Yuval Ararat » Content Management

Switch that cms.

Yuval Ararat — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 07:59:46 +0000

Companies wish to refresh their CMS implementations from time to time, that is natural and that is the evolution of the Internet, disguised as a revolutionary organisational change. Some companies who have not followed the product versions they are on, due to varios not fully understood reasons, face a big hurdle when they try to tackle a refresh 5 years after the implementation was complete.
Companies at that stage look for the upgrade path and find that its not as simple as they might think, products have dramatically changed, API and development need to be done from scratch or minimal reuse and IT will need to redesign implementation and plugins from webservers.
These hurdles usually direct those companies to a path examining other products, which in turn makes the current product look really bad when compared to the modern competitors.
When comparing the content editing interfaces of few years back you see that Internet evolution has not ceased and the new interfaces are slick, quick and easy to use.
To change your CMS you need to go through a very elaborate process, you need to remodel your data, refresh your site, rebuild your CMS data structure and content interfaces. You will need to bring the old data through from your old CMS through some sort of migration and while your at it why not get social media integration and some internal integrations that you always wished you have done.
But just like renovating a house, the problem with projects like this are the complexity and dependency between the sub projects and the unknown factor.
Your data migration depends on your data remodeling and that requires your wireframes and content strategy to be designed first making the migration design fase delayed. You want to integrate to the companies internal SAP product availability but require the catalogues to be migrated and these are delayed from the wireframe and content remodelling activities.
You get the point.
Every change in every project carries changes in the other projects and simple changes to one project can be cumbersome to others.
So why not spread it around?
Start from your new CMS and build up, stage by stage. Solidify one and get the next on top.
You cant paint the walls before you plaster them and you cant plaster them before the frame.
So my advice will be to set your expectations as follows, expect to have the site working before you get your data migrated and before the integration points are working.
Make the work a step ladder and climb only when you feel secure the other step will hold.
But you might state that this will create problems when you identify changes that are needed in the step under you.
This is true that it could take more to fix. But there is a benefit in loosing so many management and layers to figure out the same and coordinate that Change earlier in the process.

OpenText Website Management (reddot) social communities howto

Yuval Ararat — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 13:20:03 +0000

My first howto in the OpenText world, after almost 4 years in the asylum. nice.
Social communities on the Website Management offers a great assortment of features that is enabling you to support User Generated content.
But the standard feature dont show you how you can integrate a comment section under your articles.
That is part due to the way this implementation came to be.
The core of this implementation is the Vignette Community Application, a stand alone interface to forums, blogs, wikis, ideas and media spaces. this core assumes the full functionality in a page and thus is not interfaced in a way that you easily figure out where are the components. Its sole brother (by core at least) is the Vignette Community Services which took the integration, rather then standalone, from his brother and is a set of components easily integrated into your environment.
Because both have the same core, the Social communities will support every call you can think off. that is the great news.
So how do you go about and create the comments region under the article of yours.
Lets start with the piping.
You will need to create HTTP connectors to the following XAPI calls:

Create New Object
Delete Objects

Before i will start with the code lets look at the way we will implement the creation of comments.
Assuming we want comments on pages in the CMS that have an ID, without it you cannot differentiate the pages, we will need to create a remote object to represent the page.
The remote object is capable of uniquely identifying the comments, the Remote object is the ID of the Comments parent in our case though it can be responsible to more.
We will start with creating a new HTTP connector for the creation of the remote object.
Create a new HTTP connector group for your site.
Click on Prepared Operations.
Then create a new operation using the star (Add a new data group) at the top left of the screen.
Give the group a name – “remoteobject.create”
add the URL postix – “CreateNewObject”
Method should be “Post”

Go to the Request Parameters and add the following.

extObjType
extObjRealm
extObjSystemType
extObjSystemID
extObjContext
extObjID
name
type

Do the same to the delete operation
Give the group a name – “remoteobject.delete”
add the URL postix – “DeleteObjects”
Method should be “Post”
In this case you only need to point the objectID (x.x.x) for it to be deleted.

