Microsoft's 'New' CMS

by Marvin Pyles

Investing in a content management solution is similar to investing in real estate. Finding the right investment takes a lot of research, and a little luck. Ask Matt Leedham, senior Web developer at AMB Properties, a San Francisco-based real estate investment firm.

Before AMB purchased nCompass Resolution — now Microsoft's Content Management Server (CMS) — Leedham and his team did a cost/benefit analysis on either buying a content management system or building one in house. AMB's story is a familiar one.

The company's original Web site was a repository of static HTML pages that was maintained manually by Web developers. Content was delivered to developers either on paper or through email, the latter as Microsoft Word documents. Developers would cut and paste the text into HTML pages. As the site grew, so did the workload of the Web department and the need for a Web content management system.

"We wanted our business units to be able to publish directly to the Web," says Leedham. "We also needed some type of workflow feature — a basic approval process so that content submitted could be previewed in its production form."

Important to AMB's choice of Resolution over competitors like Vignette StoryServer and Interwoven TeamSite was AMB's heavy use of Microsoft technologies.

AMB's staff had developed several customized Internet tools using Microsoft Active Server Pages (ASP). For example, an ASP tool displays AMB's internal phone list directly from an existing HR database. Also, a dynamically generated employee seating chart is currently built in ASP.

"Our development staff is familiar with ASP and COM (Common Object Model)," says Leedham. "Resolution leveraged our in-house expertise."

Microsoft is a new player in the Web content management market with a proven product. Last summer, Microsoft acquired Vancouver, B.C., Canada-based nCompass, the developer of Resolution, and rebranded the former company's application as Microsoft Content Management Server. The basic functionality is much the same, says Chris Ramsey, Microsoft CMS Product Manager.

"We did a straight rebranding with the exception of performance improvements in the dynamic page generation engine," Ramsey says, adding that this has brought a 40- to 60-percent boost in page generation speed.

Another thing Microsoft changed was pricing, switching to per-CPU pricing at $39,000 per processor versus the $59,000 per-server pricing before the acquisition. This is still a bargain, but Microsoft Content Management Server is not a J2EE-compliant product that can be used with robust, scalable application servers. Resolution had a reputation as a product for small and mid-sized businesses, and Microsoft has not done much to change this.

Microsoft CMS is a three-tier server application. In most circumstances, it can be implemented within four to six weeks according to Microsoft. Speeding implementation is the fact that CMS leverages current Microsoft technologies. Upon an initial installation, for example, user roles can be created in Microsoft CMS or integrated from an existing Windows Active Directory Services setup. Content Management Server has standard user roles including author, editor and administrator.

A rich Web client allows users to create content in a template-based publishing environment. This allows authors to create content without needing to understand HTML coding. Authors can also use Microsoft Word to create and upload content.

CMS templates can be very savvy. Using Microsoft's SiteBuilder module, developers can assign "placeholders" to a template specifying what type of content a user can contribute.

An automated workflow manages the publishing process. Workflows can be simple review/publish procedures or they can integrate business processes such as scheduled publishing time frames. Microsoft's workflow engine allows administrators to define multiple approval levels and initiate other processes such as email review notices.

Templates can also be associated with approval workflows. Like normal content, once the appropriate person approves the template, it is ready for use by content authors.

Like most Web content management solutions, Content Management Server manages and stores actual content and presentation templates separately. Assets managed by Microsoft CMS can only be stored in a Microsoft SQL 2000 database. Existing content stored in other repositories, such as Oracle 8i, can be dynamically published using CMS APIs.

AMB Properties initially implemented Resolution on the company's intranet site, which is visited by 180 employees. After several months of success, the company is now upgrading to the Microsoft-branded release.

"For the last four to five months we've been pretty happy with the product," says Leedham. He adds that the main reason he wants to upgrade is to take advantage of Microsoft's "bug fixes and improvements" as well as ongoing maintenance support.