata to dynamically serve content. MetaTagger can also be programmed to automatically categorize content by subject so it can be linked intelligently to other relevant information.

The newest module, OpenSyndicate, is a rules engine that business managers can use to package content together and deliver it to targeted audiences. Because the product is still quite new, it is unknown if it will either compete with or complement established personalization engines such as ATG's Dynamo or Blaze Software's Blaze Rules Engine.

Interwoven currently has the industry buzz as the pacesetter in Web content management, and TeamSite 5.0 does much to solidify this reputation. While earlier versions of the product offered basic templating and storage, TeamSite 5.0 offers a wider array of content contribution and approval options and improved support for relational databases. Interwoven's MetaTagger offers a well-integrated alternative to third-party taxonomy tools such as Autonomy and Semio. Finally, the company's preconfigured "Turbo" offerings speed and cut the cost of deploying TeamSite with common Web application servers.

Marvin Pyles (mpyles@cms-analysis.com) is a content management consultant in Atlanta. He has worked for integrators including Sapient, IMI Systems and Keane.