Now we have the ability to create the basic item that is capable of holding comments, ratings etc.
This method will enable you to later expand with creation of comments and ratings on the remote object.
The best place to figure out the required parameters is in the developer guide for the Vignette Community Application and the XML API Documentation

Hype By Tumult Review

Yuval Ararat — Mon, 30 May 2011 11:35:22 +0000

Just encountered the Hype HTML5 generator and looked a bit under the hood.
I am not interested in a review of the UI nor in a comparison to the Flash capabilities.
This is a review of the softwares output, the HTML5 or lack of it and the SEO and Templating issues i am observing.
I will start with the first thing that got my eye.
The source code is only 2 lines, the second line is a JavaScript include to the real software.

and this script include will not be indexed by the search server since it is a JavascriptInclude and not a link to HTML in a frame as you can see below:

http://static.tumultco.com/hype/gallery/BirthdayParty/BirthdayParty_Resources/birthdayparty_hype_generated_script.js?93067

now this is bad enough to get me to walk away from the product, but then i thought about all the minisites that live in the internet and have the merits due to the campaign they represent and not through keywords and search.
Well these draw their site content usually from CMS of some sort in most big organisations.
This is going to be a very hard task to endure here, there is too much wiring in the back to make this JavaScript something that came out of the CMS, wether its content alone or the whole file.
under var scenes there is the whole configuration of the scenes, DIV sections of the design, and they are in a complex array based on the ID later used in timeline and button behaviour. not something you wish to mess with as the DIV ids "D6D4872B-15A0-4AAC-BE1F-D19521BD7D6B-39296-0000A9020DBE91F3":
And this is the content/metadata of that id is represented in this lovely JSON.

{"PaddingTop":"8px","PaddingLeft":"8px","Position":"absolute","Width":"328px","PaddingRight":"8px","Left":"339px","Display":"inline"
,"Height":"294px","Opacity":"0.000000","Overflow":"visible","ZIndex":"12","Top":"249px","TextColor":"#000000","FontSize":"14px"
,"WhiteSpaceCollapsing":"preserve","WordWrap":"break-word","PaddingBottom":"8px","InnerHTML":"SUNDAY, MAY 15 @ 12:30

Please join us for an afternoon of wine tasting/consuming at Ridge Winery in the Cupertino Hills. I will provide picnic eats.
Please drive carefully as the road becomes one lane as you get higher up the mountain, and there are usually bicyclists sharing the road. Also, be prepared for windier and chillier weather than in the Valley.

Please be mindful of your limit :)
 
If picnicing isn't enough for you, or if you're up for going all out, please join us for part 2 ...

","TagName":"div"}

This will in turn become a nested DIV inside a DIV carrying the ID

SUNDAY, MAY 15 @ 12:30

Please join us for an afternoon of wine tasting/consuming at Ridge Winery in the Cupertino Hills. I will provide picnic eats.
Please drive carefully as the road becomes one lane as you get higher up the mountain, and there are usually bicyclists sharing the road. Also, be prepared for windier and chillier weather than in the Valley.

Please be mindful of your limit :)
 
If picnicing isn't enough for you, or if you're up for going all out, please join us for part 2 ...

Beyond the cumbersome DIV structure and generation of code that will be improved in later versions as i trust it will the content is not suitable to be converted into the CMS of choice even if you wanted.
This tool at its current state generates a create and forget sites that are not HTML5 until you run the browser over and get the result rendered through the JavaScript engine.
Thus this tool is not really a HTML 5 UI editor but a Site Generator with the capability to get great flash like results in the best standard, well not yet standard, HTML5.
Its use cases are currently limited to the non SEO based sites and to replace the Flash based sites, though Flash does offer a better SEO integration, this could be also guessed by the lovely gallery that Tumult are offering for the product. All the sites are for simple scenarios where there is no content management intended, like the birthday example i am exploiting for code.
Conclusion
Hype is a great tool to be able to replace the Flash based websites and is aimed for the designers and UI specialists. it is not yet a mature product that is capable of generating real HTML5 pages to be later used in the process of templating a WCM and should not be used as such.
In my opinion this tool is for startups, i believe they should abuse this tool in creating online tutorials and demos of their software, it will make it awesome!

