When talking about social business, the new and broad beyond-the-tools term for social media, newsletters are often completely ignored as a channel. Several member interviews we’ve conducted recently confirms that email-based newsletters continue to be a highly effective and successful way to engage with the audience. A newsletter may be old-fashioned in the opinion of some, but it does provide a tested and proven way to interact with customers. Yet, apart from e-commerce sites, very few organisations seem to pay much attention to newsletters.

Headshift, a London-based everything-social consultancy has this somewhat focused definition of social business:

“The rise of the social web has taught us a lot about how we can significantly reduce the costs of collaboration and co-ordination inside businesses, and demonstrated the power of iterative, evolutionary processes driven by real-time data and user feedback. Social business is all about smarter, simpler, social tools, with the same quality of user experience we have come to expect from the web, that help people get things done”

This seems relevant in relation to newsletters, which are smart, simple and driven by data and user feedback.

Email may not be the right tool to reach 20 year-olds with. Many of them rely heavily on Facebook and Twitter and don’t check their e-mails several times a day. For the remaining 98% of the working population, email-based newsletters still do seem to have a useful place. Newsletters can be a massive driver of traffic to your website and also a very cost-effective way to communicate with your customers.

To quote Christian Peytz, a Danish expert on newsletters:

Newsletters are like Teletext: Old technology but still very used. Too few dedicate enough time and attention to newsletters, which can be used as a easy way to stay top-of-mind with customers

The usability experts at Nielsen Norman Group have an excellent report on Email Newsletter Usability. The executive summary explains, among other things why users generally have highly emotional reactions to newsletters. They moreover acknowledge that receiving newsletters is both preferable and more convenient than direct mailings in the physical world.

Many analysts are fascinated by emerging technology so I understand why they either ignore newsletters or totally seem to have forgotten about them. What I don’t understand is why so many don’t capitalize more on newsletters as a powerful marketing and communications tool?

Similar to other social business initiatives, a good way to get started with newsletters is by thinking of your audience, content and how newsletters may help support the goals of the organisation.

Integrating Microsoft ASP.NET into RedDot CMS
Learn it the right way here

Is it easy to integrate .NET into your RedDot CMS project? Yes it is, if you know how and obey some simple rules. This article gives you a best practice on how to include any .NET functionality for your published website within your RedDot CMS templates.

If you can avoid using inline code within your RedDot Content Classes then do it

Inline code within a content class can’t be versioned as it could be with a version control system when developing standard .NET solutions outside of any CMS. You can’t develop or test properly using inline code within the CMS. Whenever you have to change the .NET part of your project you would need a RedDot Consultant or some of their knowledge and hence your project doubles up on resources. Don’t integrate inline code within your CMS.

Let the CMS handle content – Don’t care about the rest

There is a clear understanding of what your CMS should handle for you – your content – and what it should not take care of – styling and dynamic functionality may it be Javascript, .NET or any other scripting technology. The CMS is your data storage and management layer, the web server is your presentation and visualization layer and hence it is the point where dynamic functionality, styling and user interaction takes place. By keeping those parts separate you ensure to have a stable, scalable and furthermore easily maintain- and upgradeable Content Management Solution. Read more on this topic here

Example – How to integrate .Net properly using User Controls

Instead of just adding a page directive followed by your inline code you should use user controls. Given that your code will be used on your website and not within the Open Text CMS ASP.NET User Controls are the best way to embedded dynamic functionality within your project.
There are basically two points where .NET is included in your template. The first one needs to be in every template which uses User Controls unless you integrate it using a container. The second one works as placeholder for the .NET functionality:

1. Reference the .ascx file at the very top of the template

<reddot:cms><if><query valuea="Context:CurrentRenderMode" operator="==" valueb="Int:2"><htmltext>
<%@ page language="C#" %>
<%@ Register Src="~/UserControls/Search.ascx" TagName="Search" TagPrefix="uc" %>
</htmltext></query></if></reddot:cms>

This example references a code behind file for a search used on the web server. It is placed in the top of every page instance created with this template. This way you only have to integrate the .NET reference once in each template. You can break it down to once per project if you use a container approach.

