Creating and Delivering Content and ApplicationsCreating and Delivering Content and Applications

You’ve got a problem: You need to manage and personalize content.

Here’s the background: Your organization publishes content as part of your core mission. You have a publishing process for creating, editing, approving, and ultimately shipping content to some public or private Web site. The challenge about this content? You’ve got a lot of customers — thousands, in fact — and not all of them are interested, or maybe entitled to, all your content. Therefore, you need to personalize that content for security and/or usability. So you begin the search for a solution.

Naturally, you went out to the marketplace and looked at content management system (CMS) offerings. You researched the publishing stuff, bought a solution, and implemented it. You found out that the package was great at the publishing part — the business process, the workflow; letting one group of people create and giving authority to other groups to edit or approve. Your CMS vendor told you that they could handle your personalization. Then you found out through trial and error and frustrating experience that they really don’t. In fact, odds are you have to program it from scratch. Or maybe they told you that their professional services team would be happy to do it — for a fee.

Perhaps, instead, you bought a portal package. You found that it’s great at letting you define the communities and constituencies that consume this content, plus you get the added benefit of being able to present reports and data — dashboards, if you will — from other systems around that content. It lets you secure and personalize the user experience for this content. However, the problem is that the tools to create the content are limited to publishing that content in the portal. What about your public Web site? What about your print materials? Your global content inventory goes far beyond the portal, but the portal’s built-in tools don’t really allow you to create content for those repositories.

Regardless of the solution you chose, what can you do now? How big a mistake have you made and how much will it cost you? Is there a solution that can remedy these challenges? Moreover, how did this happen in the first place? With all the mergers and acquisitions in the Portal and CMS arena, why can’t these tools be more holistic?

The truth of the matter is that most of the mergers in this space took tools with totally different missions and tried to make one side — either the presentation or publication side — more powerful than the other. It’s also true that in order to realize the value of enterprise content management and portals, you may, depending on you and your customers’ requirements, need two packages.

What to Know Before You Buy

Before you buy either a portal or CMS solution, it’s very important to clearly outline what your expectations and business requirements are for these tools:

In other words, does John Doe need to be able to indicate his preferences or subscriptions to certain content so that he can effectively sift through that content, or is it enough for John to say that he’s in financial services or aerospace and see all the relevant info accordingly? Also, beyond a single public Web site or intranet property, what are your other publishing targets? Print/PDF? Personalized email newsletters? Wireless devices? XML feeds for your customers to consume in their own formats? What about language variants? Do you re-use the same content in multiple places? Does the experience integrate with an existing ERP or CRM system? Does John need to get an email broadcast about a myriad of content items based on his subject matter interests? These are non-trivial user experiences that need to be designed and documented before you choose your package.

Defining Requirements

Getting specific about the end-user’s experience (or, if you like, “who gets to see what, where, and when”) is always the best way to begin your requirements gathering process. It’s critical to document and cross-reference all of the presentation methods (Web site, portal, print media, etc.) with all of the content and applications that are found on them.

Create a matrix of your audiences (e.g., customers by vertical market), content types (news, product descriptions, research, articles), content repositories (file servers, print materials, digital asset management systems, CMS), profile sources (CRM, directories, ERP), and presentation methods. Go through a standard Information Architecture process — make a “site map” with all of the top level content and features that you will have for all of the online properties that you know you want to publish (public web site, intranet, portal, etc). Make a list of all the subjects, vertical markets, or solutions that will be covered from a “top-down” perspective. For example, if your company’s public Web site is focused on Financial Services, you might have subjects like “mutual funds,” “equities,” “bonds,” etc. This process will begin to define a global taxonomy for all of your content and applications — and this is really the key to enabling content re-use and personalization.

Once this overall inventory is complete for each site, one process that’s typically quite valuable is the creation of a wire frame model for each page or screen that represents a key user experience — and then annotate that diagram with how the taxonomy will be leveraged for content reuse, syndication, and/or personalization.

Notable Cases: When to Use CMS vs. Portal or Both

If the same content, or variants of that content, only ever gets published to an intranet or extranet, and you don’t already have a way to automate the creation and editing of that content, the built-in content tools in a portal framework might work nicely for you. However, if the content that belongs in the Intranet or extranet is also found on a public Web site or in print, then you’ve either got redundancy in effort or you need a more holistic publishing strategy that probably includes a dedicated content management solution in parallel with your portal deployment.

Example: You work in Sales and Marketing for a software company. You log in to the Sales and Marketing portal to access crucial proprietary things like the pipeline, competitive intelligence, reference lists, and private case studies that are not for public consumption. However, for convenience’s sake, all of the product data sheets, white papers, and other “about the company” public content is available so that you can get your info to go any time, any place from one source. Doesn’t it make sense that the publishers of the product data sheets should only need to edit and publish this content once? Doesn’t it change all the time? Doesn’t it get published to the public Web site, in print, in PDF, wirelessly, and in Spanish, French, German, Japanese, and Italian? The portal is not likely to provide (at least not out of the box) a solution for creating and publishing these variants of this content– the CMS is. The CMS should be aware of the Portal through a smart implementation . But in this writer’s experience, the publishing creation/editing/approval/variant process is not really a “portal thing.”

However, if your audience is semi-public or private — for instance, a partner extranet/portal or employee intranet — it may be crucial to personalize the experience of consuming that content based on roles and profiles found in a database or directory (examples: Active Directory, LDAP, PeopleSoft, etc). The process of organizing those individuals into communities is usually something the portal will provide “out of the box.” It’s a relatively small development effort at this point to take content published by a CMS and present it in a personalized portal community.

Tools That Help

The discovery process can be performed using standard business analyst tools like Microsoft Visio and other Office components. Publishing-oriented CMS products like RedDot Solutions’ XCMS, Percussion’s Rhythmyx, and others can provide affordable, flexible solutions for publishing content in any number of variants on any platform. Plumtree’s Enterprise Web Software is an integration-friendly, open environment where content and applications can be easily presented to a wide array of community audiences.

When it comes to determining whether a portal or CMS solution is best for you, investing the time to research and explore the best options for your business is imperative to your continued success. Make the commitment to understand your requirements now and your investment will pay off in the long term.

Seth Miller is the President and CEO of Miller Systems, a company he founded over nine years ago, specializing in in the design and development of elegant online user experiences. His perspective has been published in a variety of CRM- and eMarketing-focused publications.