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 [...]
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.
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.
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 [...]
So, here’s a question…is WordPress a CMS?
And be careful how you respond.
The debate hit Twitter tonight triggered by a relatively harmless Tweet from Dirk Shaw:
I’ve been a part of similar discussions on how WordPress can or can’t scale to support larger sites. It wasn’t until another vendor and a CMS evangelist piled on in unanimous agreement that I felt the need to offer a brief reply in disagreement:
I’m not one to defend any one vendor, but it’s a silly argument.
Of course WordPress is a content management system. It’s technology that manages website content. And it manages quite a few websites I may add. I know plenty of fairly robust sites that get along just fine with WordPress. There’s of course a legitimate debate on what types of sites are best suited for WordPress.
But apparently I hit a third rail in the CMS world, because the comments kept flowing.
A number of other folks weighed in, including several that agreed that WordPress should be considered a CMS.
In the grand scheme, this is a relatively trivial debate. Even the folks siding against WordPress as a CMS were for the most part arguing for a different label or pointing out that it wasn’t “enterprise” enough to be considered a true CMS. Toss in a few open source fans and the debate can get religious in a hurry.
This is where the CMS world goes sideways. It’s insider baseball at the expense of the end user trying to make heads and tails of their web publishing strategy.
It still remains a vendor and consultant dominated landscape of folks trying to frame the space based on the tools and put up artificial walls based on product price points or analyst quadrants/waves. And yes, I lump myself into that bucket, although I try my hardest to stay on the outside.
Don’t even get us started on what to call our space (ECM, WCM, CMS, CM).
So, should WordPress be called a content management system? Absolutely.
Does it matter? Not really.
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The XOOPS Projects has released Alpha 2 of its upcoming XOOPS 2.5.0 release.
This new release a major redesign of the Administration module which has been AJAX-ed with jQuery. Some of the new features are breaking a new ground for XOOPS, like the visual placement of blocks, and we’re sure that the users will love them. The 2.5.0 release will be definitely the most innovative XOOPS release in years.
Some of the major improvements/additions include new Help System for Admin and modules, MySQL Dump function, Tables Maintenance and Cache Clean-up in Maintenance, new Redirect messaging system, and Column sorting in tables.
The focus on improved usability resulted in more visual administration using drag & drop, among them module ordering and block placement, and direct access to files for editing and folder management via a new File Manager.
The developers also did a lot of code refactoring to use the latest XOOPS API.
You can see a video with overview of the main new features on YouTube
For more info and download links, please visit XOOPS Site
Around thirteen years ago, I helped build a prototype for a custom CRM system that ran on an object database (ObjectStore). The idea isn’t quite as crazy as it sounds. The data was extremely hierarchical with parent companies and subsidiaries and divisions and then people assigned to the individual divisions. It was [...]
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The management within a company finds it needs to replace their existing, custom developed ERP system with a modern standard ERP system. A major ERP vendor brings their best sales people to a meeting with the management, equipped to the teeth with the most impressive product PowerPoint slide decks they could up-bring (that is, bullet-rich slides with a lot of interconnected 3D boxes that makes the ERP seem very advanced and capable).
The sales people manage to convince the company management to buy the most expensive license of their ERP system. All modules they could possible use, and a few more, are included in the price. As an extra bonus, the license agreement also contains a few “Easter eggs”, including a free license of the vendor’s state-of-the-art and very versatile portal software.
The company – some folks at the IT department – discovers the Easter-egg with the portal software. Like boys with toys, they can’t wait to open it and see what it does. So, they install the software on a server – “for evaluation purposes”.
Sometime later, a business unit identifies a need for aggregating all the information and tools they need in one place. They’ve heard that some competitor does that by using a portal solution, and that a portal solution is just what they need too. So they turn to their IT Department, telling them they need a portal solution.
The boys at the IT department (not many girls around) get all fired up. They tell the business people that they in fact already have a state-of-the-art and very versatile portal software in their enterprise software portfolio. Since the ERP system is a corporate standard and is mandatory to be used by all business units, so must the portal software that came along with it. Besides, it is free of charge. In fact, it is already installed on a server. With an IT strategy having consolidation as a key component, introducing new enterprise software is simply out of the question (even if you could argue that the portal software is not officially introduced and used).