Great Intranets

Yuval Ararat — Thu, 19 May 2011 15:05:15 +0000

After a day in ibf24 from ibf I was chugging along until Jonathan Phillips contacted me through Twitter. we had a nice discussion about the implementation of intranets, is the budget the main factor in determining if the project will be a success or are there more factors.

My take was that it is not just budget; although budget does set the tone and can influence the size it is still not the deciding factor. You can do amazing things on the smallest budget if you keep the focus of the goals and implement them rigorously, for example i will take WWF intranet, which is a combination of Google Apps and a CMS.

During the 24 hrs which i partaken in only a few (10) of them we were exposed to many intranets of organisations, it was like having a door open to the heart of other organisations and check to see how they are doing things. the good thing about this was you got to see some shoe string operations with amazing implementations when it comes to the adaptability of the intranet to the users and some major brands with intranets that seem to be inactive or lonely.

During our discussion Jonathan also pointed me to his blogpost describing the characteristic of a successful intranet and asked me to respond.

This is my response to Jonathan’s post.

I will start with the definition of Great, i believe it lacks the context and thus encompasses things that are cultural and things that are technological.
Important and significant is only a valid point if the intranet is doing its job in delivering the content in a manner that is useful and engaging. When this happens you get a site that is important and significant to the company, only if users use it it is important and this is a product not a goal.

This logic applies to Wonderful, First Rate, very good, remarkable and consequential, this is not something you can target when implementing a service nor when maintaining it. It could be of extraordinary powers, very admirable, unusual and considerable in degree, power, intensity. these things can be planed but usually cost much if the system we are replacing is great and likeable.

For references I will list the Characteristics Jonathan pointed
1. An open, multi-way communication vehicle: Top Down, Bottom Up, Peer-to-Peer
2. A facilitator of enterprise collaboration
3. An executor of business transactions
4. A tool that positively impacts every job in your company
5. A gateway to business knowledge
6. A digital reflection of the values of the company
7. Serves to build enterprise community
8. Transparent governance, management and strategy
9. An engaging space
10. Available where your employees need it
I agree with all of the other items, they are the corner stone of the intranet in my opinion, but the one thing i want to talk about here is how do you achieve this.

There is an illusion that all these characteristics relate to a single entity and thus translate this to a single product to solve the problem.

This is nice if you have a very limited team with a non-diverse need. If that is the case you can probably suffice with a good WordPress implementation and be done with it.

Most cases are not this easy and require a more complex environment to facilitate the users needs.

The question is of how we assemble this ménage of solutions? Do we turn to an all encompassing solution that has the potential to flop and make the whole intranet look like a joke? do we assemble it with products?
Who makes the decision of what product to implement and how do we know which one is the best for our users?
In my experience, the implementations I have found to be most successful were experiments in their youth. They were implemented from a need of a certain group and then spread to the organisation.
I also like to look at the economy of products in the organisation, much like a startup some products in the intranet get a lot of traction and some don’t. this economy environment lets you choose the solutions that match the crowd.
As oppose to core solutions that are there for a predefined business process our intranet is a service for the users in order to get the core business process done more effectively.
Since these are not mandatory system and they come to support the processes we have the privilege of experimenting and failing, the experiments should be like little staretups in the intranet, if they get to pitch and show value they stay if they don’t they go.
The merit of a solutions value should be based on the “Value to the user”/Cost if it is greater then 1 we are winning if it is smaller we are losing. in my personal opinion 1 is a great equilibrium for some applications.
The process i am suggesting is this:
1. Check to see what groups are using today and figure out if they are pleased or not. there could be some wiki’s and other tools lurking in the groups.
2. Let the groups experiment with the tools on the market and choose the ones to be tested.
3. Put analytic tools on the solutions tested to get the usage and let the users start working with the tools.
4. Check after a period of time what tools were used most.
5. Check to see how they helped and if they stand the merit of exposure to the whole intranet.
6. If they do seem like a good candidate to solve an unsolved problem in the organisation merge them into the intranet.
7. Check the value, rinse and repeat
This way like Lego blocks you will pick the matching tools for your people and not force them to use the technology that looked cool in the sales pitch.
if the tools are SaaS, like Yammer, then use them yourself and try to get people to send emails to you with the success stories from those tools.

