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Most of the enterprise applications developed today either handle content internally or present content to an end user.
Building a content management system from scratch is time consuming, and it will seldom be what it was meant to be—the information flow of the content is often too complex, and mistakes will often occur. Instead of developing a content management system from scratch, you can choose from several systems on the market that have been developed with scalability and maintainability in mind. However, the cost and the complexity of an existing system requires you to analyze your requirements for such a system carefully to ensure that the customer will get the most suitable content management system that represents the best value for his or her money.
The different problems we outlined in the introduction to content management presented in Chapter 1 will be investigated more closely here. We will go through a couple of different factors that can help you to decide if your company or your client should invest money in a content management system. Remember that it is not always obvious whether you need to install a content management system. To recap, a content management system is designed to solve the following sorts of problems:
Many publications need to be published from the same source.
Information is changing too quickly to be handled by hand.
Content and design needs to be separated to allow the look and feel of the site to be updated without rewriting the content.
But when does a customer have too much information to process manually? To answer that question, you need to be able to calculate the amount of content. The content becomes unwieldy for the customer to handle mainly because of two reasons: A lot of content exists and a many content types need to be incorporated into the site. When we say "a lot of content," we are referring to the number of pages here, an approximate maximum being 800 pages. This is a rough number because the amount of content is only one part of the problem. (In fact, this approximation applies to sites where most of the pages are static pages that do not change on a frequent basis. If you have an active site, the number is more likely to be closer to 200.) Even if your site has just a few pages, you may also have many placeholders or content components that need to be updated. Every content component involves a user interaction that takes time. To calculate content throughput, you need to know how many placeholders are modified in some way per unit of time. If you intend to create 40 content components per week, and you need to modify 20 of these per week in some way (that is, you must delete or update them), your content throughput is 60 in this example. A rough maximum here is 400 content components for one person to handle a week (in a manual way).
The number of different publications is also an important factor to calculate when determining whether a manual system needs to be replaced by a content management system. Whether you have one simple brochure or three different ones on your site is important. Obviously it takes more time to manage three different layouts, and sometimes even the content on three different sites, than one layout. The personalization factor of the content on the Web site is also important—more personalization requires more effort. If you also decide to make your brochure available in three different languages, the amount of work to keep them up to date rises dramatically. Something else you must consider: The previously mentioned factors are not the only ones you need to take into account. Just as each site is unique, each will have its own combination of content issues—the variations are far too many to address in a book. As with many things, experience is the best teacher. However, here we will try to give you a formula that can help you decide if a customer needs a content management system or not.
To be able to measure the needs and benefits of introducing a content management system to a company, use our content management formula:
Placeholders × Placeholder Types × Publications × Personalization ×
Redesigns × Throughput
We want to emphasize that this formula only gives you a hint as to whether the customer will benefit from a content management system or not.
Let us take a look at each of the pieces of this formula:
Placeholders represents the number of places where information will be published (or are published today in a manual system). This number is the total number of placeholders divided by 1000. Adjust values below 0.5 to 0.5. Use values above 0.5 without modifications.
Placeholder Types is the total number of different types of placeholders that exist—for instance, chart placeholders, HTML placeholders, and financial information placeholders from the legacy system. This value is the total number of placeholder types divided by a factor of 5. Again, adjust values below 0.5 to 0.5. Values above 1 use as is.
Publications define the total number of different publications that you need to create.
Personalization is the degree of personalization you have or plan to have in the new system. A factor of 1 indicates that you are not intending to have any kind of personalization. A factor of 2 is for sites with a little personalization (such as e-mail newsletters, simple login features, and a simple page where the users can change their membership properties). Factors 3 and 4 are for sites where personalization occurs on most of the content components. Personalization is also based on statistical information collected from persons browsing on the site (factor 4) and whether publications exist in different languages.
Redesigns stands for the number of major design changes to the site that you are planning to do per year. Divide this number by 2. This factor can never be smaller than 1, however—so for one redesign per year the factor will be 1 and not 0.5.
Throughput is the number of components that are changed in some way during a week. Divide the total numbers of components by 50, round values up to the nearest half value, and adjust values —below 0.5 to 0.5 and values above 0.5 to 1. Use values 1 and above as they are.
The breakpoint of the formula to recommend a content management system is 1. If the result from the formula is less than 1, the company in question will not gain much by installing a content management system.