The business people understand they don’t stand a chance against this strong setup. Besides, when looking at the slide decks that the vendor left them with, the portal software seems to be pretty much what they are looking for. So, they decide to skip the part of the process where they define their needs and requirements in more detail and start looking for different alternatives to evaluate and eventually purchase. Instead, they invest their money in an implementation project, seeing the promise of a short time to platform and quick and tangible business results.
The implementation project is executed and eventually a portal solution is launched. Soon enough it turns out that they did not really get what they expected, but to ensure return on their investment, they decide to force adoption with directives and policies. Maybe they will also work out some the kinks, possibly by purchasing a bunch of 3rd party software.
It does not take very long until the following has happened: The users are unhappy and frustrated and do whatever they can do to find reasons for not using the portal solution. The expected results are nowhere to be seen, and the portal solution quickly enters maintenance mode. It is just too expensive to develop it any further. But as some people have invested a lot of prestige and their entire careers in this thing, nothing can be done about the situation.
A couple of years later, the business people identify a need for aggregating all the information and tools they need in one place. This time, they don’t need a portal solution. Obviously, portal solutions are not the recipe for success. Now success is spelled differently. Instead, they need a versatile platform with a lot of capabilities, from search to business intelligence.
So, they turn to their IT department…
It would be very interesting if you could list 5 faults you find in this story, and come up with 5 things to make it right.
(thanks @letterpress_se for inspiration)
This post combines two FastForward posts as I wanted to continue to share this story with a broader audience. The US military
is using an enterprise 2.0 style collaborative network to help coordinate its
relief efforts in Haiti. As
reported by David Pierce in Wired in Pentagon’s Social Network Becomes Hub for
Haiti Relief:
Transnational Information Sharing Cooperation”) is a new iteration of APAN, the
All Partners Access Network, which was developed by the Defense Department a
few years ago. Initially, the military was using APAN to communicate across
borders, particularly in countries without sophisticated communication
technology. Even in third-world countries, Internet connection seemed to be
frequently accessible, so the APAN system was built to work over the Internet,
to facilitate the sharing of classified files, as well as things like
coordinating calendars.
The system is
designed to be as simple as possible, and is as easy to use as a site like
Facebook, says Ty Wooldridge of the U.S. Pacific Command in Hawaii. It uses
file-sharing applications, wikis, blogs, and calendaring tools, among other
things, to coordinate information and action among people, no matter where they
are. Though there are obvious military implications to that kind of network,
its first battlefield test is ongoing, on the ground in Haiti.”
was involved in the development of APAN to get the details (see my series on
how Booz Allen, itself, uses enterprise 2.0 within the firm). First, I will
cover how it works and then cover how it came into being and then its use in
Haiti.
Haiti but they might be even worse without the TISC. Haiti is the first
activity of scale to use the system. When you are determining ROI based on
number of hospital beds filled and people who receive much needed food, the
benefits take on a different meaning. The TISC concept is to help the US
military better coordinate with NGOs and other countries when disaster strikes.
The objective is to a create system that not only helps with particular
disasters but also builds an archive of best practices, key
people/organizations and useful information to better handle future needs, as
well as a platform for efficient cooperation.
chat and blogs. In the forums, people are able to ask questions (how to find
experts, etc.) and make requests (can you help with this issue, etc.), as well
as offer help or point out resources that others can draw on (e.g., available
hospital beds or safe landing areas). The forum tags content and sets up a
treaded dialog on the specific issues.
The chat tool allows for real time secure communications. Then the content is organized and
placed in a wiki for ease of retrieval. Finally, the best practices are
abstracted and put into blogs to attract comments and be available for use in
future disaster relief efforts. In
the future, there will be expert locators and profiles.
