Acronyms:

CMS  : Content Management System

WCM : Web Content Management

WEM  : Web Experience Management

WTF  : What The Fish

One of the question was about ‘Integration with our existing CMS’. This was the area where I was interested in, so I was really attentive and analyzed every word they spoke about integration. Unfortunately, none of the MQ ‘leaders’ were convincing enough on CMS integration side, moreover, they were trying to propose their WCM product,  inline with their Portal Stack.

I was quite surprised while they were pushing their WCM product, without even knowing why and since how long we(customer) were using other vendor’s WCM product. They were having no idea on the volume of content we had and how simple or complex our implementation was.  It’s quite common vendors proposing related products alongside with their core product. But, when it comes to Integration of their product with other vendor-product, you will often hear them saying – ‘we have a partnership’ ,  ‘we can write a custom connector’, ‘we can use web services’ etc…. But how truthful are they while making these claims is an intriguing question. I think it is better to research integration options beforehand, or ask your vendor for a specific case study along with customer’s testimonials.

Coming back to the topic of this post –

We all are aware that the vital principle of content management system is to separate content from presentation. This is true, as we don’t create different versions of same content in different manner for different delivery platforms. One content can be targeted to many channels such as – desktop browser, portal interfaces, mobile devices etc…and when we say different delivery channels, we have different options to deliver the content to these channels,  I will cover some of them here -

1. Presentation Templates : This is pretty common, most of the implementation takes this approach, be it intranet microsite or internet website, developers can use product specific APIs to fetch the content and present the same to the site visitors.

2. Presentation Portlets : Some of the content technology vendor ships CMS portlets for their own portal products. Ex. OT-Vignette, IBM (Authoring/Rendering Portlets) and others. On the other hand, few core CMS vendor ships content portlets for different Portal Products. These portlets can be deployed on the supported portal platform and are responsible to fetch the content from CMS and display it on a portal page. You can configure CMS portlets in a portal page which can display your content from one or more CMS sites/nodes/workspace. Most of these portlets provide interface to create, manage and display the content.  Management Functions are quite limited and if in case they do not cater to your requirements, you may want to extend these portlets and write additional custom code based on your requirements.

3. Presentation Templates(For portal interface) :  This is straight forward. You can use this approach when there is no clean integration available between your CMS and the Portal Platform. Write a simple presentation template as mentioned in #1 for fetching the content, apply the right CSS(as per your portal look and feel), and make sure that the HTML you use is aligned with the portlet/channel/i-view etc. Once the template is complete, publish the page as HTML(static publish). Configure your portlet to fetch this HTML file. This is a quite simple/fast/non-expensive way to get your CMS content on a portal page. Disadvantage of this approach is that it’s a one way communication channel. You can only ‘read’ your static content. Dynamic content delivery, in-context editing and User Generated content will not be applicable in this approach.

4. REST : This could be one of your option to access content if your CMS provides REST APIs for accessing the CMS data. All you need is use REST URLs and access a resource in the system and get the output in either XML or as a JSON object. Once you have the required information/content, you can apply the presentation to render it. It’s not only the read but a  supported REST service provides developers with Create, Edit, Update, Delete (CRUD) functions for operating on the specified content/content-object.

5. RSS : There are couple of scenarios and options to fetch and render content using RSS.  Take an example of news feed from CMS – You can write content template to search your News content based on publish date/time, retrieve the data, and generate the RSS XML. You can now either display it for a web page or you can consume it in a RSS Portlet/Reader.Another way is to export your content as XML from within the CMS and write a utility to generate the RSS XML and to display/consume it.

6. Content Delivery on Mobile: If you are using WEM stack with Mobile delivery platform integrated with your content management system, it becomes fairly easy to target content to a particular mobile device. You can leverage the device database to know the device’s OS, type(touch/key-based), screen(size and resolution) and apply right presentation (Layout and CSS) Template, before rendering it to the Mobile device. If you are not using any sophisticated mobile delivery platform, you can use application filters to Modify(Only HTML & CSS) your actual CMS specific Presentation templates based on the type of device group (as you don’t have a huge device database in this case)and then target the content + presentation to the Device Groups.

