Content Management Nightmares

bildstorm writes "I've recently been looking into content management systems for my company and have found that there are all kinds of systems out there. I've found that most Americans consider web content management to be the catch all for content management (like Interwoven). In Europe, I've noticed that what's referred to as digital asset management is what is usually meant by content management (like Artesia). Has anyone used any of these systems well? For more than just web content? Has anyone tried any open source systems and used them well? I know there is a conference in Zurich next month for open source content management, but I don't know much about the products."

Comments

CityDesk...

[xtermz]

..I'll admit, I've never used it, but just from reading about it, and knowing who the main architect is, it seems like a pretty decent product.

Check it out here :CityDesk

Re:state of play as i see it

[Matey-O]

Having used Site Server 2.0, and the Rudimentary Content Management that sucked rocks in Site Server 3.0 I've gotta say Microsoft Sharepoint Portal Server (Site Server 4.0 essentially) Rocks.

It's improved tremendously in this iteration, although there's still room for improvement. see http://www.zdnet.com/supercenter/stories/review/0, 12070,475696,00.html

beware of interwoven

[nuhonda]

after spending close to $150,000 on an interwoven set up, we finally gave up the ghost and ripped it out last month.

it has got to be one of the worst, most tempermental services i've ever used.

the breaking point was after asking the IW consultant "how do we make and manage templates?" and having him reply:
"you can't. you have to call us."

we're now back (and quite happy) using out custom setup based on VSS, ASP, SQL Server and FTP via PERL Scripts.

InStranet

[clobdell]

There's a great new product on the market by a company called InStranet (www.instranet.com) that uses an interesting approach to organizing the content; instead of securing the objects in a hierarchical fashion using ACLs, etc., they employ a multi-dimensional framework to organize and secure the content. It uses the same technology as a lot of business intelligence applications on the market and is far more robust than Interwoven or any of the other behemoths on the market. Something to keep in mind is that a lot of products like Interwoven et al. utilize a proprietary repository for storing the information. So, you can only access your content through their application. InStranet uses Oracle or DB2 so you have greater flexibility in customizing your app. Much better choice if you don't want to get locked into one company's app.

I have to say you're wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

Sharepoint is a worthless piece of crap.

1. Application critical information stored in Access (go have a look, it's amusing and terrifying)
2. Easy to make work exactly the way MS wants it to work, an enormous pain in the rectum to make work in any other way (i.e., changing the template layouts, etc)
3. Requisite office XP to really take advantage of the application

All the packaged content management systems suck,t hough. After a certian point, it's easier just to pick some decent base libraries or app server platform and roll your own. It will do what you want, you can see your source code, and you might be able to make ungodly sums of money later reselling it (Vignette).

Configuration management

[Raedwald]

As we're all experts here, I should point out that content management seems to be just a new buzzword for boring old configuration management with bells and whistles on.

You might therefore want to consider a configuration management system (CMS). Some of the CMS vendors relaunched their tools as content management systems during the dotcom bubble. You might want to look at them. Continuus (now Telelogic) did this, for example. And, of course, you could take the cheap and Open road and use CVS

One Issue

[SomeOtherGuy]

I have seen with multiple content management applications is as follows:

Most content managers create an AutoIndex feature that works similar "in theory" of a web search engine such as google. When adding static html files as objects into the system --- this works great because it is able to index the content of the HTML pages with pretty good "searchability" ... where it falls flat is when it comes to dynamic pages that rely on database queries and criteria for the content (.cfm, .php, .asp, etc.) At least on the "web side" of our content management process -- this is causing all sorts of issues when trying to add dynamic pages as objects into the various products. (We already have the source control issue handled with mks -- but since 90% of our pages are dynamic -- most of the benefits of traditional "content management" have yet to be realized in areas where the content gets created on the fly --- turns search engines to mush.)

Bricolage - open source CMS

[phippy]

formerly known as many different things....it's on sourceforge. it is an industrial strength CMS open source project that (in many different implementations) runs the content management for some large scale sites.

Postgres/Mason/mod_perl/lots of other stuff...check it out. the developers working on it know what they are doing. stable as all get-out and a pretty intuitive UI, in my opinion.

Re:Interwoven TeamSite

[ari{Dal}]

Personally I think that "good content management software" should, well, make it easy to manage content. In other words, it should not cost you through the nose in training, or preferably in installation and upkeep.


While minimal training is fine for the lowest level of users (the TS gui is pretty slick for those who are simple authors...), its when you actually have to get into the guts of the program that the training becomes essential.

Creating templates for the users is one thing that I had to learn on my own, and would have been a lot easier for all concerned had i some training.

