The perennial “what is a CMS” debate broke out this week, with a fairly innocuous tweet from Dirk Shaw, “I am sorry but wordpress is hardly a web content management system.” that many of our CMS community waded into and included this post on CMS Myth arguing in favour and just about everyone arguing against… and crikey [...]
Content Management Software (CMS) provider, pTools, today announced the addition of a range of embedded social media and networking features to its software. From within the pTools CMS, social media content can be easily re-distributed to any site anytime in any format on any social network.
A key feature, pTools ‘TwitterDocs’, allows users to post to Twitter as they publish content through the CMS. There is no need to separately login to Twitter, and the content-related Tweet is controlled and managed within the CMS and its workflows.
In addition to Twitter, customer content is presented on Facebook, LinkedIn, and indexed in live search engine results such as Google & Bing with no pre- or post-publishing tweaking required.
“What is Content Management?
My definition is…
Content Management is the management of content.”
-Tony Byrne, What is Content Management, Real Story Group, February 24, 2010
As strange as this sounds, one of the biggest debates among CMS gurus is over the very definitions of content management and content management system. I have always preferred utilizing the simple but precise definitions for the terms we use. “Real life” tends to complicate everything we do and starting simple is sometimes the only edge you have when facing increasing complexity. This is why I think the best definition for content management out there comes from Tony Byrne.
Recently it occurred to me that video and (to some extent audio) has become a less important requirement for most of my web content management clients these days. If I were to extrapolate the interest trend I was seeing back in 2004, I would expect to see the web resemble billions of tiny television [...]
Related posts:
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
Optical Image Technology (OIT) and client Panhandle Farmers Mutual Insurance Company of West Virginia has been named one of three national finalists for the 2010 AIIM Carl E. Nelson Best Practices Award in the small company category. The award recognizes excellence in the field of enterprise content management (ECM) technology, showcasing projects that have achieved a strong return on investment. The “best practices” designation denotes processes that are quantifiable, adaptable, and repeatable.
One of the first insurers in the region to transition from paper to electronic files and processing, Panhandle implemented OIT’s DocFinity® document and content management software for front-end scanning and secure electronic file access. Ultimately, Panhandle’s DocFinity integration with their web-based policy administration system, company portal, website, and more eliminated paper-based processing and enabled secure remote access for agents and customers.
Delivery has been uppermost in my mind recently. My wife is expecting a second child but this one decided he doesn’t want to head in the right direction. Next week he’ll be “from his mother’s womb untimely ripp’d”. Consequently I’ve been thinking heavily both about caesarean delivery and about a number of projects which now share a common delivery date. If I were project managing this birth, I’d just be cajoling the baby to get into position but quite frankly wouldn’t be offering much value. Is this the same for web projects? Do project managers actually help and how can you get more out of them?
According to Douglas Adams’ Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, the population of planet Earth was formed by a spaceship full of middle managers, hairdressers, marketeers and account executives. It’s easy to lump project managers into this mix. When Ford Prefect complains about this group’s inability to get stuff done — “This is futile! 573 committee meetings, and you haven’t even discovered fire yet!” — you can be sure that a project manager was there, maintaining the rolling action item log.
This is often exacerbated by project methodologies that foster a generic culture of project management, where all project management problems are essentially the same and if you can fix the issues around business case, stakeholders, executive sponsorship and resources you’re well on the way to project failure prevention. I’ve no doubt that these rules do apply for all projects, but I wonder that if you have a culture of just focussing on these issues you simply encourage project management by numbers where you get unthinking, standardised responses. As usual, Scot Adams got there first:
Even where you have a good project manger trying to help, it’s usually soft skills. Plant any management consultant in there and there’ll come up with the same answers without really having to get to grips with the fundamental issues. Why is the project struggling? Let’s not call lack of sponsorship a root cause when it’s just a symptom.
Sponsors are reluctant when they don’t understand project goals. You can see this for nearly any social media project. The business case is difficult to prove, the executive don’t buy into social media as reducing costs or increasing revenue, and the rigid formulae of business case definition help no one. This isn’t a sponsorship failure where the project manager can go in and mitigate against lack of funding. It’s fundamentally about whether an organisation is culturally ready to adopt social media and understand how they might use it. The project manager can facilitate this debate, but really you need a subject matter expert rather than a journalist who has read a couple of reports from the big analyst firms.
Jerry Manas recently wrote an article in which he suggests that project managers who run agile projects bring a completely different style to the table that’s much more concrete than traditional approaches. While I don’t agree with the entirety of his article, I think the main hypothesis is right. If you can get project managers who are close to the stakeholders, intimate with the issues and prove that they’re not just some glorified secretary, they can bring real value. Specialist projects require specialist experience and expertise and the world (of IT in particular) is littered with projects that have been delivered to industry best practice, but to abject failure.
