Almost every single portal project requires that you surface a variety of content in different formats. Most groups that address content run into a number of issues or start with some mis-conceptions about content on portal. While not every company to create a portal has every single mis-conception, you’d be surprised how much sharing is going on.
Common mis-conceptions on content in portal
- Content should be treated like code
- We should force the users to give their content to a central source
- We should create a lot of different templates for each small variation in content
Now let me address the three items above:
Content is NOT code
Many who develop and deploy portals hail from a development background. That background demands that before anything goes live, it must be fully vetted in a variety of conditions. That includes multiple levels of testing and review by many parties. Now for new code that has never seen the light of day that OK. However, for someone who is creating a set of sentences and paragraphs with an attachment or image here and there, we shouldn’t expect a user to have to vette it like it were code. We shouldn’t migrate content from one environment to the next and check it out each time. Here’s the think, if you write, “Hello World!” and then test it in a development and then staging environment, it’s going to be exactly the same! The tools used to create the content didn’t change. The tools used to display the content didn’t change. The tools used to personalize the content didn’t change. The bottom line is this, if we trust the content tools then we don’t need to use a code like publishing process.
That’s not to say that workflow doesn’t have it’s place. It does. But it should be a simple workflow in an authoring environment. No sys admin should be involved in this. Create it, review, and then let a business user click on the button to make it live.
Centralized Authoring is not efficient
We see it time and time again, the IT or Marketing people demand that everyone gives them content and then are confused that users are not happy. The unhappiness reaches new heights with Web 2.0 technologies. Those blog, AJAX, and other tools make it really easy to create content. We should not keep users from doing so. We should give them simple tools with specific security constraints and let them go at it.
When creating content templates, keep it simple stupid
Let me recount two experiences.
One client needed to do an upgrade and had my company work with them on it. The CMS supporting the portal delivered 200 articles or pages to the portal. Supporting it were 120 different templates or types. In other words, more effort was spent creating the infrastructure for the content than was spent in creating the content in the first place. At that point, you might as well just hire an html developer. It would be cheaper.
Another client has a content developer. He complained about the users constantly wanting different articles with just a little variation. They want the picture in the upper instead of lower right. They want to change one metadata field to make it different from this other one. He was working with upwards of 100 different content types that were at least 70% similar. This guy had a guaranteed job because any change went through him and he had a huge backlog
Both approaches made content much more difficult that it needed to be. One of the first rules should be that if it’s almost the same then it should be one template. If you end up with more than 5 author templates for a 500 page site, you probably did something wrong. Today’s rich text editors are phenomenal. You can copy/paste from Word, you can create tables, lists, colors, and use different fonts. You can place a picture, move it around, have text wrap around it, etc. If you combine your content templates with a good text editor, you just made life a lot easier and you also created a system that’s a lot easier to maintain.
Now if you also take your governance process and allow business users to create content and place it on any page in the portal, you’ve just made a tool that users will like to use. However if you they can create content but they cannot create a new page without a very expensive multiple step and multiple environment review process, you just made someone really annoyed.
What are your thoughts? Do you have issues with the way content is managed on a portal? I suspect the answer is yes. I also suspect that more than a few portal content management tools fail to make content easy. Next time, I’ll talk about portals and the tools.