Apart from the delivery options I mentioned above, there could be other ways to deliver content from your content management system. It all boils down to your requirements, participation level of end users at the presentation end, and most importantly, the delivery interface.

Thanks for dropping by and do share your experience and your approach on content delivery from CMS.

I am not against this WEM phenomenon, but I get irritated when I think about WEM’s contribution to the core WCM. The answer is – Nothing. I do not see any functionality add on any WCM from last 3-4 years. The core WCM remains the same, the product vendors are now concentrating more on how to nicely wrap their flop products by this WEM wrapper and fool the customers.

This is my take on WEM, I am sure most of the readers will not agree, especially the one who are heavily fascinated about WEM . So…let me try to answers some questions which come to my mind -

Q-1) What is WEM?

Answer:  Web (Experience/Engagement) Management. A marketing term coined by WCM vendors to position themselves above pure WCM vendors. A term that is now helping them to sell more licenses (I heard that-I don’t know if that is true though). A Nice looking User Interface, a SSO software to back it up with integrations of the below software’s from the same vendor-

1. Web Content Management
2. Analytics
3. Local/Social Collaboration/Community
4. Targeting/Segmentation
5. Mobile Delivery Platform
6. Connectors for other WCM/ECM/DAM products

..and the list goes on.

Q-2) Is WEM a product, suite or a framework?

Answer:  For product marketing & sales chaps it’s a ‘suite’, for a buyer it’s a ‘product’,  for a technical developer it’s a ‘framework’,  for a business user/content contributor it’s a User Interface with drag-drop of layouts & content and for a end user/content consumer it’s a ‘mess’.

 Q-3) Do you need WEM or WCM?

Answer:  You need a WCM for creation, modification, targeting, publishing, versioning and to manage the lifecycle of a content. You might need a Mobile delivery platform if you are targeting your content to a range of Mobile Platforms. If it’s just couple of handsets you don’t even need the Mobile Delivery platform (more on separate post). Analytics is a way to go if you want to know your online users, website visitors but it’s no point buying an analytics product from the WCM vendor. Separate specialized analytics software will give you more flexibility, control and higher degree of reuse. Revisit your business and technical requirements,  talk technically to the product vendor to check “how” WEM can help you cater those requirements. So far, I have not seen anyone specifically writing requirements or budgeting for WEM.

However, if the WEM vendor is giving customer the flexibility to choose from a range of products (those part of WEM suite/framework) and charging only for the selected products than I think it’d be a good way to move forward.

Q-4) Is WEM a revolution, evolution or transformation?

Answer: It’s not a revolution, but yes, there is a significant change in the way consumers are using the web. Users do not want a one sided communication but also wants to contribute, provide feedback, personalize their content from across multiple channels not just ‘web’.  WEM is an effort to provide a rich experience to both the content contributors as well as content consumers. Having said that, it does not mean WCM has evolved or transformed to WEM. The core WCM remains the same, and ironically, product vendors are not putting much effort to enhance the content management capabilities of WCM.

Final Thoughts:

Product vendors always look for some buzzwords to always be in the news, to market their product and to impress buyers. ‘God lies in the details’ – don’t get fascinated, involve your IT staff, let your technical team sit with vendor, let vendor explain you the basics and underlying components (REST, SSO, JSF, Taglibs , Delivery model, Web-services etc). Get a feedback from your technical team and see if similar can be achieved with your existing software infrastructure without much effort and cost.  If you still want to use WEM, check with the vendor if you can choose and use your own apps on a’ la carte basis.

Real Story Group Analyst Apoorv wrote a really nice post with some great takeaways.

Yes, there are not enough gadgets for content contributors and community server does not offer anything more than just blog functionality, but I think the idea behind is to “populate” or “pull” content from the end users. A young platform laid out for a two-way content collaboration i.e. exchange of content from both corporate content contributors and site visitors.