The better generic project managers will continue to mitigate against failure and they’ll deliver their projects. But it the end, you’ll be judged on what you’ve delivered, not how you delivered it, and that’s where domain knowledge is essential.
My son will be just as precious to me whether he comes via forceps or scalpel. But it’s the people with the hard skills, not the soft skills, whom I’ll to put my faith in to ensure that he gets delivered safely.
A recent presentation I made to the J. Boye community of practice on speeding up project delivery using techniques from Scrum and Prince2.
In an economic recovery, top talent — fed up with no bonuses and low morale — may want to jump ship as soon as the job market picks up. Here are three things you can do to keep your top talent where they are:
- Launch efforts to rebuild trust. One of the things that suffers most in a recession is the trust between employees and employers. Show your employees that what was done in survival mode is not the norm going forward.
- Adjust compensation and benefits. Keep your radar tuned to the job market and any signs that it is heating up. Adjust salaries to make up for lost bonuses and raises and to match the market.
- Know your top talent. You not only need to know who they are, but what they want. Communicate with them regularly about their careers and how your company can support them.
Carnegie apparently said, “Take away my people, but leave my factories and soon grass will grow on the factory floors……Take away my factories, but leave my people and soon we will have a new and better factory.”Is there a typical large corporation working today that still believes this?Most organizations now have it backwards. The factory, the infrastructure, the systems, the patents, the process, the manual… that’s king. In fact, shareholders demand it.It turns out that success is coming from the atypical organizations, the ones that can get back to embracing irreplaceable people, the linchpins, the ones that make a difference. Anything else can be replicated cheaper by someone else.
I’ve recently been working on a number of web content management system selections. My preference is to carry these out in a two-stage process (see the one-sheet guide to selecting a WCM). The first stage pre-qualifies suppliers according to client attitudes to cost, risk and technological preferences. The second stage then gets into the real tasks that you want to perform, discovering how the WCM enforces and informs processes.
Like most other people in this business, I approach this from the point of view that there is no best WCM, just different products that may be viable for different kinds of tasks. It’s about finding a product that will allow you to get started as quickly as possible without precluding later ambitions. I try to show clients what a WCM could do for them, and in turn client aspirations suggest product features. These usually centre around a number of core areas:
How is content updated? Is it through a browser, a document template, or some other application? If it is through a browser, which browsers does it work in? Does it require a plug-in? How viable are those constraints within the organisation? If the organisation is planning to devolve editing, how appropriate are WYSIWYG and in situ editors? If content entry needs to be more controlled via forms, how will users preview their work? Can the WCM offer different editorial interfaces for different types of users? And hand in hand with the interfaces, if you have lots of devolved editors, how does the WCM assure concurrent contribution and secure access for different kinds of users?
Some WCM only really have the concept of pages and associated assets, making it hard to re-use fragments of content across the site. This simple model is generally appropriate for two scenarios: where there are many devolved, occasional contributors who would be confused by having to perform multiple tasks to get a piece of content to update on one part of the site and wouldn’t immediately understand the implications of a more complex editorial change; and for sites which have quite user journeys with little information appearing in more than one place.
For sites which need to re-use content a lot, where there’s a central editorial team assuring that changes are propagated correctly, more advanced systems that use “fragments” of content in multiple locations across the site in an “edit once, publish many” model can bring significant business benefit. These content management models usually bring more flexible templates but they can also make it more difficult to audit content: what did a given page look like on a specific day and who made the content changes? They are also reliant on robust link cohesion, so that if you move a piece of content, the WCM continues to link to its new location.
Absolutely central to most WCM is the concept of a content type. This is the model that allows you to define which fields editors need to complete to publish a page and the constraints on those: e.g. title (no more than 200 characters), summary (plain text), main body text (rich text), location (postal code), category (list of valid values), etc. These structures are important for a number of reasons. They allow you to create business rules for linking content, such as get me the three latest news items about Germany. They allow you to create different presentations for different types of content, so am event looks completely different from an FAQ. And they allow you to contol which information must be completed before content can go live and how it will be presented on different platforms once it’s been published.
There are other metaphors that WCM use to relate complex content: hierarchical metadata structures such as folders, categories or channels enable you to group content together in more complex ways. Flatter metadata structures also allow you to “traverse” across website structures and relate content in differnt part of the information architecture that don’t sit into this hierarchy. It’s often useful to have multiple kinds of metadata, particularly faceted taxonomy, if your content is particularly complicated and needs a lot of content relationships in order to achieved desired user journeys.
Where the WCM isn’t a standalone application but needs to integrate with other systems in a web platform – user directories, CRM, eCommerce, transactional tools – you need to validate how it will communicate with other systems. Is it through the Application Programming Interface (API), web services, or some other method?
The maintenance and extensibility of the system can also be important requirements. If I need to change a content type, what does that involve? If I need to get data from another application, can I do this in a de-coupled way?
