Content Management Systems - Hot Out Of Kindergarten - Look Set To Make The Grade

DCLnews interviews content management expert Tony Byrne of CMS Watch (www.cmswatch.com), who says content management systems (CMS) are where the web was five years ago - but are catching up fast.

When Should You Convert Legacy Data?

There is a solid business case for converting legacy data to a format that fits your chosen content management system if it provides value to one or more sections of your audience. Technical documentation, for example, might need to be accessed by your staff on your company intranet. Customers might require specs or information from old sales brochures. Or a niche audience on the web (who could turn out to be potential customers) might be attracted to visit your site if you published documents and articles going back many years.

Tony Byrne is founder and editor of CMS Watch, a portal that follows the CMS industry and evaluates web content management technologies. He is principal author of The CMS Report, now in its 6th edition. And advises companies and public agencies around the world on installing the right content technologies for their needs

For those who don’t know, content management systems, or CMS, organize and manage website, technical, or media industry content, while keeping the actual text in a single source, separate from formatting. On his website, Byrne explains that this cuts back on maintenance time, makes the publishing process far faster, and allows you to deploy your content to multiple channels (web, CD, print, handhelds, etc) at the click of a button.

DCLnews asked Tony how prevalent content management systems (CMS) are today.

TONY BYRNE: In many respects, we are only at the beginning of a content management era. You could say CMS is where the Internet was five years ago. Most companies still employ a surfeit of manual processes to publish electronic content. At the same time, many large enterprises that have tried to introduce greater automation are embarking on their second or third generation of CMS. They learn more each time, and are beginning to figure out what they need to accomplish to "do it right" this time. I'm beginning to see some impressive success stories out there.

DCLnews: How popular are out-of-box solutions and will they prove a key factor in making CMS take off?

TONY BYRNE: There are many "out-of-the-box" solutions right now and they are proving increasingly popular. The question a buyer has to ask, though, is out of whose box did the solution derive? When vendors produce very plug-and-play systems, they are making assumptions about how you publish content. To the extent that acknowledged content management processes are beginning to solidify across the industry, many of those assumptions are likely to be accurate. However, there are cases when a company will want to do things a bit differently - if your company is one of those, you better be sure you have an extensible solution. (The CMS Report at www.cmswatch.com has more details on this).

DCLnews: Data migration is one of the big areas of complaint in CMS. A 2003 survey by the Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture (AIfIA), for example, revealed that 53% of respondents complained of poor legacy content handling in CMS. Can you comment on this?

TONY BYRNE: Migration is a great source of frustration; always has been, probably always will be. However, I think a lot of the frustration stems from uninformed managers postponing key decisions and important work until too late in the project. The time to start migrating is on the first day of the project, not the last

DCLnews: An article by John Girard in CMS Watch says it is frequently better to start from scratch than get into data migration. But how often is conversion really an issue?

TONY BYRNE: I tend to lean towards Girard on this. Companies should take a hard look at the real value of their legacy content and use that value equation as a yardstick for the size of the ultimate migration. This is not just because of migration cost and hassle. More content on your website does not necessarily add value for readers; in fact, more content can often subtract value.

DCLnews: How important is content reuse as a spur to the adoption of CMS?

TONY BYRNE: People talk about content reuse much more than they actually do it. It shows up on all the RFPs, but very few implementations. By this I mean true content reuse, with fine-grained content models and highly discrete chunks - as opposed to reusing footers, headers, and other basic document elements. More commonly, I see enterprises focusing first on content repurposing*, with coarser-grained content models and sending integral documents through different channels and sites. At the end of the day, it depends, again, on the business value of the content and the processes you can put in place. Just don't underestimate the difficulty of managing content at a component level.

(*For a useful distinction between reuse and repurposing, see Ann Rockley's www.managingenterprisecontent.com)

DCLnews: Will the world change dramatically if content reuse is used extensively? And what is the killer app?

TONY BYRNE: It's not the world that will change as a result. Companies will have to change as a precursor to wider reuse. Persuading employees to: 1) recognize that content belongs to the enterprise and not the individual, and 2) think of information in terms of chunks and not documents; is supremely hard. Mostly it is a cultural shift, but the technology isn't all there yet, either. I think you have to be brutal about deriving content models from realistic estimations of near-term product opportunities, rather than chunking for some vaguely imagined world of possibilities. The companies that succeed will have killer managers, rather than killer apps.

DCLnews Editorial