Having said that, this is my take on the recent release –

1. WCM Implementation in Conjunction with Portal:

Customers with existing Implementation of FatWire Spark-pCM on Sun/Weblogic portals have a luxury of using various portlets which are tightly integrated with CS. Administrators could easily configure portlets based on editor’s needs. So, in this scenario just a few WCM specific gadgets will not make much of a difference for editors, but developers can easily place these gadgets on any web page as a part of FatWire page layout process.

Personalization is a capability that every portal offers, based on requirements, personalization at multi levels can be configured using portal itself. Additional Investment on gadget server will not be much beneficial unless you have a requirement to let template developers utilize the capabilities to add gadgets on web pages during page layout process or for the end users to personalize their dashboards with these light-weighted apps. The usage of gadgets become  positive within the WEM framework where  Site Admin wants to create a page with certain layout and include these gadgets within the slots. It’s a quick and easy way of developing new content-centric pages. Another advantage is gadgets created within FatWire’s Gadget Server can be exported for use on third party websites such as igoogle.

2. Pure WCM implementation for external WebSites:

It really depends on what type of website one has. For a website selling products online, it will be a nice idea to implement functionalities offered by Community server as it will get you customer’s feedback and reviews related to product sold. This can potentially be a platform for you to support customers online, share best practices or share product manuals. As good it may seem from the user end, it is equally difficult from the website management perspective. Most of the user generated content will be stored in the Production environment while Staging will just be used by internal content editors. Different information will be stored in various silos and IT will have to work around syncing of content between environments.

3.  Pure WCM implementation for internal Sites/Microsites:

I see a huge potential in this area. We have a large number of ‘social networking’ platforms and tools in the market and over internet. What lags in the WCM space are the tools and functionalities by which internal users within an enterprise can be networked together and form a ‘content collaboration’ space.

With community and gadget server integrated within the WEM framework, the realm of WCM is extended, so does the flexibility of retrieving and contribution of information from the internal users. If wisely implemented and keeping security and authorization into consideration, information and knowledge can be reused, relevant content can be collaborated from across the boundaries and from within a business unit of your enterprise. Now, it’s on the individual organization’s WCM strategy how they drive productivity around information. All an all a right Content Strategy that clearly identifies the demarcations and overlap of document, social and content collaboration.

Most of the organizations believe in ‘push’ of the content. The push of content happens at various levels, it can be targeted to either one business unit of the organization, or to a partner on extranet, or to the site visitors on internet.

There are valid use cases and business requirements for the same, but that’s not the point where the story ends. Enterprises today are not just targeting content (newsletters, campaigns, product info, recommendations etc) to the end user but emphasis is being given to ‘pull’ of information from the end user. There is a need of a business channel that is interactive. This 2-way methodology of content contribution and collaboration helps organizations to–

1-  Create a Knowledge repository from the users of a particular business unit working towards a similar goal.

2-  Get actual feedback from the site visitors

3-  Interactive Support

and most importantly -

4-  Reach out for useful insights

Rich back-end content management systems with complex features are around for a while. A non technical business user finds it difficult to learn, contribute and manage the content.

WCM products lag User Experience, which is quite seriously taken up by collaboration products. Amalgamations of these two categories of product are on the roll and the adoption will be fairly wide in the near future.

Filed under: Architecture and Integrations, Collaboration, Evaluation/Reviews, Web Content Management, Web Portals ]]> http://contentprise.com/2010/04/29/fatwire-content-collaboration-extending-wcm%c2%a0realms/feed/ 0 Lokesh Pant Share http://contentprise.com/2009/11/12/who-should-fixwcm/ http://contentprise.com/2009/11/12/who-should-fixwcm/#comments Thu, 12 Nov 2009 14:11:14 +0000 Lokesh Pant http://contentprise.com/?p=321 ]]> It started with an intention to solve the world’s WCM problems at Aarhus09.

Analysts felt that there is something broken in WCM that needs to be fixed. To figure out what exactly is broken they all jumped on twitter under #fixwcm hash tag and started tweeting it with whole lot of questions, comments, concerns, advices and inputs.