Some other factors may come into play, such as workflow, internationaisation and personalisation. If one product is particularly strong in one of these areas and it’s a key requirement, then it may get into a shortlist even if it’s weaker in some of the other areas identified above.
This all brings me to the recent debate about whether WordPress is a CMS, with numerous contributions on Twitter as well as from:
My experience of WordPress is that it’s really good at two key features where some established content management systems are relatively poor: search engine optimisation and comments. On SEO, it ties your blog post title to a friendly URL, enables good internal linking (as long as you don’t move any pages), allows tagging and categorisation and offers some great SEO tools. Comments meanwhile can be quite tricky for some WCM that operate separate content contribution and consumption environments, but WordPress does this easily, with useful anti-spamming tools and the ability to follow the comment conversation by RSS or email.
When it comes to the question of whether WordPress is or isn’t a WCM, the best analogy I could come up with was a camera phone. A camera phone does take pictures, it is convenient, some phones even have a flash and autofocus. But would you get a camera phone specifically to use as a camera? I think not if you’re serious about photography, It is a camera, but a very limited one.
WordPress is a blogging tool with some shared characteristics of a WCM. If you apply some of the many available modules to it you can come up with a really nice proposition, up to a point. But you’re effectively hacking the software to get it to behave as many WCM already do. You can get any software to do pretty much anything in the end, but that still doesn’t make it a WCM.
WordPress is widely used by many organisations as a web content management system and there are a lot of photos taken on camera phones. But you need to understand the product’s limitations and if these don’t affect you and you’re achieving what you want, then no one should criticise you for your choice. But let’s be sensible about it and say that even if there’s no such thing as the best WCM, you know that it wouldn’t be WordPress.
This is a rant. I rarely write rants, but here is one. It is based on one of my largest pet peeves in the technology industry. It is about a commonly accepted term and not about the people who use it.
It is about “CMS”. This is a term that for many is synonymous with Web Content Management. This just gives me the screaming heebie jeebies. Let me illustrate.
I was at a meeting in DC called the Web Content Mavens recently. The topics of discussion should be obvious. I made a comment to a group there that there is content that isn’t web content. This person, an experienced “CMS” implementer did not believe that any such “content” existed. I used the easy examples of Word and Excel files. She immediately jumped to the conclusion that if it wasn’t web content, it was documents. I then fired some examples at her:
Her eyes lit up as if I had just revealed a whole new world of content to her. I didn’t. I revealed the world of content, not a new one. She hadn’t been living in the world of content. She had been in the world of web content.
There is more to Content Management than managing Web Content!!!
Being able to publish or host a website does not make something a CMS!!!
The Growing Itch
I first noticed the problem several years ago. I went to an event focused on Content Management Systems and noticed that everything focused on publishing a website. Ah, Web Content Management, I know a little on this topic, I thought to myself.
The problem is that people don’t think of it as WCM, or any similar terms. They think of it as CMS. This drives me NUTS! There are systems out there that manage content, quite well, but don’t publish to the web. They don’t get considered a CMS by many people.
I hate the term. It is a term that has such potential, but so many people use it in such a limited fashion. Qualify the thing with “Web CMS” or create a new friggin term.
Let’s look at some of the people using the term (keep in mind I like and respect most, if not all, of the people behind these sites)
There is a big world out there. All you Web CMS people need to give the term CMS back! It doesn’t belong to you. A long time ago you took it while the broader content community was trying to futz with the term ECM. By the time we realized what was happening, you had taken the term.
To whome does the term belong? That is a topic for another day.
A Quick Breath
This isn’t personal. Far from it. I read the websites listed above and find them valuable.
Pretty much everybody who reads this will have entered the industry with the term CMS firmly entrenched, incorrectly, into daily use. That is life. I had to get this off of my chest so that when I occasionally twitch when the topic of “What is a CMS” comes up in conversation, you know why.
I’m also going to not respond to comments. I’ll allow them and read them, but I’m not going to get sucked into an argument over a rant. This is a rant and there is a lot of irrational emotion that fuels it.
Here to hear Capt Michael Weiner talk about the Defense Health Information Management System (DHIMS) and the lessons that the DOD have learned. I have a personal interest as I grew-up in the military health system and my parents and a large number of family members are in it now. I haven’t been posting a lot of notes as I’ve just been absorbing, but this session should has lots of good information.
Captain Weiner was a great presenter. Loved the presentation. Lot’s of good lessons that apply to large and small facilities. Now off to catch-up with my colleagues.
All information in this post was gathered from the presenters and presentation. It does not reflect my opinion unless clearly indicated (Italics in parenthesis). Any errors are most likely from my misunderstanding a statement or imperfectly recording the information. Updates to correct information are reflected in red, but will not be otherwise indicated.
