Archive for the ‘Content Management’ Category

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HTML Mockup and Content

Tuesday, May 24th, 2011

In my previous post, I wrote about HTML mock-ups and their importance. To extend on the same point, it is really important that sample of the actual content that needs to go on the page needs to be part of mock-up as well. In my previous experience, I have encountered various situations where lourel ipsum content works fine but when we replace with the actual content the mock-up starts breaking up. A classical example is usage of RTE (Rich Text Editor) where authors think that anything can fit in and will work but in reality creative agencies never have a view of which all styles to be defined in CSS so that content appears right. In the recent example. authors started inputting tables within RTE, the styles for which were never defined as part of CSS which lead to confusion and frustration on everyone’s part.

HTML Mockup

HTML Mockup

Actual content requirements

Actual content requirements

Another classical examples is management of headings (h1, h2, h3 etc.) within a page. When the creative agency define mock-up, they try to follow a hierarchial pathern for the heading from top to bottm with H1 (heading 1) appears first on the page and than H2′s, H3′s and so on. When the content is written, either in-house or by third party, they never has visibility of the format that needs to be followed i.e. whether to use H1 in their content or H2, H3 and this all leads to confused page with headings floating all around.

I think as part of mock-up testing and sign-off, it is important that we use sample of the actual content with all variations possible to be part of those pages. So, I think as part of the mock-up testing and sign-up, we should also include the right content to make sure of such scenario’s. Has anyone had such experiences to share?

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Are you a good CMS User?

Friday, May 20th, 2011

Are you a good CMS user? CM instinct are part of our day to day life. The thinking about CMS usage starts from our day to day job. Think about what all you do as a normal day for a moment and read on.

I am into consulting and spend most of the time using a PC, laptops, storage devices etc. I am sure most of the users who will read this blog will be in the same boat. The managment of day to day work is a CM. Whichever operating systems we have on our laotps, it is providing the basic framework to manage your conent.It provides features like setting up heirarchy, setting folders, files templates, basic and advance search, content creation through adding apps in the framework (creating word doc, spreadsheet, pdf etc.), management of digital assets etc.

How to make use of the framework effectively is left in the hands of the user and that’s where your CM thinking cap goes on. Some of the users manage their documents effectively creating a folder hierarchy, adding meta information etc. while others leave it in the hands of search engine.Some users version the document to manage history while others doesn’t care about it, and many such examples can be included.

If you are good at managing your day to day work, in anything you do, I am sure you will be much better in using a CMS product. Bacause the same thinking will apply behind anything you do in CMS and you will be as good a CMS user as any CMS greek out there, if not better :)

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Bundled CMS with Portal: Are they an option?

Monday, May 16th, 2011

Most of the well known Portal products in market comes with some form or shape of web content management systems. The supplied WCM tools are very basic while other are funcionality rich. For example:

IBM’s Web content Manager (previously called Lotus WWCM) is very tightly integrated with WebSphere Portal. The product was originally was acquired by IBM and over the period of few releases it has move forward from just being a simple WCM product to more rich functionality. The support for personalize content and integation with portal’s personalization engine adds new dimension.

Liferay has built in product called Liferay CMS (previously known as Journal) which is tightly integrated within Portal and let you perform basic CMS functionalities though it is not as rich as IBM’s WCM. It does provides integration with jBPM to manage complex workflows. No personalization of content that I am aware of.

Oracle’s UCM is a true WCM product and could stand on its own (not the once mentioned above). It is far more complex and provides a wide range of capabilities – document management, versioning, document collaboration etc. The newest version provides a tag based architecture, allows you to embed services in content regions, runs and scales on WebLogic Server, and has some interesting web app functionality to create content driven web applications without a lot of coding. However, it is not as tightly integrated with any portal in the WebCenter Suite.

Lots of time people have an opinion that bundled CMS are not capable to handle requirements and they start buying bigger CMS products and start integration work. In my experience, it is worth to evaluate bundled option first before even looking out for CMS. Evaluate how much of the requirements are met with the current bundled version and if the percerntage is significantly high stick with it. Integration with other CMS will not only create inegration nightmares but will also add high cost to licences with the gain not in proportion to spending.

