Content Management Goes ModularContent Management Goes Modular

The era of million-dollar companywide content-management deployments appears to be ending. Increasingly, companies are taking a more gradual approach to rolling out content-management systems, minimizing front-end investment and giving business-unit managers and department heads more control over content.

"You want to pat your head and rub your stomach at the same time," Delphi Group analyst Hadley Reynolds says. "You want centralized syndication, but also the ability for your lines of business and departments to manage their own portals and Web sites." Content-management vendors are making this easier by offering more modular products that provide thin-client access to a centralized content repository and workflows guided by automated business processes.

Ball State University in Muncie, Ind., had a simple goal: To give its colleges and departments the ability to develop their own portals without sacrificing a uniform look and feel. Last year, Ball State deployed Vignette Corp.'s StoryServer, which helped the university take the initial step toward distributed administration by letting 300 independent Web authors publish content while maintaining a branded look for the school.

The $100,000 investment--the school received a deep discount from Vignette's usual pricing--was large compared with the university's past software purchases, says Al Rent, Ball State's director of marketing. But the license and maintenance plan lets the university upgrade to Vignette's newer V6 content suite. Doing so will let the school add features such as personalization and customization to college and department portals.

The ability for college and department staff to create Web pages without being Web designers has offered greater independence, Rent says, while also relieving the school's IT staff of hands-on content-management tasks. In the end, the improved portals will mean increased enrollment and better alumni relations, because the appropriate subject-matter experts will be able to get the word out on what the school has to offer prospective students and alumni, he says.

Based on the desires of customers such as Ball State, as well as pressure from competitors, Vignette recently said it will change the way it packages and sells its V6 suite to let customers deploy content-management initially to individual divisions or departments. Rent says the university's upgrade to V6 will let the IT staff work with college and department staff to build more custom and targeted content into individual portals.

Santi Pierini, Vignette's VP of product strategy, says the new packaging of V6 will let customers save on the initial investment while still letting them roll out an enterprise content-management system with upgrades. V6, which was released in September, is available in a standard edition for about $200,000; the more comprehensive enterprise edition is $400,000.

The primary difference between the two editions is the number of CPUs that power the system. The standard edition has six processors, enough to take advantage of application server capabilities, but not enough to support a global content-management environment. The enterprise edition's 14-processor version can handle the full content life cycle, from creation and collection to delivery and presentation, on a global basis.

Zions Bancorporation in Salt Lake City wasn't focused on departmental management of content but rather on the types of content it publishes on the Web. Zions, which has banks in eight Western states, wanted to preserve its branded look. It had been customizing versions of more than 1,000 loan-policy documents for each state, based on regulatory and legal considerations.

BroadVision's One-to-One Content offering, which Zions acquired as a component of BroadVision's InfoExchange portal application, has let the bank publish a loan-policy manual that enables administrators in each state to change predetermined fields of data such as credit-authorization procedures, and rates and fees. The result is the automated delivery of standardized documents that can be customized locally and still conform to the company's policies.

The customized loan-policy manual is in line with the company's long-term goals, says Dianne Wynne, executive VP of Zions Management Services Co., an in-house service bureau that supports Zions' subsidiaries. "Our model is to let each one of the states manage its own intranet content," she says. "It's so much better than having a static intranet."

Kitty McGahey, BroadVision's marketing manager, says customer demand for a phased-in approach has been growing as momentum in portal development has been building. "Organizations want departments to own their content," she says. "Portals are driving this by making content so readily available." Until recently, companies managed their growing portfolios of portals in-house, but the volume of content now being delivered to those portals makes that difficult, if not impossible.