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In today's economy, with companies focusing on immediate returns
on investment, web content management is a top priority. Content
management transforms content into the capital that drives
business success. Now more than ever, companies are focused
on increasing their efficiency and global competitiveness.
With the proliferation of corporate portals, internal and
external-facing applications, and web services, content and
application code have become vital assets. As enterprise content
continues to explode in volume, number of data types and complexity,
content management must assure that it is accurate and relevant,
and that it adds maximum value to all enterprise initiatives.
Below are some key factors McFadyen considers when feveloping successful web content management strategies:
Versioning for Security
Web site versioning plays a crucial role in the web development process. It is essential to periodically capture known snapshots of the web site. Snapshots serve several purposes. First, with a known snapshot of the web site a developer can roll back to a known-good copy of the web site. Second, if the web site or a section of it becomes hopelessly broken, a developer needs to be able to selectively pick assets to revert to. An asset is an electronic artifact that embodies the intellectual property of an organization. Having a known working set of web assets allows a developer proceed to make changes with the assurance that there’s always the ability to compare to a working copy for ongoing development. A working copy can be used as a reference copy, to discern what changed and what did not.
Content management is
all about managing, protecting, nurturing, and evolving an
ever-increasing collection of assets in a web property. It
is critical to retain previous versions of a web property.
Previous versions are often needed as archival copies, as
references to assist in ongoing development, or to retain
the ability to revert an individual asset, or to revert an
entire web property to a designated last known-good version.
Managing Concurrency and Multiple Content Contributors
Professionals by choice and by necessity work autonomously. Because each contributor to a project or content of a web site works on their own, the challenge of managing concurrent changes arises. Because of the nature of web technologies a site begins to hit the “web wall” as the number of contributors increases. A site hits the “web wall” when the pace of development exceeds the ability of informal coordination to adequately do the job.
Internets and intranets
have made many people into publishers. Management of the content
publishing process has become a challenging and critical task.
A typical web site today contains thousands or tens of thousands
of web assets (HTML, GIF, JPG, etc.) and dozens or hundreds
of content creators, editors, and approvers. Special tools
are required to manage the changing inter-relationships (Hyperlinks)
of evolving personalized web sites. The complexity of structure
and difficulty of managing a web site increases in proportion
to the number of content contributors and volume of web assets.
Many companies find themselves “hitting the web wall”
as their business begins to grow and at a time when the need
for a solution to manage content is mission critical.
Project Completion Skew
Project completion skew occurs as a team of contributors grows to a point that individuals are doing different things and multiple groups each have a different project focus—most often long term versus short term project objectives. Each project is coping with contributors on a project who are working on diverse activities, and each project alone has a need to develop, integrate, test, and review their work before their project can be integrated into the live web site. Projects run concurrently and they do not all finish at the same time. If one project is getting underway as another wraps up, there needs to be a way to keep the work separate and the organizations image consistent.
Templating Tools to Protect Against Project Completion Skew Issues
The assets of a
web site must be factored in a way that allows many members
of the team to make changes concurrently. Templating provides
for separation of project components of multiple web contributors.
The concept of templating is based on the separation of content
from presentation. One way templating can be used is to maintain
consistency of an organization’s brand image. For example,
a large organization would centralize the art direction of
a web site and decentralize the writing of the text of a web
site among the content contributors who are subject matter
experts. Project timelines will always differ, yet the corporate
image remains consistent (read more about this in the section
of this paper dedicated to templating).
Manageable Deployment Infrastructure
The goal of deployment infrastructure is to copy assets to the production server into the right location at the appropriate time. Deployment comprises the processes and practices by which web assets that have been reviewed and approved are copied from a development environment to a production environment. The goal of a deployment infrastructure is to copy assets to the production server into the right location at the appropriate time. Assets no longer on the development side are deleted from the production side.