On another note, this method holds some problems in it that will be present whenever we dont go with the single entity approach, it lacks the integration between solutions. this is the one thing that is a requirement on the developers to tailor the integration and find the solution for interoperability when there is no standard available.
This will be the biggest hurdle but it is still not as big as picking the wrong software for your users, some of the SaaS give a great solution as they integrate to the dashboard’s and websites easily.

Oh just something from the ibf24 twitter feed, intranet in 3 months is not a valid response, 3 months for the WCM might be ok but development of the product does not stop here.

Content Staging and Virtual Staging

Yuval Ararat — Mon, 16 May 2011 23:16:35 +0000

I was just reading over at Gadgetopia the post by Deane Barker about Content Staging and the merits of Virtual Staging of content. i was impressed by Dean of exposing the disadvantages of the Virtual Staging methodology especially when arises the need to change Menu structure.
When i come to think about an Architecture like this i think there is a balance point that is better then virtual or actual. Since we have to consider other parameters to the equation such as redundancy stability and productivity my take on the staging is a bit complex.
A Decoupled CMS/WCM is the term you might use for the architecture but the nature of the implementation does not mandate the software to directly support this.
I will start with a diagram of the architecture and then dive into the water.

As you can see i have quite a strong opinion in regards to the content staging and publishing.
The process i see is a decoupled CMS that is a hybrid approach of a single server with multiple endpoints, the content generation is done in the internal facing content management server and staged through the application and web server so that it can be examined when a workflow is informing the editor of an upcoming change or new content and enables the creator to examine his work in context, i am a supporter of the in-context editing.
This is not the pure Decoupled system with many to many relationship as i have not seen a successful implementation of such a system yet.
But now that we have separated the content editing from the live content we have some ease of use and the ability to do any thing we want on the content editing site and later publish it to the website.
The publishing method can be any set of things, it could be DB replication and having to work on the same SAN/NAS or it could be file sync and DB injections, any method that has the stability and is well maintained is a good method.
The DR of the system has much more to offer as the environments are unconnected and can be replicated to a Hot Cold or Hot Hot scenarios, the ability to push the content in several data centre’s is also natural to a system like this.
As for the direction of content and code, or the Backward Forward dance “Code moves forward. Content moves backward.” blog post by Seth Gottlieb, in this scenario the whole server farm is our production and the content moves from here down the glide path.
The separation is based on the ability to separate the core from the content editors UI, letting the application interact with the API (core) of the product away from the content editors server, in some products this separation exists in a natural form and you will not need to manipulate the product, in some cases you will have to create that separation in a more complex way, but it is possible in most products.

Requiem to comments

Yuval Ararat — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 03:03:35 +0000

We all like reading posts on blogs, news sites and media. we like to see videos and pictures. some of us like to comment on them too. but those comments are not social, they are local and isolated. who saw this in his twitter feed?

i commented on _____ blog post http://bit.ly____

This is a hack with a hint to the future.

Comments are a social thing, an interaction of the reader with the blogger. Why should it not be a part of the social fabric?
There are a few first trials to weave the social tools to website, like the cmswire.com reactions driven by disqus, but comments are still available. No one was bald enough to take the plunge yet and remove comments all together.

The Facbook social plugin gives another platform to replace the comments while adding the facebook aspect to it.