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Posted in Content Management, Integrations, Portals | No Comments »

Setting the right Expectations

Tuesday, April 19th, 2011
Expectations

Expectations

Expectations = :

  • the act or state of looking forward or anticipating.
  • something expected; a thing looked forward to.
  • the degree of probability that something will occur.
  • Statistics . mathematical expectation.

Yesterday I was playing with my son and he was behind me to get more and more chocolates from me. And I was trying to set his expectations. I had two ways to set him right, easy and faster was to set his expectations as per his needs. Other was to make him understand with all proper explaination and setting his expectations which could have been long and painful process. Lets not get into what I finally did :)

Setting the right expectation is important on any front and CMS world is no different.

I have been part of few sales demo’s and it is really amazing to see how the sales people try to promote their product by just agreeing that they can do whatever client needs, setting wrong expectations. Well, I think it is very important to set the right expectations at first place. Because all the other expectations are relates to each other and they can blow aways pretty quickly.

Lets take an example, in one of the CMS demo, there were queries from client around workflow capabilities to understand the level of granuality available OOTB (Out of the Box). As usual, the sales team provided sales pitch highlighting all the positives and agreeing with client that their needs for workflow could be fulfilled by this product better than any other in the market. All went out happily out of the room. Client went back with certain expectations that building any custom workflow within the system is easy (drag and drop) and so they started working on requirements. Time passed and development phase arrived and so did the troubles. The defined requirements could not be matched with the OOTB workflow and it ended up with lots and lots of customization and thus adding all the upgrade issues along with it.

Reality-Expectation-Gap

Reality-Expectation-Gap

So, if you set the expectations right at the first time, though it might be painful and not the melody music to people who are listening to you, but it is going to help in long run.

Have a I set the right expectation about my blog with my 100th post?

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Scarce Skills responsibility: Service Providers or Vendors or both?

Wednesday, April 13th, 2011

Recently there was post from Irina Guseva from Real Story Group around CQ5 WCM development skills are hot — and scarce.

This is not the case just with CQ but with an niche product. I have worked in Fatwire during its Open Market and Divine days in India and it was soo tough to get a single resource with any Fatwire experience. There was a time that in IT driven country like India, I was in touch with all the people with Fatwire skill which is not usual. :) .

So why are these skills scare? And how does that impact products like CQ, Fatwire and others?

From IT service providers view, they build such niche skills in a reactive mode i.e. once they get a project they start engaging with product vendor for trainings and do not really invest pro-actively till they see a big pipeline of projects in same product. And there are cases where people work on one project to acquire such niche skills but than are moved to completely different project and the acquired skill gets lost. So, is IT service industry responsible for building such skills pro-actively and make these skills more readily available?

Service providers could really differentiate themselves from others by specializing in such niche skills but it could very well add a risk for such providers and more balanaced approach needs to be taken based on service providers position.

I think apart from IT service industries, product vendors as well need to focus on developing skills but working with IT service industries and/or clients. From the product vendor point of view, they should pro-actively provide trail versions (downloadable or cloud), free training, service providers specific seminars and try to partner with a number of service providers. This will not only help in building skills required for their product implementation but will also drive their product forward. In most of the cases, vendors focus more towards client needs than a providers which is helping client to achieve the goal. I think product vendors should focus towards service providers equaliy as they could be reliable networking partners to promote product through various seminars, part of RFI/ RFP response etc.

I was in one of the conference couple of weeks back which had a mix of people from vendors to implementors to clients. It was really amazing to hear from vendors that because they are not close to service providers, they do not have a view of what all diffent case studies a product can be implemented. And some of the cases fall well outside their own imagination of using the product.

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Posted in Content Management, Trends, skills | No Comments »

Perfect Example: WCM project Lifecycle : Sign-off’s?

Friday, April 1st, 2011

Some days back I wrote about sign-off’s value in a WCM project lifecycle. Recently, I came acoss a perfect example to showcase the same. We recently launched a website based on signed-off requirements, signed-off wireframes, signed-off designs, signed-off HTML mock-ups, signed-off browser support, signed-off content etc. All worked perfectly until two super high priority stuff came through:

Website to run on iPad and iPhone’s
Why this has become a super high priority is due to the fact that senior managers in the organisation are having iPad and the site is not working fully in iPad.