Pacific Command (PACOM) wanted to develop an online community for the free flow
of information between validated people from the US military, NGOs and other
countries. Ty Wooldrige and Jerry
Giles led the effort for PACOM. Booz Allen was asked to create the system with
PACOM, and James Kaina and Tim Gramp are the Booz Allen leads.
support for mobile devices was strengthened. The US Southern Command asked the
PACOM to provide an operational demonstration of the system. The PACOM team was
in Miami for this demo when the Haiti earthquake struck. The Southern Command
said to forget simply doing a demo and decided to put the system into real use
to help with Haiti. Now APAN is providing real-time help, validating the
concept and vision, gathering useful content, and the Haiti effort is providing
a significant test of the system to make further improvements.
knowledge management and the use of after action reviews and lessons learned.
It is nice to see it acting as one of the leaders in the use of Enterprise 2.0
concepts that take the vision of knowledge management significantly forward
with new tools, transparency, and capabilities.
reported on how on APAN has evolved into a broader communications and
coordination tool that's proving vital to those who want to help and those who
need it. Governments, companies and private citizens are using it to post what
they are offering, allowing disaster relief officials to pick and choose what
they need. Defense News also
pointed out the usefulness of Web social media such as Twitter and Facebook, as
well as geospatial systems such as Open Street that was been used to create
detailed maps of damaged areas.
very basic use of wikis helped with the Katrina efforts (see: Katrina
PeopleFinder Project). In this case a call for virtual volunteers to help
populate a centralized missing person database was meet over 20,000 people
within a day. It is great to see social media and its users helping out again
and the evolution of its capabilities. However, the basic human drive to help
others in need continues to drive these efforts. Social media just allows a
much greater way to productivity channel this human drive.
In today’s economic environment business and marketing professionals are having a difficult time justifying technology spending- and that includes the purchase of a brand new web content management system.
The justification for this major investment might seem hard to make, but delaying the purchase or piecing together an in-house solution can cost you more in the long run and severely impact your brand. Here are four rock solid points to help you make the business case for an investment in an enterprise web content management system (WCMS).
1. Demonstrate Increased Revenue
By streamlining and centralizing content creation, a new or revamped WCMS boosts your revenue by allowing content reuse and re-purposing across multiple websites, channels, and, if you’re a global enterprise, in multiple languages. Additionally, a WCMS simplifies workflow and provides robust analytic measurement capabilities to keep you focused on the timely updates of content that makes you money rather than wasting it.
A best-in-class enterprise web content management system will also have an integrated suite of online marketing tools that will help you achieve business objectives, like increasing conversion rates and building brand loyalty. Here are a few examples:
Brand management tools Email campaign tools Target audience marketing Website personalization Another revenue generating benefit of a top-rated WCMS is faster time to market. Imagine launching a multichannel marketing campaign or a new product in just a few days, rather than a few weeks or even months. What would this mean to your business in terms of increased sales or leads/
2. Demonstrate Decreased Operational Costs
With the right WCMS, you will spend less money on updating your website and avoid the inefficient practice of copying and pasting content across various pages. Centralized design elements and templates can be created once and then instantaneously integrated across your website. WCM helps you save money on labor, protect your brand and get it right the first time. Most enterprise web content management systems are easy to use. One of the major reasons organizations invest in web content management is because it empowers content creators (marketing teams, for example) to create, manage, modify, and publish content themselves- without IT involvement. Consider the savings of hundreds of IT hours on an annual basis, not to mention the increased efficiency
3. Calculate Probable ROI
Due to the economic environment, the concept of ROI is on the tip of everyone’s tongue when discussing technology investment. Don’t worry: an best-in-class enterprise web content management system almost always provides a sizable ROI. In addition to saving costs and boosting your revenue, a good WCMS interface comes with a high degree of usability. This means you can accelerate and simplify projects such as site development, implementation and content creation.
4. Think Beyond ROI
In addition, a WCMS can provide benefits that supersede ROI. Next generation web content management systems can really help to protect brand equity online and across multiple channels. For large companies, branding remains one of your most important assets and good customer perception is integral for continued success. A next generation WCM system allows you to build and maintain your brand with minimal hiccups. Even if you come up with initial ROI figures that are lower than you want, maintaining your brand equity and providing the ideal user experience across multiple channels is enough to make the business case for updating your WCM strategy today.