October 2001
Hands-on Content Publishing: Put the Experts in Charge
by Michael P. Voelker
"Give a man a fish, and he'll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he'll eat for a lifetime."
Effective Web content management takes a cue from this age-old proverb by taking publishing tasks out of the hands of a few Web experts and simplifying and placing content creation, editing and approval in the hands of the real experts. This freedom not only eliminates webmaster bottleneck, but it also improves collaboration and the flow of information throughout the enterprise.
Effective Web content management begins with painless content creation. For internal users, that means supporting the native authoring tools already used within your business, from word processing to Web authoring. Therefore, a Web content management system should support authoring applications out of the box and be built on an open architecture to allow for easy integration. The benefit: no new interface for users to learn.
"One of the reasons there are multiple interfaces for content contribution, collaboration and management is that we try to stay out of the actual authoring and leave that to the tools that are already out there," says Bob Warren, director of the product management group at Open Market, a Burlington, MA-based company now set to be acquired by Divine Inc. of Chicago.
But only part of the content you need comes from within. The rest comes most frequently from trading partners that contribute specs, releases, catalog content and other material. External contributors also should be provided with a familiar interface, but one that requires no new software or application integration to access basic functionality. That's why nearly every Web content management system also offers a browser-based user interface.
"Once partners have to use vendor-specific software, that's when we start talking about partner collaboration ending," says Hank Barnes, vice president of strategy at Eprise, Framingham, MA. "People don't have time to learn new interfaces, so being able to edit on the Web site using just a browser is very important."
Typically, external users access the interface via either a separate client extranet or secure access on a public Internet site. A Web content management system should support both models. Users should also be able to see the results of collaboration in WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) format.
For example, Eprise's Participant Server Web content management system provides an environment in which internal and external content contributors can directly edit information they see on your Web site. User/role access controls display active "update information" links for content that a user can modify. The advantage? "A visitor can go from viewer to contributor to reviewer without ever leaving the Web site," says Barnes.
Browser-based tools should also support full drag-and-drop capabilities from native authoring applications as well. Microsoft's recently released Content Management Server 2001 allows users to drop any text directly into browser-based page templates.
"You can move paragraphs over as individual content objects so they end up being managed as unique objects," says Chris Ramsey, lead product manager of the Redmond, WA-based company's Content Management Server. The system automatically applies HTML formatting tags, and templates can be designed to wrap XML tags around content as well. (Microsoft's Content Management Server is based on NCompass Resolution - the content management system developed by NCompass Labs, Vancouver, B.C. - which was acquired by Microsoft this spring.)
Go With the Workflow
Of course, simply using authoring and contribution tools does not equal working with others. "It's not just throwing content over the wall and having it lodge in the repository," says Naomi Miller, director of product marketing at Documentum, Pleasanton, CA. Expanding from contribution and storage of content to collaboration requires getting to the heart of content management functionality: workflow.
"Effective collaboration is the integration of workflow with business processes," says Miller. "Even with EDI, I can have a machine-to-machine transfer of content, but when I get that content into my firewall, I have to parse it, sort it, [and] figure out who's going to get it to make it useful."
The objective, says Miller, is to automate the manual process. "Instead of content coming in without the context and parameters needed to do something useful with it, we provide ... context [and] business rules so it can become part of the business process," Miller explains.
The added bonus of this workflow control is the "users-publish" role trumpeted by Web content management vendors, where publishing delays and webmaster bottlenecks are reduced.
Web content management systems that aim to let users take control of content generally provide a linear workflow, moving content between author, editor and publishing destination in any number of user-defined configurations.
Basic workflows typically incorporate a queuing system, requiring users to check for pending content. Many systems have made collaboration easier by incorporating "push" methodology, typically notifying users via email when content is awaiting their input or approval and often embedding a link to the content to be reviewed within the body of the message.
Email-enabled collaboration is particularly useful to a mobile workforce that needs to collaborate on content. Microsoft's Content Management Server, for example, can serve content to any device a user might have to access email or the Web. "The system recognizes what browsing device someone is coming in on, whether it be a Pocket PC, a Palm Pilot or some other device," says Ramsey. "It can swap out the browser template, swap in the template built for that specific device and then serve the page up with a link to the page waiting approval. The user can just tap on the link, be in the page, and be part of the collaboration process."
Some systems go one step further by making email more than a notification tool. For instance, Open Market's Content Server automatically parses incoming messages to extract content. "[Content Server] can be set up so that anyone can send in content to a designated mailbox [that] Content Server has access to," says Warren. "That email may have an attachment, or the content can be in the body of the email itself." Content Server retrieves the message, parses it, and sends the relevant content to the repository and the next stage in the workflow.
Ditto for Documentum's Engagement Services interenterprise workflow offering. "[Engagement Services] sends an email with the right attachments, not just links, using SMTP protocols," says Miller. "Users reply to the email, and Engagement Services intercepts the message coming back, applies business rules in terms of who should get the content, what type it is, what folder it goes in and what categorization and tags should be associated with it."
Meetings, Chat and Discussion
A common feature of the tools discussed to this point is that they allow only asynchronous collaboration throughout the users-publish process. But what about real-time collaboration - the idea that a virtual room full of people can discuss and rework content simultaneously? Content management systems simply don't provide it. The reason? The check-in, check-out features that are central to these systems only allow for one person to work on a single piece of content at a time.
That model makes sense, according to Tim Hampson, vice president of enterprise marketing at Interwoven, Sunnyvale, CA, particularly when you consider the roots of content management in the document management world.