Let us look at some examples to clarify how to use the content management formula. Company MyLittleComp does not have a Web site—the only publication it has is a brochure in two languages (Swedish and English) that it distributes as 200 leaflets to their customers. This company changes the brochures once a week and redesigns them twice a year. Inserting these numbers into our formula results in the following:
200 Placeholders × 1 Placeholder Type × 1 Publication × 2
Personalizations × 1 Redesign × 1 Throughput
Based on the previously discussed factors, the value for Placeholders works out to 0.5 (200/1000 = 0.2, which is adjusted to 0.5), and Placeholder Types equals 0.5 (1/5 = 0.2, which is adjusted to 0.5). The other values can be used as they are to calculate the result as follows:
0.5 × 0.5 × 1 × 2 × 1 × 1 = 0.5
This indicates MyLittleComp does not need a content management system today, but might in the future if it continues to grow.
Company LittleBigger is a travel agency that already has a Web presence. This company's site has 600 different placeholders of 2 different types. The content of 30 different components is changed each week. Since this company is only using the latest technology it only has a Web site that it will change three times a year. Using the previous factors for figuring out the values to plug into our formula, we get the following:
0.6 × 0.5 × 1 × 1 × 3 × 1 = 0.9
This company is a bit tricky. Although the value is quite close to the magic number (1 in this case), close is not enough. LittleBigger does not need a content management system; however, because this company's business is Web based, there may still be some benefit to using a content management system versus its current manual system.
Finally, company HeavyComp produces motorbikes and needs a new site with information about its new models and spare parts. Today HeavyComp's site incorporates 1200 placeholders of 8 different types. This company changes the content of 200 different placeholders each week. An e-mail newsletter and a catalog are sent out to members. A new Web site will be developed that allows member information to be personalized based on the local area of each member. The site will be redesigned once a year. Plugging in the numbers, we get the following:
1.2 × 1.6 × 2 × 2 × 1 × 4= 30.72
This company really needs a content management tool!
Table 5-2 provides a general framework for evaluating your own situation.
|
Complexity Level |
Need for a Content Management System |
|---|---|
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Below 0.3 |
You have little need for a content management system. |
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0.3–.05 |
You could begin thinking about a content management system if you believe that your needs will grow. |
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0.5–.075 |
You should begin thinking about a content management system if you believe that your needs will grow. |
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0.75–1.0 |
This is the beginning of the gray zone between needing a content management system and making do without one. In this range, go with your intuition. Consider whether the complexity will grow. If it will, this is a good time to begin a content management analysis preparation. If the complexity will not grow, a content management system may well be more effort than it is worth. |
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1.0–1.75 |
This is still in the gray zone for investing in a content management system. However, a content management system is more likely needed in this region than not. Even if the site complexity will not grow, a content management system may save you more money in the long run than it costs. |
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1.75–10.0 |
A content management system is recommended. You may be able to start slowly or cover the factors that have the highest values, but eventually you will want to implement a content management system. |
|
Above 10.0 |
A content management system is definitely needed. The company is likely experiencing content management problems already. If the complexity is well above 10 and still growing, you may need to act quickly to either control complexity growth, or implement the parts of a content management system that relieve the most pressing problems on the site. |
Remember that the level of complexity as dictated by our content management formula is not the whole story. If a content management system is very expensive, a complexity of 5 may not be enough to warrant obtaining the content management system—the costs to implement the system may be higher than the savings. On the other hand, you could implement an inexpensive content management system for a site with a complexity level below 1 and see benefits. When you have gained experience from your own projects, feel free to make adjustments to formula values to fit a particular situation.
Today there exist two types of content tools that both claim they are perfect for business: document publishing tools and content management systems. Document publishing tools and content management systems are two different items intended to solve different problems. Document publishing tools such as Documentum take care of document versioning and document handling in a large company, whereas content management systems take care of publishing information on intranet, extranet, and Internet sites. However, the trend these days is for document publishing tools to implement more content management features in their latest versions, and for content management tools to include some document handling functionality. On the market today are many different content management tools and document publishing tools such as Story Server, Microsoft Content Management Server 2002, EPiServer, Dynamo, and Documentum. We will focus mainly on two content management tools here—Microsoft Content Management Server and EPiServer.
A well-functioning content management system requires more than a simple HTML editor to work efficiently for the customer, such Microsoft's Content Management Server 2002. You need a system that you can plug new content components into, a system where user roles and authorization is easily handled via a user-friendly interface.