On a higher level, you have the internal management of TS itself. It's a beast. Anyone who's thrown into taking care of it without any training.. well, I feel sorry for them. And those are the courses that cost in the range of 2k US each plus travel and hotel.

TS itself is composed of many pieces: There's TS for simple content, Templating for creating templates (of course), DataDeploy for deploying to databases or XML files, OpenDeploy for deploying static content, and a myriad of other interrelating products that are difficult to figure out on your own. I know this intimately because this is exactly what I had to do. For the first three months, I was nearly in tears with frustration.

Now that i've had some experience dealing with it, and have even installed it a few times just for kicks, I can comfortably say that I have a handle on it and that if it breaks, I can quickly find the problem. But it took me a LONG time to get here (almost a year now), even with a good knowledge of PERL and familiarity with unix environments, and the help of a great (and tolerant) sysadmin. If i'd had the complete training package, things would have gone much more smoothly.

Any content management software is fairly complex in nature, but one with as much flexibility and as many componants as TS is on a level all its own. That's not to say it's bad... I can look back on my experiences now and say it was a good thing and I wouldn't take it back. But I'd think good and hard before placing anyone else in my position.

Just don't go near PHPNuke..

[DamienMcKenna]

Stick with the PHPNuke forks, especially PostNuke, as the original is terrible - major lack of security, code uncleanliness (and hence a lack of extensibility), etc. Just ask Wayne Hunt (wayne at amiga dot org) his views on it - he had his site hacked over and over again while he used Nuke.

The PostNuke folks have been doing a great job of clearing up the code itself, a much better job than the phpWebSite guys at Appalacian State.

My horrific experiences

[ciryon]

Don't try this at home

Part of my job involves being webmaster for our company. When I got to that position we allready had a new and improved website. (I hadn't been involved with the creation of that site). It was constructed so that anyone in the company would be able to add information and news to the webpage. And that without knowing anything about HTML. Sounds nice, eh?

Well, the entire system was delivered by our advertising agency, and we didn't need to care about the system beneath all the beautiful eye-candy. That was a bad thing as it turned out. The site was built with a tool from a web agency which created ASP pages. It also involves special addition to Microsoft IIS (the only webserver capable of running the system). For us to play with we had a nice content management built into the site. We couldn't change absolutely anything (like moving a textbox 1 inch to the right) without calling the web agency and asking for their help. But, wow, we could add certain news items in mandatory textboxes. As it turned out, nobody in the company (who wasn't a HTML-guru) dared to change/add anything to the webpage, because the content management was extremely confusing and unorganized.

I, who know quite a bit about creating websites with HTML/PHP/Perl and whatever, was becoming more and more frustrated with the "nice" content management tool. It also required me to use Internet Explorer 5.5 (nothing else) and load a special entry to the Windows registry which lowered the securitysettings in my browser. When wanted to add a text to the site the CM system started a miniature Microsoft Frontpage. That means it was impossible to add any kind of HTML in the text, no links nothing. But, whohoo, I could press CTRL-I for italic text. Damnit, I run a Linux desktop at work and aren't too happy that I need to switch computer every now and then. The system was also extremely unreliable and would crasch once in a while. I have created a special WWW folder on our IMAP server where I store all mails to the web agency regarding the content management system and the webpage. It's over 100 mails since the beginning of the 2002.

The web agency is now bankrupt and we are working on a new webpage using Zope on a UNIX server. It's really a great and extremely flexible tool which enables you to quickly create advanced dynamic sites.

Ciryon

Lack of $ not an excuse

[dcavanaugh]

You could rescue an old Pentium clone from the dumpster and install Linux + Zope + Squishdot, all at a cost of $0. Not exactly a production environment, but more than enough for "proof of concept" and a smoke & mirrors demo.

I had a similar lack of funding problem. My organization has a capital spending authorization procedure that rivals that of the Pentagon. I installed Linux, Zope & Squishdot on a piece of Pentium-100 junkware, and customized some of the Squishdot screens so as to make it look like series of customized portals to deliver reports as PDF file attachments. The powers that be couldn't wait to spend $7K on a Dell Poweredge server. There is so much more I would like to say about Zope + Squishdot, but I have to avoid needlessly educating my competitors. I can't mention where I work, my employer's line of business, the clients we serve, or any of the specifics, but I can say with authority that Linux, Zope & Squishdot can be turned into a "wonder weapon" against larger competitors who have more money to spend.