The risk as with all cloud services is the locking of the data to a third party and with the last Amazon EC3 shutdown, as with all risks the mitigation and the value it offers should be assessed, my view is that an integration of a twitter/facebook feed to your articles is much more engaging then the current comments structure. The value and exposure in the social networks will beat the search value, yes i think that search will crumble against the mighty social network information structure, information is ranked better in a social network to my oppinion but that is a huge article i have no time to deal with at the moment.

So what do you think about the comments death? is it inevitable?

Why #CMS Modules are not Enterprise worthy

Yuval Ararat — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 00:46:07 +0000

I just encountered elcom CMS proposition, flipping through the pages of the products i realized the truth of the proposition.
The product is bought as a base infrastructure with Base modules and then you can add new modules on top.
This is a very small business oriented approach to my taste and understanding.
When we approach an enterprise with a “Social Package” or with Blogs/Wiki/Comments modules that you can add to the base offer we will get a bitter response to the latter, the people in the organization don’t like to play Lego. they just don’t care if the tags is different module to the wiki’s or not, TCO is what they care about and the CAPEX encuring the purchase to be justified with the ROI.
So packing modules into integrations, seamlessly integrate able product lines will generate much better traction then modulizing offerings with a base install.
The thought line behind modulization is clear, installing a new module will be simple. but the simplicity is good for mediume and small businesses and not a large scale IT infrastructure where the stability and scalability play a bigger part of the decision making.
So my take on the offering from elcom is that its aimed to the medium size clients making them feel big enterprises as they are installing ECM and not some Joomla/Drupal open source thingy.
Looking into the offered modules and i noticed that the bread and butter of an enterprise are in the additional modules sections, SSO and Staging of content are the air you breath in an organization with more then one layer of content creator and multiple business units handling content in the environment.
This leads me to believe that the product is not aimed at enterprise after all is it.
So these days businesses use the Enterprise keyword as a marketing spin to make the purchaser look good in-front of the board of directors and to explain high costs, noice.
Coming back to the Modules vs Product theory, in the field of large organizations a module can be used only by a small segment of the business and be neglected in the purchase as to the additional cost, thus may be preventing a better business process. or it could be a hidden feature on the platform that gets used most often and add the best value.
Business in the sizes we are speaking of will shell the extra dollars for a full package so the offering of modularization does not appeal to it.
As oppose to the medium business who has a small IT team that is very well familiar with all the organization and has the ability to chase every requirement and be aware of it, in this case modularization is a great optimization solution to save on the IT cost of a CMS.

The iPad web influence.

Yuval Ararat — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 23:41:11 +0000

No no no, i did not get an iPad on ebay, its still missing some basic specs i need like a camera, though the WePad seems more like what i want.
The iPad is starting to symbolize the death of the Searched web, where website page was king, this is done with the help of mobile OS’s perception of usability standards.
iPad is pointing on the change we are making to the internet, from the even spread internet to Silos of information instead with vertical content, the Apps!
There are some people in the industry that compare the iPad with the CD-ROM publishing phenomena, where CDs were sellotaped to the front of a magazine, and their inability to bring extra profit. they were only done to glorify the news paper brand.
Apps are wonderful things they are focused on a single realm of usage and the put the rest of the world aside, but they are changing the way we build our internet and structuring our content.
We used to have silos of thought and very productized information consumption long ago when the internet was nothing more then a dream in some university, they called it news paper.
But the internet broke these silos to pieces and enabled a generation of people to produce news and information sharing in the forms of Blogs, Micro blogging and Collaboration Sites.
These enabled us to publish everything and surpass governments to display real footage from places like Iran.

But the iPad is becoming the icon of the reversal of that, its iconic because of the broken promise of creating the ultimate publishers tool.

What we get is a big App driven solution resembling the iPhone and Android phones supplying segregated content streams that are awesome on the go but lack when you hit a certain size and commitment.
The phenomena we are getting now is that many companies invest efforts in becoming iPad capable with applications, especially publishing houses, which in this age of the web should not happen. The web standards should have sufficed with a browser.
Some will claim that the Appcelerator IDE and alike just create a web interface over the same content i supply, i disagree as to the point that web standards should have driven the product to be able to display and let a person interact with content without the need to re mask it under an app.