Microsoft Content Management Server, or CMS, is an enterprise-wide Web content management system based on .NET technologies, XML, and IIS. Microsoft Content Management Server relies, of course, on other Microsoft server products such as IIS for content publication and management. CMS also requires a Microsoft Server operating system like Windows 2000 Server or Windows Server 2003. You also need to install the latest Microsoft Data Access Components (MDAC) and a SQL Server 2000 database that is used as the repository for the CMS. If you want to use CMS, you should do so in a homogenous Microsoft environment—Microsoft tools work best together with Microsoft tools.
Since the release of .NET Framework, all applications and server environments from Microsoft are moving toward including .NET Framework as one of their building bricks. The inclusion of .NET as part of CMS 2002 empowers this latest version of CMS with new features and extensibilities that were not present in the previous versions. For instance, it is possible from an ASP.NET project to author Web services and templates for CMS and reuse them in other areas of a site. One thing that was missing in version 2001 was the ability to include CMS projects easily in Visual SourceSafe for source-code version tracking—something that is necessary if you want more than one person to work on the same project.
A good content management system requires a good administration tool. CMS now comes with a great Site Manager utility. Here you can define channels (used in CMS to define a Web site's structure) and resource/template galleries. Through the use of channels (which function similarly to the placeholders and content components mentioned earlier in this chapter), you can control where specific content is to be published and when. You can also define when content should be removed from the channel and also specify groups of users who should be able to see the channel.
Another crucial feature of a content management system is the ability to feed new content into the system. CMS provides two ways to allow authors to publish their articles. First is a new Web-based tool that runs in Internet Explorer 6 and allows users to view and edit page content directly in predefined templates. The great thing about this is no extra application tool is needed on an author's computer. Authors can also sit at home and via an Internet connection update and publish their information (after authentication, of course).
Secondly, you can use a plug-in to MS Office that allows you to publish content directly from Microsoft Word XP! This is a great way to encourage more people to create new content. Many people today use Microsoft Word, so no extra education is required to start publishing information for an intranet, extranet, or Internet site through CMS. The author just fills in some meta information, and then the plug-in packages the content and sends it to CMS.
So far so good—but does CMS have any drawbacks? From what we have experienced so far, CMS has two big drawbacks: the workflow support and the price. The workflow is a bit too simple to be used in a fairly complex environment. There is a basic workflow system in CMS that enables your users to create page content but not publish it until approved by a designated manager. However, the workflow model is rather static and inflexible. You are not able in an easy way to split the workflow or to change the approving flow. We all look at the label before buying anything—even with a content management system. Microsoft has priced this system at approximately $40,000 per CPU. With this price, it is obvious the product is not intended for small and medium-sized businesses; but for larger companies, it is a great tool to control content flow to different sites in the company.
EPiServer is a content management system tool created by a company called ElektroPost. EPiServer is based on Microsoft products such as IIS for content publishing and SQL Server, which serves as a repository. The latest version of EPiServer, version 4, is totally written in C# and runs as a managed application. This gives developers great opportunities to extend EPiServer to fit their needs better.
EPiServer is based on different building blocks, shown in Figure 5-21, to make the application as flexible as possible for the developer.
EPiServer provides several ASPX template pages that the developer can use. These templates can host reusable Web controls such as calendar controls and vote controls. The controls and the code in the code-behind page on the ASPX page use EPiServer's base classes to access the data. Besides the aforementioned reusable Web controls, this product includes several objects for handling language support, configuration, data access, and security programmatically.
The typical workflow for an administrator to create a new page is as follows:
The administrator selects a particular type of page to create.
The administrator fills in the information that should be presented and this information is stored in the database.
When a user requests a page, EPiServer authenticates that the user is allowed to view the page, and it also checks if the user has administration rights for the requested page. If the user is allowed to view the page, the template is filled with the information from the database, and a cascading style sheet (CSS) is applied to give the page the right look and feel. If the user has administration rights for the page, support for direct editing in the page is enabled (see Figure 5-22).
In the preceding sections we have looked into what comprises content management and the problems related to it. We have shown you a formula for roughly calculating whether a company will benefit from investing in a content management system. Finally, we looked at the Microsoft Content Management Server and EPiServer and pinpointed some benefits for the different products. We can say that due to its lower price, EPiServer makes a good content management system for small and medium-sized companies; even bigger companies can use it, since EPiServer seems to scale quite well. CMS is for larger companies due to the price being a little bit higher, which in turn makes its Return on Investment (ROI) span a longer time frame than EPiServer's ROI. For the time being, we strongly advise you to compare these two content management systems and at least one other with an eye toward user requirements to pick the best content management system for your customer.
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