An important organizational underpinning of a deployment infrastructure is the release agreement, which binds the development and production groups into an agreement of responsibility. Content and application developers agree to approve and formally submit any asset to be deployed and the production server administrators agree to use only released assets on a production server. In a well-designed deployment infrastructure, only someone that is authorized to initiate a deployment job does so. A well-designed deployment infrastructure copies assets into production with minimal or no effort, with full control, notification, and the ability to roll back to a known-good version.
Most web operations do deployment, which has the important effect of separating the process of developing, testing, and approving a web site--which is defined as development—from the serving of web assets—which is defined as production.
Deployment divides the
creative but sometimes messy job of creating and testing a
web site, from the serving of those assets to the outside
world, including intranet, public web sites, and partner organizations
on an extranet. The major decisions of deployment have to
do with configuration: allowing authorized people to deploy
content and denying access to content of unauthorized people.
Workflow to Compress Work Cycles
Workflow is the process by
which people collaborate to develop assets within a content
management system. This issue becomes important when several
people collaborate on a job, where wait time is a significant
proportion of the total job time, and where patterns of interaction
are repeated frequently. Workflow improves productivity by
minimizing the wait time between successive steps, and it
automates the business logic of an organization.
Workflow infrastructure
combines people, projects, and a business environment into
a virtual assembly line. In a virtual assembly line, a highly
skilled contributor is presented with a task to perform, in
the context of other related assets, where the required task
can be completed efficiently. Upon completion of the task,
the contributor transitions the job to the next task and to
the next contributor with minimal delay. This works harmoniously
with the business environment, because all of this occurs
within established processes and procedures. Errors and process
failures are minimized.
Workflow
A number of concepts
underpin the workflow paradigm. An important foundation is
the identification of repeated patterns of interaction between
people, projects, and the business environment. The patterns
are codified into workflow job specifications, which are programs
that run within the workflow infrastructure to create workflow
jobs. A workflow job consists of tasks that are related by
transition links (such as approve and reject).
Key Benefits of Workflow
Infrastructures:
- Saving Time
- Increasing throughput by
eliminating waiting
- Reducing errors
- Improving adherence to
established processes
- Allowing greater ability
to undertake web initiatives
A good workflow design consists
of a structure that meets requirements: as simple as possible,
but no simpler. The goal is to identify interaction sequences
for which codifying into workflow jobs will reap benefits
to the organization.
Template Interface for Content Contributors
Web site visitors demand fresh
content to remain loyal and continue to patronize a web site—this
necessity of keeping content fresh for visitors as a factor
of success is called the freshness imperative. Like a building,
a web site has a visual presence and internal structural connections,
and its interactions with a visitor evolves as the web site
is used over time. Unlike a physical architectural artifact
such as a building, however, a web site responds to a different
set of expectations from its visitors. A visitor expects a
web site to be simple to grasp, expressive in its intent,
and comfortable to move about in. Visitors also expect to
see something new each time they visit. This expectation is
the freshness imperative and in this context freshness could
mean personalized content rendered for each specific visitor,
or it could imply current content for everyone.
To respond to the demands for fresh content, contributors need tools to support this effort. Templating tools offer a way for content contributors to reduce time to web and for managers to control what goes live and ensure that the organizations brand is maintained consistently. To understand templating it is important to understand how information flows in a template system . In the diagram below content contributors are a source of data. A data-capture developer encodes the data entry and validation logic that the data-capture user interface obeys. Another source of data is a relational database. The template developer creates a template specification asset, which encodes how to render the finished page, based on inputs from one or more data content records, or one or more databases. The generated files can be of many types, one example is a pure HTML page. It could also be a Java server page (.jsp) or a Java servlet.
A well-designed templating
system gives a web site a number of properties. It fosters
a consistent visual design, an ability to be easily updated
with fresh information, a factoring of the web assets to facilitate
changes by many developers concurrently, and an efficient
run-time architecture that lets the web site perform well
under load.
To read about some of
McFadyen Solutions’s successful web content management
implementations click here.
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