CMS Implementation

Outsourcing to India, China and Ukraine doesn’t surprise us anymore. What we found interesting, however, is an emerging trend in the world of offshoring that doesn’t revolve around India and Chennai, in particular. Chennai may be losing its top placement on the list of offshore capitals of the world, as Lima, capital of Peru, comes in. Peru is starting to be seen as the new destination for general web development, as well as more specialized projects such as CMS implementations. What are the implications?

James Robertson of StepTwo Designs has laid out a very handy summary of spending patterns during CMS implementations. His cost curve seems quite accurate for small-to-midsized implementations. In my experience, large, complex projects see even more of an inverted bell curve. That is, "enhancement" expenses incurred in out years often approximate Year 1 implementation costs. This can come as a rude surprise to companies who capitalize the initial expense, only to find out they need to cover substantial ongoing costs in an operations budget over the long-term.

US federal IT budgets continue to expand, but not evenly across departments and programs, and spending for non-security IT projects falls under unprecedented scrutiny today. This means that -- despite substantial vendor attention -- large government agencies face the same dilemma that confounds major enterprises seeking content management solutions: roll the dice on a huge implementation or tolerate a potpourri of low-cost solutions at departmental and workgroup levels. A recent article in Federal Computer Week plumbs the issue...Read the FCW piece

Today CMS Watch officially kicks off a formal training program. In conjunction with AIIM, we are providing classroom workshops (leading to official AIIM designations) in Information Organisation & Access (IOA) and Business Process Management (BPM).I'm very excited about these new courses. CMS Watch undertook the coursework development under the guidance of AIIM's Educational Advisory Group, and both organizations will be leading courses throughout North America, Europe, and (next year) Asia-Pacific. Here's why these courses are so terribly important. What are the two pillars of successful content technology implementations? Content Analysis and Process Analysis. Without those two skills, effectively deployed, all the technology in the world won't help you. Yet, there is a worldwide shortage of proficiency and experience in both areas. As an industry, we really need to grow the talent base here. That's what these courses do

James Robertson offers a handy checklist for evaluating WYSIWYG editors, pointing out that not every requirement will pertain to every implementation. James observes that half the requirements concern cleaning up extra Word gunk. That's important, because in most installations most content finds its way into a rich text editor via copy-paste from a desktop editor. But setting clear expectations is critical here, because "cleaning up" Word formatting to make it standards-compliant almost inevitably makes the text appear differently than the original, and additional manual manipulation may be needed in the browser to re-create the desired formatting. Left to their own devices, authors will blame the CMS, when -- as James points out -- the real culprit is Word.

Marketplaces change, and therefore, we change our product coverage with them. The Web CMS marketplace is particularly dynamic; some products seem to plateau, while others advance quickly.So, with our recent update to the Web CMS Report, we decided to drop regular coverage of Synkron Via, a Danish Web CMS. Our research indicates that product sales have stagnated, especially outside Denmark, since Dynamicweb acquired Synkron in March 2007 and with the management shake-up that followed in June 2007.To be sure, the product does remain on our radar. We continue to track its development and regularly talk to customers and implementation partners about their experiences.

While many enterprises are still feeling the impact of the new IE7 on CMS and Portal implementations, Slashdot last week reported on some upcoming browser versions. It seems that work on Microsoft IE8 has already begun and we may expect it in 2008. Slashdot also reported on plans for Firefox 3 to grow to more than a simple HTML renderer. In related news, last week saw an outcry as it became public that the new Outlook 2007 will not use the usual IE-based rendering engine for HTML, but instead Microsoft Word. The limitations imposed by Word 2007 are mainly CSS related, but may break many of the nicely formatted newsletters that your CMS or Portal software automatically create now. Testing is ever important, but as I'll lay out in the new Portal Project Starter Kit you need to remember to plan and budget for continuous updates.

That's one of the most frequently asked questions in any CMS project. One astute consultant, Martin White of Intranet Focus (UK), argues that project managers should plan on a 12- to 18-month journey. We might differ on the duration of some of the internal benchmarks White identifies (e.g. proposal review can happen faster, but implementations often take longer). But White is dead right on the typical overall duration. Plan your schedules accordingly...Martin White on "Setting a Realistic Timetable"

Content reusability and multichannel distribution represent music to the ears of any Web publisher. We call this music the "siren song of structure," because nearly all the benefits of reusability depend on being able to structure your content carefully and sustain that structure consistently. In a recent contribution to EContent magazine, CMSWatch argues that if you underestimate the challenges of creating and maintaining structure, you risk getting dashed on the rocks of yet another under-utilized CMS implementation... Read the EContent article

Have you noticed that -- despite the spiffy new name -- CMS vendor Stellent still seems to land most of its major deals with Intranet implementations? You'll recall the company was formerly called "Intranet Solutions." We think there's a good reason for this: the product is architected to support the highly heterogeneous document types that characterize most Intranet publishing efforts...Read about Stellent's latest client win