The issues i see with this from the content management side are huge, since we are now using a different interface to display content you will not be getting the same content as it is probably not looking “Good” on the App you just built, this will mandate an “iPad” version of the same content and thus will create content duplication and degradation to fix display issues that could have been avoided.
We are talking about multiple content formats to maintain partially duplicated content with same metadata and probably the same tags and classification, all in the sake of the App.
This will create the duplication of resources in the team to manage the Website and the App’s, iPhone/iPad/Android etc, content.
I wonder how quick will somebody build a publishing plugins/system only for iPhone/iPad and the likes?

But i think that the product is incomplete as with the iPhone that was released in the first version without the GPS who its competitors had.
So i am not claiming i will never buy an iPad, just not this one.

As for some other perspective i got thinking about when i was reading Jeff Jarvis article, the inability to open the packaging, with the ability to close it back, makes these items throwaway like and very unfriendly to people who can repair electronics or inquisitive child.
This is something i can understand in a phone a bit more, may be as a construction stability, but not at a personal computing unit.

What went wrong? #fixwcm!

Yuval Ararat — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 10:59:13 +0000

This subject was introduced by a group of WCM guys and will be discussed in the best Web Conference in the world by Janus Boye.
This will include a Web Content Management track that is suggesting it will give guidance as it states

How do you get it right? What are the pitfalls to avoid? On this track you can learn from internationally recognized analysts, who will be joined by practitioners, all sharing their insights on how to get it right.

to solve your earthly problems with the WCM implementations.
The panel will be Janus Boye representing the customer viewpoint, Jarrod Gingras of CMS Watch representing the analyst massive, and Jon Marks defending the honour of the implementers.

This session will be an interactive one where you can use twitter to submit questions about the problems or solutions you had to WCM implementations using #fixwcm tag.

But what is really wrong about the WCM that we are in need of this session?

Inspired by the twitter tag #fixwcm i was pondering about the CMS sickness and what is the methods i see to cure that.

some people suggest that the WCM term is bigger then what it should be and thus too hard to handle and needs to be cut into smaller chunks.

Others put the blame on estimates and project schedules, or more politely on the sales process for cutting down on the implementation times.

But what is wrong with the WCM products and implementations?

The customer is not happy with the solutions and usually works with it only due to necessity not because they love using it.

But why is that?
The technology has matured enough to satisfy any customers need.
Implementers have matured.
The web has matured and implementation processes been formed. we have Agile methodology to make the implementation in the most versatile way.

This should have been sufficient to support the creation of the best fitting products for each and every customer. but it just doesn’t cut it.

Whats is wrong with that?

Interaction is what comes tomy mind every time i think of what went wrong.
Internal and external interactions are the place where we lose the implementation.
it starts with the initial process of selecting the right product through translation of business processes to requirements and failing of the requirements to be formed into artifacts in development and to the final grave of testing.
When selecting a product you are dealing with the Sales teams of each vendor and they want you in, that is where you get the more generic answers “Yeah our product can do that” and they are correct but it takes time to make the product do that.
Jon Marks had a discussion about the selection process. iguess there is no clear solution to this enigma.

It continues with the Dictionary each party is using through to politics and risk management.
To prove the dictionary point just ask any of your clients what CMS is, you will be in for a bit of an earthquake.

So what is to be done?
Some of the points that were up in the air like simplification of terms under the CMS with smaller chunks will create an easier dictionary.
use of simpler tools for the implementation.

The way i see it changing is with the maturity of the clients and the implementors in understanding what should be done when implementing the WCM and been trouthful about the weight and cost of such a process we will have a better implementation and love to WCM solutions.
Peace and Love
Yuval.

Wave demo

Yuval Ararat — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 07:05:12 +0000

Just dropping a Wave demo using the Wavr plugin.

Can you submit to this one not from the wave?