2. Place the User control tags as placeholder for the .NET functionality

<body>
  <div id="site">
    <div id="header">
<reddot:cms><if><query valuea="Context:CurrentRenderMode" operator="==" valueb="Int:2"><htmltext>
      <uc:Search ID="Search" runat="server"/>
</htmltext></query></if></reddot:cms>

This is the ASP.NET User Control for your search interface. Since you don’t run the search inside of your CMS project we have used a Render Tag to exclude this block from showing up within the CMS. If you want to be fancy you can put some placeholder content here by using a different Context:CurrentRenderMode block where you use valuea=”Context:CurrentRenderMode” operator=”<>” valueb=”Int:2″ to show HTML code only on the CMS server, you can read more about this here.

Maintain & edit your ASP.NET code outside of the CMS

By following the example above whenever you have to update your .NET code you just have to change your .ascx file, there is no need to touch or even deploy the .ascx file to the CMS server. There is an approach of using the built-in .Net folder within RedDot CMS but since you might as well just upload your files manually I dare to say – Why bother? Ok, you should bother in a clustered server system where you publish to multiple publishing targets, but for a simple one CMS one web server setup you might as well just stick to manual deployments.

Changing ASP.NET properties and influencing your .NET from within the CMS

In RedDot we are able to insert User Control tag into any area of a page. If you have to influence settings or content areas you can use several ways to generate content and integrate those within .Net applications. You can use XML files published by RedDot CMS or user attributes with inline edited content to changed and/or edit properties. Those can be passed through to your User Controls. No need to use the CMS as IDE for your .NET solutions, keep all parts of your project separate and everything is just fine.
Are you interested in how to integrate CSS files within the CMS? Read this article here or on a high level understanding and “how to” for CSS and CMS in general this article here.

And you?

How do you integrate ASP.NET in your RedDot CMS projects?

Read more RedDot CMS best practice articles here.

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For 40 years, scientists have searched for a way to bring nuclear fusion to the masses. If successful in bringing fusion online, we all could have an inexhaustible form of power to meet our world’s energy needs. The promise of fusion is a dream that many have hoped to see become a reality in their lifetime.

Perhaps not for as noble of cause, Drupal users have sought better themes for their Drupal sites. Four years ago, it seemed to me that creating a good theme for Drupal was almost done as an afterthought. There simply were not too many places for a user to go for a quality Drupal theme. I recall spending a lot of wasted time maintaining my own (boring) themes for Drupal sites. The Drupal days of version 4.4, 4.5, 4.6 and even 4.7 for themes were dark days indeed. Luckily, Drupal 5 introduced us to a new theme called Garland. Garland may not have been a perfect theme but in my opinion the theme marked the beginning of an era for a new style of Drupal themes.

In the past few years, the number of Drupal themes provided under open source or via private companies have exploded. Along with that explosion, various starter and base themes have been introduced too. On the top of my head I can think of Zen, Genesis, Basic, and AdaptiveTheme. These starter/base themes offer theme developers opportunities for everyone to build or use professional sub-themes. In fact, this site used Zen in the theme’s early years and today we’re currently using a Genesis based theme called Extreme Updates (slightly modified). With each passing year, the theme offerings for Drupal has steadily improved in quality and quantity. This year is no exception and brings us a new official base theme to carry us over into the next generation of themes made for Drupal.

The year 2010 brings us Drupal’s newest base theme, Fusion.  Currently, there probably isn’t a Drupal theme that offers site owners more control over layout and style than a Fusion based theme. Fusion has the support and backing of well-known Drupal theme shop, TopNotchThemes. TopNotchThemes appear to be serious enough about Fusion revolutionizing the way themes are done in Drupal. This week they publicly announced their new line of themes and a website called Fusion Drupal Themes. Most of the themes offered at the site are for a price, but there are a couple free themes also being offered that should give you a chance to see what Fusion is all about.

read more

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:

Editorial interface

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?

Pages vs. elements

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.

Content structures

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.

Technology

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:

• Jeff Cram: Is WordPress a CMS?
• Ian Truscott: Is WordPress a CMS? Hardly? Barely?
• CMS Watch: Evaluating WordPress as a web CMS
• Laurence Hart: What makes a CMS a CMS?

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.