What motivated me to write this post was the fact that most of the tweets were just raising the issues and none of the Analysts tried to address the way they would want to fix a particular issue. Then the tweets took bizarre turn and the blame game started. Fingers were raised against Customer’s Business Team, Customer’s IT staff, Vendors, SI’s, Architecture, a mix of all these and whatnot.

Sitting at my office, I was wondering if anything was perfect. Well, there is always a room for improvement, keeping this in mind I start by saying that WCM is not weak and down and does not need an instant hot fix to have it up and running. However, we need to identify the problems and fix them.

I could not restrict myself to 140 characters, so here is my take-

WCM Market/Vendors: It is a mature market with high level of healthy competition with quality offerings. Vendors have gone beyond providing workflow, publishing, multilingual, multi-site capabilities. Competition among vendors is high and those who provide innovative solutions out of the box, easy to implement utilities at lower cost, usually takes the pie . They keep their product abreast with Web2.0, integrations with LDAP, Content delivery on the portal environment, or adhering to open standards and the list goes on.

#fix: Every platform/product has limitations, therefore, Customers need to identify which vendor suits best for their requirements. Customer should take help from analysts firms or consultants and include their IT staff to identify if the offerings from the vendors are technically correct.

Roadmap and Objective: OK, so you want to implement a WCM for your enterprise. Good…btw what are you going to do with it? What is the purpose and the business objective? Will it be a profit center or a cost center? Who is the target audience? Is it for internal employees, customers, partners, microsite or a website? Where do you see the WCM implementation after 3 years?

Primarily, figure out your business objectives. It is important to align business objectives with the WCM solution. You should have a clear roadmap and your profit objectives must be aligned to your WCM investments. Profit not just in terms of $$$ but may be in terms of relationship with your customers, partners, suppliers etc etc. You should also keep a track of the returns on your investments. You might need to revisit your objectives and the implementation if you are not getting the expected returns.

#fix: Change your ideology. Use WCM as a tool that will give you some profit. Do not invest just for the sake of implementing a technology or a product. Have a business justification for the investments you are going to make. Associate each of your high-level needs with some measurable CTS (critical to success) parameters and keep measuring/refining until you get the expected results.

System Integrators (SIs): These folks contribute a lot in a WCM project’s success and failure. Know your SI, make sure they have enough expertise and experience in the solution design, implementation, and delivery. Ask for proof of concept, not in the content authoring, workflow, publishing, archiving part but specific to your implementation standpoint. Check what they have to do for the integration points. SI’s on the other hand must refrain themselves from being biased towards a particular vendor and influence the customer

#fix: Customer should clearly communicate their business and technical requirements to the SI’s in order to get what they need. Do not hide anything to save cost, this might lead an adverse effect in near future. Do not go ahead with any WCM vendor/SI if you have only 20% of the requirement. SI’s at the same time should tie the solution around customer’s present and future requirement around WCM product. System Integrator should educate the customer if a single product or a mix of few can fulfill the requirement. SI’s should also educate/advice customer on how to leverage best of WCM by integrating it with Customer’s existing infrastructure (If, in case).

End Users: You have to know your audience- People accessing CMS directly or indirectly, from internet or intranet, be it partner, customer, supplier, website visitor, personalized content visitor etc. You need to know who is invited in your party. Are you giving them the attention they require? Are you serving the right content at the right time when they need it? Are they party goers/ regular visitors.

Investments on Web Analytics might be a bad idea for few companies during recession, but I think they act as guide to know your WCM implementation better. Try to factor Analytics while budgeting for WCM, this is going to help you to find the source of your profit..

#fix: No fix required, add sugar to make your coffee sweet. Try playing “Roller Coaster Tycoon 2” (Part of my #sixsigma project these days) and analyze your customer’s view/take on your park and try to co-relate with your WCM objective.