Real Content Management

[aux1aux1aux1]

I've been working specifically with Content Management for the past five years. If you think that it is simply something that is just a buzzword or bullshit that is sold to corporate heads then you don't understand the real value it provides. Being an application developer myself, I think that the largest value of Content Management is appreciated by those who create and manage sites.

It provides abstraction of your content from your look-and-feel and can drastically reduce your development timelines and ease of maintenance. That may not matter if your site is only 5 html pages, but it does when you have thousands of them (and want to use the content on them in different ways).

The problem is that most of the exisiting products (in addition the huge price tag) have been oversold on what they do or even what they are. Remember that the Content Management market is still in it's infancy, so a lot of different compaines entered the space just providing a development platform or by rebranding document/digital asset management products. This left most of the work up to the developers or the profession services (good revenue for the companies selling the software) teams that have to implement them.

What I found led me to the conclusion we really needed some true turn-key solutions. After building about 5 custom Content Management Systems for various large corporations, along with my dev team we've spent the last two years designing and building a commercial product called Conclarity CMS (http://www.conclarity.com), which we are just about to release. It's built in Java using the J2EE framework, every content object is available as XML, and it uses XSL and XHTML for templating.

If anyone is interested in checking it out, I'd be more than happy to give away some free piolit licenses to slashdotters.

Landon Hall
President, CTO
Lucid DataStreams, Inc.

Zope "Get's it" (and rocks)

[pschmied]

I came into it a few months ago knowing nothing about programming. With very little time, I was able to put together some impressive demos.

Zope seems like the real deal when it comes to Open Source companies. They release for free and then do commercial add-on and support. Cool stuff.

Zope has two sites: Zope.com and Zope.org. Send your developers to Zope.org and your boss to Zope.com.

.org is their community development site (which also runs on Zope). It is a very active very homey collaborative environment.

.com is the suit-friendly corporate face of Zope. This is where you send your boss to assure him that you can get commercial support / training. Zope certification will begin soon. This is one of the few certification programs that I'm ever likely to even consider.

All in all, Zope is a really solid piece of software. The new CMF does a great job of separating roles. Don't forget to visit the Demos (very informative).

Good luck with Zope. You will not ever regret using it.

-Peter

Danish Design - Sophistic CMS

[Vspirit]

I'm in the WEB CMS business, so I resign from moderating though possible in this discussion.

Should anyone want some Danish jibberish, the direct URL to a CMS is Sophistic CMS and it contain a few screenshot cuts and some explanations. Go fish translate it, yeah right, no Danish support :0)

The advantages of a CMS, are that deploying a full featured website is incredible fast assuming the right tool is available. If this is so, you can concider it as a toolbox. You may have plenty of ideas of what your website should do for you, but developing everything from bottom-up can be an expensive task, with a CMS with selectable components, you design as you please and can implement components as required, and it is up running in a heart beat. Furthermore you have a CMS development crew as your backing to ensure that the components are matching the needs of tomorrows tasks. To finish it off a thorough CMS also provides you with the tool to maintain and develop your deployed site even further, with ease, with proper access management to distribute specific tasks.

A sample is BLUNT a website for a new rockband featured on Danish TV3 through 10 shows generating lots of interest. Universal, their record company, had sponsored a small amount to support the band and their online promotion (We are currently preparing negotions with Universal to allow mp3 sales). The general photoshop/gimp+html design was provided by the design crew(among it were one of the band members)Monday, March 25th at around 13pm and was up and running less than 6 hours thereafter, supporting both IE and Mozilla/Netscape, Opera, etc.. I hope. Please dump me a mail at the address below if your browser (besides lynx, sorry :) is not supported.

A CMS is a broad topic I give you all that. What matters is that it is about managing content, whether it be an intranet(office documents and tools for the daily business..e-business..), an extranet (marketing, product, pricing material, etc..), or a website with promotion, store, discussion forums, information spreader, its all about content, and thats what a CMS can cover as a tool.

Basically its reusing code and sharing the development code of an tailored administration system, where a professional CMS consist of a lot of different components from which the integrators can implement and configure according to their needs and be up running in less time and with less waste of money. One of the benefits for non-techies is that the editing tool works just as a word processor and it can be delivered to support just about all platforms thanks to use of java or activex, depending of what is best for the users.

Basically its a tool.

Sophistic CMS, to which one of the above links is directed to, is pretty inexpensive and could be what you need, Danish Design, what do I know, IT IS YOUR CHOICE.

The pages are only available in Danish, but you can reach our Danish office at +45 86 13 73 15 between 9am - 17pm CET og by email contact at sophistic dot com

This may be concidered an advertizement, but it is still free content, so if it suits you, it is free for you to use.

Best regards,
Casper