Customizing Without Cost

by Lowell Rapaport

Content management systems are often expensive because they require extensive customization. According to content management vendor Percussion, much of the programming required in deployments is dedicated to developing specialized graphical user interfaces.

Stoneham, MA-based Percussion says its Rhythmyx Content Manager minimizes implementation costs through a user interface that can be easily matched to each user's role in the content creation environment.

"Out of the box, Rhythmyx has [pre-built] interfaces for content creators, producers, programmers and template developers, Web developers and so on," says Jared Carlton, an independent analyst with Frost and Sullivan, a New York-based consulting firm. "Plus, Rhythmyx includes modules for integrating with Microsoft Word. This lets users work in environments in which they can be most comfortable."

In addition to its built-in, role-based user interfaces, Rhythmyx lets administrators develop customized user interfaces using a tool called the Graphical Interface for Creating Content Editors. The tool lets administrators mix and match different content editing tools to create custom forms that let users enter text directly or upload it from files or from Microsoft Word.

"This ability is unusual in a content management system," says Carlton, "and it puts Rhythmyx ahead of content management systems that, while offering WYSIWYG views of content in a Web template, don't give users the range of options Rhythmyx has. High-end content management systems also offer customizable user interfaces, but these usually require expert programming to take advantage of them."

Another time and cost saver is provided by Rhythmyx's templating approach. While many other Web content management systems use separate templates for publishing and for internal content management, Rhythmyx uses the same template for both functions. This saves work by letting administrators change just one template when they want to change the layout of published content.

Enhancements to Rhythmyx Content Manager 4.5, released in June, include Active Assembly with Site Explorer. Using Site Explorer, content producers can test content in different templates to see how it fits in particular Web page formats before releasing to a Web server.

Rhythmyx relies on a role-based security model. Users are recognized by the system as having distinct roles: content creator, producer, template developer, project management, project architects, etc. Users can have multiple roles or just one.

"One of the original goals behind Rhythmyx was to build a high-end workflow infrastructure," explains Verson Imrich, Percussion's chief technology officer. "We feel a role-based security infrastructure puts Rhythmyx on par with high-end systems."

User Communities are the latest enhancement to Rhythmyx's security and workflow model. Communities are composed of a specific group of users, each with a different role in the content creation workflow. As part of a community, users can collaborate with each other on a single project. Communities can also bring together all the users within a department.

Rhythmyx's architecture is based entirely on XML. All content is XML tagged, and the publishing engines rely on XML interacting with formatting tools like extensible style language (XSL). This lets Rhythmyx publish content to any destination, including the Web, Web portals, handheld devices, print and databases.

Rhythmyx is about Web publishing rather than broader enterprise content management. The software's workflow is confined entirely to the task of developing and publishing content, but Imrich points out that, "Rhythmyx can be used to generate content for any application. Many of our customers use Rhythmyx to publish content into document management systems and other applications where it can enter into business transactions."

Percussion customer McKesson, a San Francisco-based pharmaceuticals distributor, is deploying Rhythmyx to consolidate content management operations and to strengthen the identity it presents online.

"Currently, our content is distributed through several different channels," says Morgan Morris, McKesson's vice president of architecture strategies. "We wanted to bring all our content to a single portal for both our company intranet and extranet."

Morris says McKesson previously had a content management system in place, but it wasn't up to enterprise use. "We wanted a more robust system for content creation throughout McKesson," he explains. "Ultimately, we expect the system will have to support between 50 and 75 editors creating and posting content for 23,000 employees, plus customers and partners."

Specific features that attracted McKesson included Rhythmyx's role-based security and its new communities feature. "We can use Rhythmyx's communities to separate different projects and to create separate workgroups," says Morris. "Communities will provide better separation between different departments within the company." McKesson plans to use Rhythmyx to provide content management services to departments as varied as corporate communications, human resources and sales.

More than anything, however, Morris says McKesson was attracted by the savings inherent in Rhythmyx's user- and administrator-customizable templates and interfaces.

"When we were looking for a content management system, many of the enterprise class solutions were complicated and expensive to program," he says. "Rhythmyx had the sophisticated architecture we were looking for along with lower long-term costs."

Rhythmyx's installation and set up is geared towards letting users build their own content management systems. According to the company, most complete Rhythmyx systems are built for less than $250,000 and the service to license cost ratio is 1-to-1. Basic software licensing costs are $120,000 plus $30,000 for a 5-user development package. The developer seats enable users to program elements of a Rhthymyx system such as workflows and user interfaces. Optional software components, such as a database publisher and Microsoft Word integration, are purchased separately.

New developments on the horizon for Percussion include a plan to add Web services, the XML-based distributed processing technology. Rhythmyx can invoke a Web service to provide it with content or to publish content, but another application, for example a document management system or ERP system, cannot yet invoke Rhythmyx as a content management Web service.