Track the 'Paper Trail' of Web Content

by Bruce Silver

Back in the days of document management, after all the proposed cost savings from enhanced productivity were totaled up, closing the deal often still required a "strategic" benefit. And vendors came up with a good one — avoiding liability risk in litigation or audit stemming from the inability to produce specific business records.

"Sure," says the plaintiff, "that's what the contract says now, but that's not what it said on July 26, 1996."

Can you prove they're wrong? No actual instance of such a failure ever achieved prominence in the public mind, but the risk nevertheless was plausible and potentially large, and it gave document management an important "strategic" rationale.

The alleged risk enhanced the business value of some otherwise dubious DM system features such as the ability to save and recall any version of a document ever created. It certainly also helped sales of report management (also known as COLD) systems that archive every customer statement, essentially recording snapshots of the online transaction system.

And so, when Interwoven, the Sunnyvale, CA-based content management player, extolls its technology for saving and recalling in totality any version of a Web site ever produced, I feel a warm glow of recognition. This is the old DM records management problem, but kicked up a notch for Web content management.

Consider the technical challenge. Documents are self-contained objects, whereas even a single Web page is made up of dozens of separate bits of text, graphics, code and links to other pages, all independently authored, approved and stored. If any single piece is modified, the page changes. Now multiply that by dozens or hundreds of pages that make up the site.

Unlike a typical document, a Web site undergoes thousands of version changes. Interwoven TeamSite automatically takes a snapshot of every such version change as a new "edition," and is able to roll back the site on demand to any previous edition just by specifying the date and time.

But why on earth would anyone want to keep track of every single one? One reason is productivity: If a new version of the site has a problem, you can easily revert back to the last version that worked. Another reason is risk avoidance, and that's where the old fear factor — I mean, "strategic" benefit — comes in.

Suppose a customer says you made a particular offer on your Web site and you later refused to honor it. They sue you. Can you prove what your Web site did or didn't say on the day in question? It's that old DM straw man brought back to life, but given the growth and value of e-business transactions, now with vastly larger potential impact.

But is this threat real? Has it really happened, or is it just the makings of another urban legend? I pressed Interwoven for an actual case. To my amazement, they gave me two. The best one concerns an overseas financial institution. One customer alleged in a lawsuit that the institution's Web site had advertised a product at a specified price — an interest rate fixed for some specified period of time — and the customer bought at that price. The institution denied that it had ever offered the product at that price. But because they couldn't prove what the Web site offer was on the day in question, the institution had to settle. Subsequently, they installed Interwoven TeamSite because of its version control and rollback feature.

The second example concerns an ISP that found itself locked in a battle with a children's rights group over whether the ISP had properly placed "adult content" warning labels on certain portions of a site. Because it had TeamSite installed, the ISP could show it did have the warnings in place.

In terms of dollars, these examples are individually small potatoes, but they represent the tip of a huge e-business liability iceberg. If Web content is to have the authority of business documents, site version control and rollback are ultimately key requirements for any e-business site.

Laws and precedents are still murky. And even sites managed by Interwoven may include objects hosted on external ad servers outside of TeamSite's version control. Moreover, regardless of the content management technology employed, business processes have to change to give Web content the same level of scrutiny and control applied to documents.

Whatever the reason, even after installing TeamSite, that overseas financial institution added the following disclaimer on its site: "We disclaim all express or implied warranties that this site is accurate, complete, or up to date. We will have no liability to you if it is not."

Such a statement is really a fundamental repudiation of e-business. For e-business to work, companies must stand behind their Web content as strongly as they stand behind their printed documents. If they will not, it's a failure of vision or business process. At least now they can no longer blame it on technology.

Bruce Silver (brsilver@earthlink.net) is president of Bruce Silver Associates, Aptos, CA, 831-685-8803. Reports are available at www.brsilver.com.