Yes, the stats of WCM project failures are bad. We can’t blame a single entity in the WCM ecosystem. If vendors are involving themselves in CMIS or JCRs, why cant analysts develop WCM  benchmarks, models, evaluation criteria and then trace it to see who needs a #fix

Posted in Market Share/Trends, Web Content Management ]]> http://contentprise.com/2009/11/12/who-should-fixwcm/feed/ 6 Lokesh Pant Quote3 Share http://contentprise.com/2009/09/15/my-cms-origin/ http://contentprise.com/2009/09/15/my-cms-origin/#comments Tue, 15 Sep 2009 08:16:04 +0000 Lokesh Pant http://contentprise.com/?p=283 ]]> …so a new meme was started by pie, then was followed by all other cmsgurus and then it became popular on twitter. Everybody went down their memory lane and shared how they started their career in Content Management. Therefore, here is what made me commit to the content management space.

My Introduction to CMS

I started as a Business Associate with a leading service provider in India. I was trained in Fatwire CMS version 5.0. Content Management was kind of a new science for me and understanding content management from a French teacher with French accent was nothing less than rocket science. Those 5 days training were neither good enough to go ahead and develop an intranet for a major Oil company, so we researched the tool and implemented the solution in ten months.

btw- I was also asked to create sequential and class diagram for this CMS implementation and I was like What??

My Argument about the future of Content Management

I remember my argument with my Project Manager where I was defending that there is no future of content management and EJB is the one who will rock the future. Other arguments were based on the huge costs involved in procuring a CM solution and I was sure it was not be an option for any SME’s based out in India.

In the Main stream

A year later, I joined  Apoorv at Wipro Technologies and from there on we worked closely in the areas of web portals, open source, and Content Management. I researched a lot on CM systems like opencms, Alfresco, Teamsite but the focus area was always Fatwire.

As I was involved in both portals and content management technologies, many times, I wondered which one is better, who holds the future and then my thought process took another turn, and that was where I started this blog. A post like this was trying to demarcate between the twos.

With time comes maturity and I was now sure that content management is here to stay. To prove my point, my job helped me to travel across the globe for few large CMS implementations. Apart from pre-sales, architecture and implementations, I always have my eyes open for the happenings in JCRs, CMIS, Migration strategies, and every small big topic in this system.

“First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win.” — Mahatma Gandhi

1. Using WP Tools, I used Import from blogger utility which  imported all my posts, comments, and users from my Blogger blog. As I got my categories migrated, I manually created few tags and assigned them to each of my posts in WP.

2. I added few widgets and changed look and feel. Though I have to work more on this.

3. I updated my domain’s Name Servers with NS1.WORDPRESS.COM

4. Changed existing CNAME entry to contentprise.wordpress.com, that was originally pointing to ghs.google.com( for blogger). It took 10 hours to get reflected globally.

It was all about finding a right mini-CMS for my blog. In return,  look what I got the very first day-

There is a long way to go for all the SEO’s done for this blog. But more focus will be on portals and content management space.

A lot more is going to come in this space-Keep watching…

If you remember Fatwire already has a Content Integration Platform(CIP), which is a “web-services-based” content sharing tool. In this Fatwire CMS user can access content stored across the enterprise without leaving the Fatwire CMS interface (CS-Direct). CIP offers connectors to access content from Documentum, SharePoint, and Windows and Unix file systems.

So why this rescue package from Fatwire when they already have a solution in place? Here are my insights on the demarcation between the two offerings and the differences in the approach -

1. In Content Integration Platform, the source WCM/ECM sever must be up and running in order to serve the content. The only difference will be accessing the content using Fatwire console (dash/advance/insite interfaces).
[Access + Connector = Integration]

2. Fatwire rescue program is based on the expertise and past experiences of Content Migration service providers (Vamosa and Kapow). Server Instances of Teamsite or Vignette will not be required after full content migration.
[Entire data movement (Assets/Content/Templates/Workflows/Roles/Security/Users/Publishing Events) = Content Migration ]

Since there is no Fatwire connector for Vignette and Teamsite as of now, I believe this is another way of attracting the customers to move completely into Fatwire at lower cost (No license cost + No Running Instances of Teamsite or Vignette required).