Changes to content – (text and images)
Changes to the images which are hardcoded in CSS. This brings back to the point of realization of technical verification of HTML mockup so that authors could have more control over images than governed through CSS/JS hardcoding

The first point is really interesting of the fact that there are no actual requirements around support for iPad. iPhones. And more interstingly, does the same website presentation holds good across desktops, laptops to iPhones? Or it is better to have a cut down version of the site for mobiles which in turn reference the same content instances?

I am in suppot of cut down version of site as the original site could be lot more fancy with images, graphics while the mobile version can limit them, though providing all the functionality. But again, there is no definitive set of rules which defines whether to have cut down version of site or the same site can run on mobiles. I think it varies from case to case basis.

How have your experience with website Vs mobile sites?

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WCM project Lifecycle : Sign-off’s?

Thursday, March 24th, 2011

Each and every project has milestones and one of the important milestone is the sign-off of various artifacts including site designs, wireframes, functional specification, HTML mock-ups, content etc. With the WCM projects, my exeprience of sign-off is just a formality but in reality it doesn’t hold any vlaue. And the reason: changes and more changes after sign-off.

Normally when the design and wireframes are laid down, there is just specific group comprises of few individuals from IT and business teams that will look at them and sign-off. Based on the designs and wireframes the HTML mock-up originates and again in most of the cases the same approval authority sign off without getting into much details.The mock-up are presented to the development team who start to churn out templates and components and setting up website to deliver content. Once the development has passed a reasonable phase, someone in the approval team suddenly come up with a novel idea of presenting this new webiste within the higher authorities. And this very novel idea presents highter authorities with their first view of the site. This is the very first time they start inputting their feedback and the whole ball game of sign-off, CRs start. This sometimes is so drastic that teams go back to the drawing boards and start implementing new designs.

Content sign-off is a very different story with CMS projects where customers always take a view that the whole idea of implementing a CMS is that they can make changes nth minute before the launch of the website.

Also, when the mock-ups are signed off, there is a need for technical review of the code. It is pretty easy for the creative agencies to place lots of images and make them as part of CSS which are non editable by authors. I think it is important to have certain more activities on the plan to cover some of the above issues including:

  • Technical Verification of HTML mock-up to make sure that editable/ dynamic area’s/ extensible area’s are not goverend through CSS/JS hardcoding
  • Presentation of HTML mock-up to all the stake holders to identify gaps earlier than later
  • Involvement of high level management in each stages of the project, including design sign-off, HTML mock-up sign-off etc.
  • etc.

If the issues are raised during development or in UAT, it involves lot more effort than getting it right in the initial stages.

Anyone experienced such situations in their WCM project lifecycle?

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Posted in Content Management | 3 Comments »

Discussion:Adobe’s Day CQ : Separation of content from components

Sunday, March 20th, 2011

Few days back I posted some information around Day’s CQ Separation of Content from Components. There was some good discussion around the topic in one of the CQ group. Here is information from group discussion:

From Paul McMahon, Acquity Group

I think this is a common mis-perception – that because a component defines both content and presentation that the content and presentation are somehow linked.

Yes the component does have presentation logic associated to it, but the content is stored without the presentation, as raw content. This means that that content can be reused in many places without calling on the presentation of the component that was used to create the content.

So let’s take you restaurant example. You might define a restaurant component, which would include all the attributes of a restaurant in it’s dialog, and provide the presentation for a restaurant detail page.

Now lets say you want to have a restaurant listing component. This components content would be limited to say title and column headings for example. In the code of you component you execute a search on the repository looking for all nodes where sling:resourceType = yourrestuarantComponent. This search returns all the nodes where restaurant details were entered. You iterate over this nodes, grab the content you want to display and you display it in the presentation layer you need for the listing page. No duplication of content and you retain the ability to edit the content in it’s natural home within the site.

Now that said I often create the sort of plain jane content entry components and templates you are describing when dealing with content that has no natural home, but that is more about content organization and business process than it is about separation of content and presentation layer.