While Flash CMS is probably the best way to create a fancy, multi-functional website, there is always a chance to improve the user experience in website management. With exactly this purpose in mind FlashMint has released Mint Editor – a new offline content management software to edit and customize FlashMint XML templates at ease.

read more

It is already happening, and I couldn’t be happier.  There are CMIS-base custom clients being developed and released that are taking some of the pain out of using ECM systems.  I’m not talking about open source clients, but commercial clients with dedicated teams and one goal, to make money.

I know that there is pain in the use of ECM systems, and not just because I use them.  I know this because of one simple metric; In my list my most successful ECM projects, the top of the list is dominated by systems that do not use the default user interface.  I’m not talking about customized clients.  I’m talking CUSTOM clients.

A Market is Born

Well, there are some companies that are addressing the problem.  As I said in my Fierce Content Management guest piece on The Future of CMIS, two companies are leading the way by taking existing custom ECM client applications having them use CMIS to create a broader market for their software.

Generis updated their existing common interface, CARA, to leverage CMIS to work against multiple repositories.  WeWebU has announced plans to follow suit with their OpenWorkdesk interface in the second quarter of this year.

This is great!  Companies are looking to address the largest pains out there with ECM systems.  We may actually be entering the time of true Application Separation!  I’ll address some impacts shortly, but first, let’s look at what I saw over the past couple of weeks.

There is a Market, Now

So, three things triggered this post.  The first was watching Generis’s CARA application being shown to a continuous flow of prospective clients at last week’s DIA EDM conference.  Many were Documentum users, but there was a healthy collection of SharePoint users as well.  The response was consistently positive across the board.  Even those that said they were happy with their existing interfaces were impressed.

The second was talking to a company that was starting over fresh.  They had written a set of architectural principles that they wanted every component in their new Knowledge Architecture to meet.  Documentum’s interface didn’t cut-it.  The platform may have cut it, but having spent years being ignored by EMC, they were moving on to another platform.  They did feel that CARA, using CMIS and being browser neutral, met the bill.  They still had tests to run, but they were enthusiastic about the prospects.

Those two events showed me that there is not only a market for applications, but potentially a strong market.

The final triggering event is this Implementation Spotlight on CARA3 on the Ext JS website.  They used the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) to build CARA, using Ext GWT to round out the functionality.  This allowed them to build CARA very quickly, allowing them to hit the market quickly and to throw in all sorts of cool features with very little effort.  The result is quick, light-weight, and browser independent.

The important part about the article, while it has a healthy amount of marketing, it gives you more background into what led them to develop a CMIS-base interface and about the underlying technology.  The first is important from a market perspective.  The second is pretty cool from a development perspective.

Enough on that, on to what this means…

The Landscape is Shifting

This is actually part of a perfect storm.  Look at this:

• ECM Platforms have gotten stronger to keep up with the increasing volume and more diverse nature of content.
• ECM interfaces have been steadily falling behind the innovation curve.
• CMIS allows a common way to communicate with a repository.  Chemistry is providing a common implementation for those that already support the JCR standard.
• Documentum and FileNet were bought by EMC and IBM.  Oracle bought Stellent, but they aren’t the user-friendly people.  Open Text bought everyone, leading to a shifting product lineup that leave people wondering if they are coming or going.
• Open Source ECM has matured, providing multiple options for an ECM platform.
• Microsoft has been Microsoft.  They are fixing every problem with SharePoint, but they haven’t caught-up to the curve yet.  Meanwhile, their biggest flaw remains, Works best with Microsoft products. (IE and with SP2010, Silverlight).

Fun fact: Did you know that many ECM vendors charge a separate license for their user client?  I wonder if they could take that money and buy a better client for less?  That is what we are about to find out.

We are now looking at vendors creating custom user interfaces.  Generis may have been first to release, but they are going to be far from the last.  WebWeU has been aggressively marketing their interface and I am looking forward to seeing it when it is released.

History says that the first couple of vendors typically don’t win the war in software (Wordstar, Novell, AOL).  When you take that into consideration, you can see why it is way to early to make any judgments regarding either of these offerings.  What we can say is that unless things change, this may become a permanent market niche.

Until Open Text buys them all.

Disclaimer

This time, there really is something to disclaim.  Generis is a partner of my company, Washington Consulting, Inc.  While my company, as policy, does not accept any revenue from any technology vendor if their software is used/purchased by a client, there are still some co-marketing efforts and lead-sharing that takes place.