"It's good to look at the historic print analogy," Hampson says. "People collaborated there, but there was always clear ownership. For example, you'd write an article, it would be typeset ... and the typesetters knew they weren't allowed to change anything. Then someone would check the typeset to make sure it was absolutely accurate. The same principles apply on the Web ... there has to be a workflow process."
However, by automating this workflow and drawing on the distinction between content - text, images and sounds - and the resulting documents constructed from it, content management systems improve on the print model even in sequential collaborative tasks.
"Since we store content in a database, as soon as I save it, anyone else who has the rights to edit and review could click a button in their browser and view the changes in their associated document context," says Barnes. "Importantly, I don't need to create a version of that page, distribute it out to five different Web servers or manually route it to another user."
In fact, content management vendors report there's little call for real-time collaboration because, first, customers are already using groupware and Web conferencing for discussions, presentations and meetings, and, second, they are looking to content management systems to manage the ultimate results of these interactions.
"Technology can actually get in the way," says Barnes of Eprise. "Sometimes, using [meeting systems], I spend half the time saying 'Do you see what I just typed?'" From a content management standpoint, Barnes submits, it works better simply to have content entered after a final review.
With Eprise's Participant Server, the result of Internet meetings or discussion threads can be cut and pasted into the content contribution interface. Additionally, technology integration agents allow system owners to write scripts in ASP, JSP or ColdFusion to automatically extract elements of discussions and insert that as content into templates within the system.
Whether it's internal or external, sequential or real-time email or snail mail, there are as many ways of creating and collaborating on content as there are users who do the authoring and collaboration. To ensure that everyone can contribute and work together, you simply have to find a content management system that provides a flexible workflow, support for existing authoring tools and an architecture that allows for easy integration as needs and systems evolve.
Sharp Gets to the Point of Web Content Management
Sharp Microelectronics of the Americas (SMA) jumped feet first into the users-publish approach to content management.
"I wanted the people who know and run our business to be empowered to make real-time changes to their business storefront," says Don LaVallee, director of strategic business operations and information technology at this Camas, WA-based division of Sharp Electronics.
SMA chose Eprise Participant Server, which has been in place there for just over a year. The content the company needed to manage included both its user-generated content - press releases, job postings and other information - as well as product content dynamically generated by a custom-built e-commerce application. (The latter application includes the Eprise WCM system as well as components from FastFocus, Extricity, Portal Wave and Callico.)
LaVallee reports that the initial installation, which took six months, had "typical" integration challenges that were exacerbated by the number of systems and interfaces they needed to contend with.
"Eprise didn't support the dynamic ASP generated by our product catalog system, so we had to use another process to control this system's content and link the attributes generated dynamically back into the content database," he explains.
Despite these pains, LaVallee says the installation has been worth the effort. "There's no [publishing] bottleneck," he says. "It used to be [users] had to tell the webmaster or HTML programmer what they wanted, and everything was a rush. Sometimes they forgot to tell the programmers that changes were needed, and content was incorrect, out of date or never added. Now the person responsible for the content can look at the Web page in real time, click 'edit,' change the text and review it before publishing."
LaVallee says managers or other approvers can review changes, and there is a full audit trail as well as accountability at all levels in the organization.
Although he declined to reveal the total cost of the Web content management system, LaVallee says it was "affordable and reasonable" and that it has already paid for itself in productivity and functionality.
"We went from days or weeks of getting through the [publishing] process to minutes," he explains. "I measure the ROI in terms of productivity and not hard dollars. We're saving at least one hour per week for every [user], and that's about 50 people. ... The ROI from my perspective has been several hundred percent."
BEA Evolves to a User approach
Many content management system users anticipate a full users-publish model, where authors, editors and business partners collaborate on content and then bypass the webmaster in its publication. However, vendors' claims notwithstanding, it's not always advantageous for an organization to push all content responsibilities directly to the contributors. That's why content management systems should allow a flexible workflow that can evolve as your business does.
E-commerce vendor BEA Systems, San Jose, CA, is an example of company that has moved to the users-publish model in a gradual rollout. In October 2000, BEA began implementing the 4i WCM Edition from Documentum, Pleasanton, CA. The first business unit targeted for the users-publish approach was human resources. Job posting templates and an established manual workflow made this a natural starting point.
"Our priority was to first target content that was updated most frequently," says Peter Tait, BEA's Internet marketing director. With 4i, human resource staff members directly enter jobs into a template, and those jobs move on a workflow to a manager in HR for approval and publication. As the HR implementation takes hold, BEA will continue to push the system out to authors in all functional areas.
BEA's gradual rollout strategy was designed to minimize implementation problems, which thus far have dealt primarily with use, rather than integration, issues. "Even though 4i supports all our existing toolsets ... training is always an issue," says Tait. "The strategy we have of carving off pieces is our way around that."
BEA operates what Tait terms a "reasonably fixed" IT environment, running Solaris machines with Oracle databases and, naturally, a WebLogic application server platform. Total enterprise content management system costs, including the consulting engagement, hardware, and software, were $500,000.
Tait believes there will be a sufficient ROI. "We are able to look at it in a couple ways," he says. "When we go from 30 minutes to zero in programming time, and HR has so many requests a month, there is that cost savings. When we roll that [capability] out to [each new] area, we will do a similar evaluation. In the final evaluation, I am convinced we will come out ahead on hard-dollar costs."
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