You can also use the scaffolding mechanism to achieve similar results, but in a different manner.

(more…)

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Posted in Adobe Day, Content Management | 1 Comment »

Adobe’s Day CQ : Separation of content from components

Tuesday, March 15th, 2011

I am almost two impelementation’s old with Day’s CQ WEM. When I started with CQ product, one thing which kept me guessing within CQ was the separation of content from presentation.

As per my understanding of CQ, a component is the one which holds data, dialogs to capture information and presenting the information. One of the ground rule for a CMS system is separation of content from presentation but its initial usage looks to voilate this rule. If the same content is presented in three different formats, it is pretty common in CQ to end up adding the same content three times through different components usage. And if the site is pretty huge, I can easily image the content getting out of sync soon within the same site, not even accounting for any external interfaces.

No doubt, CQ is pretty powerful and its underlying architecture can allow you to do almost everything, along with its paragraph system. For our implementations, we followed an approach as described below. I am sure this is nothing new but I never saw such information on sites, so I thought of putting togather this post. In order to achieve separation of content from presentation, we defined three different categories of components:

Data Components: These are data buckets which holds data without any presentation logic built into them. It presents user with a dialog box along with various tabs to capture information.

Presentation Components: These are components which extract information from data components and display the content in the desired format.

Common components: There are common set of properties defined to capture common assets information either as part of data component or presentation component.

Let me try to explain with an example:

Requirement:
Suppose there is a need to build a website for hospitality group which has number of restaurants scattered across the globe. These restaurants are logically grouped into regions, for example, Asian, European, American etc. As part of restaurant, there is a need to capture information including: Name of the restaurant, Location, Region, image of the restaurant, Description of the place, Opening hours, facilities etc. The information for restaurants are displayed on various pages, on the restaurants home page, maps pages, regional pages etc.

(more…)

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Posted in Adobe Day, Content Management | 3 Comments »

HTML Mock-up guidelines from CMS Vendors?

Thursday, March 10th, 2011

With the develpment in CMS area, there is all the more push in the market for websites to move to a CMS system, large or small, to manage their content. As a result there are lots of new initiatives for grounds-up CMS implementation.

Usually, a CMS product starts with HTML a set of HTML mock-ups which defines how the site will look like along with specifying the static and dynamic regions on the page. By static, I mean area’s which are not editable by authors/editors and usually controlled by CSS. By Dynamic, I mean, authors/editors can go in CMS system and change content for these areas. Dynamic area could be anything, plan text, images, links etc.

The CMS developers take HTML mock-up as input, define content types based on defined dynamic area’s (and obvously functional specifications) and convert the HTML into CMS templates and content holes. The above approach sounds all straight forward but still there are soo many projects which fails/get delayed. And one of the reasons is HTML mock-ups.

Usually in an enterprise environment, multiple vendors are involved in building a website, from creative agencies, to implmentation partners to hosting partners. In most of the cases the creative agencies which develop HTML mock-ups who has no clue around how the HTML mock-up is going to be fitted in a WCM in terms of templates/ components/ elements etc. They try to make website flashy, attractive without really worrying around its maintenance. Some of the examples are:

  • Using images everywhere in the site goverened by CSS than HMTL
  • Same block of content using different HTML structure on different pages though the look and feel is the same
  • Hard coded height width dimensions for image tags
  • Too many variations in layout, which in reality could fit in just a few
  • etc.

Even if the HTML mock-up is developed to the best of practices, its usage varies with each CMS. An example, there is a style defined globally which is applicable to all the divs in centre portion of a page. Some CMS systems add their own divs when elements/components are dragged on the centre part. This leads to style issues for the centre portion and we spend lot of time negating those effects.

I think its time for CMS vendors to move forward and lay down best practices, guidelines that needs to be followed when developing HTML mock-up for their product. This could definitely makes easy for creative agencies and implementors to get it right the first time than really spending time on HTML structures just because the choosen CMS doesn’t like the way HTML mock-up is designed. It will really going to reduce overall project cost and project failures.

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Posted in Content Management, Usability | 2 Comments »

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