Content Migration is a very risky, customers are advised that there is no fully automatic or a neat way of doing it. Manual intervention and tweaking of trusted scripts, XMLs and non-java based templates is very much required in order to do the migration. Evaluate and request for case studies or a proof of concept from the product vendor before you make a decision.

I am glad that in the midst of acquisitions in the WCM space, Fatwire is the one of the niche player who is moving a step forward by collaborating with content migration service providers like Vamosa and Kapow. I hope this move will hold well for Fatwire in WCM market space.

There is no question on the capabilities and functionalities of IBM WebSphere Portal V 6.1, which is well designed to collaborate the information from users, communities, corporate enterprises, and the Web. I will not discuss the cool and robust features of IBM but will list down the external factors that might have influenced the ranking-

1. Technology: Still the market share of .net is much less than java. IBM being a java based portal and is adopted by organizations who either already have java based software infrastructure or their decisive people are pro-java. I agree with Janus-

“Microsoft is known to give away SharePoint like candy, so SharePoint might indeed have less revenue. A substantial portion of SharePoint licenses remain unused.”

Yes, the Adoption of SharePoint (MOSS) is much higher than any portal in the market (07-08), and who does the marketing better than MS, but the point has still not reached where SharePoint can be ranked as #1.

2. Choice: Do customers have choice?..ummm –lets find out-
a) Opensource/Liferay: Even though Liferay is named as the Visionary portal product in Gartner’s magic quadrant, the financial industry has no confidence in this open source portal. On the other hand, IBM software is being used by the top 10 global banks.

b) Sun JES Portal: before the acquisition: The setting sun finally decided to stop the further release if its enterprise portal product (last version 7.2) and decided to contribute towards Websynergy and Webspace (Liferay-Sun combo Prj).

c) Oracle/Weblogic/Webcenter: Oracle invested huge $$$ in their Webcenter portal project but failed to market their so-called strategic portal product. Market still questions Oracle’s portal leadership. With five portal products under its belt, seems like that sale and marketing team is confused on which portal to highlight. I believe that aqualogic and weblogic are doing pretty well but not widely adopted as IBM WebSphere.

3) Leadership/Support/Cost: IBM tops the chart in terms of cost for its product, services and support. Even then, organizations opt for security, availability, collaboration and other web2.0 stuffs over the cost. It might be because IBM promises better ROI. I believe that 2011 will be a crucial year for IBM portal after the economic recession ends as most of the organizations have kept their decisions on hold for buying an expensive portal products.

There can be other reasons as well such as innovations, industry types, underlying architecture etc that might have valued customers more in buying this product.

More information about the report, features, and a case study is here-
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Web-Services-Web-20-and-SOA/Report-IBM-Number-One-in-Portal-Software-333186/

Anyways..I’ll leave other analysts to comment on hardware/storage/cloud computing and other areas. I am more interested to speculate the future of software products from Sun, example Sun Portal, Access Manager, Directory Server, and other open source projects. Here is my take in that -

Oracle already have five portals under its belt, out of with they have clearly indicated of taking Webcenter, Aqualogic and Weblogic forward.

With this buy out, Oracle might dispose Sun Portal, as this product from Sun is not doing great from last few years, even after Sun made heavy investments and revamped its portal suite during ’06-07. Sun failed to generate more ROI and is now supporting only its top 100 customers.

I also fear that it might be a dead end for all open source initiatives from Sun, as Oracle has never shown any interest in the Open Source arena. This might badly affect project Websynergy and Webspace (Liferay-Sun combo Prj), NetBeans IDE, PostgresSQL etc.

I think, Liferay is becoming more vulnerable for acquisition by Oracle as Sun had an interest initially and still have few ongoing projects with Liferay.

On the greener side, Oracle will get benefited with Sun’s IDM suite as Access Manager & Directory Server are widely used and now Oracle will have a reply to IBM’s Tivoli suite.

Let’s wait and watch what next will come under Oracle’s Business Process Management tag.