That being said, this post was entirely MY idea, not my company’s or Generis’s.  I heard about the spotlight and thought it would be a good time to highlight the first commercial CMIS client already in the market.  In six months, there will be more competitors and it is entirely possible that one will be better.

None of this changes the fact that the release of this client shows that CMIS is already changing the Content Management landscape for what I hope is the better.

Mark your calendars for the 2010 Cascade Server User’s Conference taking place on Monday September 13, and Tuesday, September 14.

All modern CMS vendors claim to be capable of delivering content to mobile devices. Some even offer additional modules to make the implementation faster and easier. However, as a customer, how do you separate marketing from reality? We decided to explore how seriously the vendors treat mobile devices and took a look at their websites through a mobile device. As expected, the results were quite mixed.

Even when I used to work at a CMS vendor myself back in 1999 – 2002, customers would regularly require to have content delivered to mobile devices. Back then most customers did not go ahead and implement mobile services, but that has certainly changed today. The arrival of the iPhone in particular has made this development spiral. The mobile Web has rapidly moved far beyond the early adopters.

To be fair to vendors, some customers may still not know exactly know what they want and are simply “ticking the box” when they ask for mobile support. Still, it seems reasonable to expect vendors to “eat their own dogfood” now that they claim their product supports mobile devices so easily. I can imagine several use cases where customers might want to visit a vendor website on a mobile device, eg. for contact details and to read news.

Here’s the vendor and open source project websites that we visited:

It would seem like a clear majority of vendors still have a long way to go. Congrats to Plone, Sitecore and WordPress on jobs well done.

For additional details on mobile delivery, including some specialized products, CMS Watch analyst Apoorv Durga have written a posting on Content Management for Mobile Delivery

Thanks to @athraen, @BrianBentzen, @jdavidhobbs and @s2d_jamesr for helpful input.

NB: Yes, I recognize that this blog and this site does not look pretty on most mobile devices. We’re working on it

Microsoft Office may be one of the world’s most widely deployed software packages.

A backstage pass…

Indeed, with a user base of 500 million, any changes or updates to the suite are significant for that fact alone.

In the upcoming Office 2010 release, there are many areas that have been retooled and refined; however, for the typical knowledge worker, the most obvious will be the user interface.  In this research brief, we will look at how the user interacts with a document through the new Navigation pane and Backstage view.

The new Navigation pane in Word enables users to move around a document, search for content, and change the structure and organization of headings.  This replaces the old Document Map and Thumbnail panes and brings those feature sets into one place along with Find.  Users browse through a document by heading, page, or search results.  Content in a section is moved around a document by dragging-and-dropping the tab for the heading.  Additionally, the outline of a document can be manipulated to promote or demote sections.  When sections are moved, all headings and subheadings automatically adjust.

Office 2010 also features a new way to manage documents, the Backstage view.  This new functionality extends across the entire Office suite.  The Backstage view appears when the user clicks on the File tab from within an application.  The view that opens up provides the user with access to tabs that show document info,  permissions, versioning, printing options, and sharing options.  The user has multiple options for sharing including e-mailing the document as an attachment or link, or via a blog post.

Backstage also includes Accessibility Checker, which allows users to identify elements of a document that may cause problems when used with assistive technologies.  These functions were previously found in various Ribbon menus and, with 2010, have been separated out from functions that are needed for actual content creation.  The goal of Backstage is to help users work with documents, processes and workflows, as opposed to when you work in the document.

Features such as presence are incorporated into Backstage, making it possible to initiate contact with document authors and to see related documents.  Backstage is extensible, meaning that it can be customized to allow for a range of application data to be brought into the view.

The interfaces for Backstage and Navigation are smooth and intuitive to use, and the concept of separating these features and giving them their own panes that group like-minded features together is a good one.  Obviously getting used to features being in a different place takes some time, but Backstage and Navigation are both positive changes that increase usability .

We will be examining other important new features and enhancements in Office 2010 in the weeks to come.

Cody Burke is a senior analyst at Basex.

Microsoft Office is undoubtedly one of the most world’s most widely deployed software packages.
Indeed, with a user base of 500 million, any changes or updates to the suite are significant for that fact alone. In the upcoming Office 2010 release, there are many areas that have been retooled and refined; however, for the typical knowledge [...]