Improving the IBM WCM authoring experience

One of the key areas we focus on with many of our IBM Portal/WCM implementations is the authoring of web content within WCM. Let’s face it – while the out-of-the-box interface isn’t difficult to use, it is easier for technical users to learn than for non-technical content authors.

However, there are a number of things that can be done during a WCM implementation to dramatically improve the WCM authoring experience – many of these don’t require much effort:

1. Instead of allowing a lot of choices within a piece of content, it is sometimes easier on authors to give them separate, but similar templates. In a perfect world, WCM would allow something like template inheritance to make this easier.
2. Hide any elements that authors do not need to complete
3. Provide descriptive help text for all non-trivial elements.
4. Try to finalize 1-2 templates early and let a few individuals try to author content. Then adjust templates and help text accordingly.
5. Limit selections (e.g. categories, site areas, etc) via WCM security. Authors will then see only the selections they are allowed to choose based on their authority. This allows a great deal of reuse within WCM.
6. Set default values when applicable. If you use a naming convention for the “Name” field of your content items, set the default value to an example of that naming convention.
7. Create custom launch pages in the WCM Authoring environment that give the authors a better starting point.
8. Version 8 provides a few options (“Basic Home Page” and “Home Page”) that are better than the default. At a minimum, choose one of those, but a custom landing page is even better.
9. Custom workflow actions. These can sometimes be implemented with relatively simple usage of the WCM Java API, yet provide a lot of time saving and usability improvement. For example, one client of ours had the requirement for the approver group to be set based on who is creating the content. So if the author is in HR, the approver group should be HR_Approvers. If the author is in Marketing, the approver group should be Marketing_Approvers. This is relatively easy to do with a custom workflow action, a simple lookup table, and some basic coding to the WCM API. There are alternatives with out-of-the-box WCM features, but it requires more duplication of assets.

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For most new IBM Portal/WCM implementations, there will be a period before go-live when a large amount of content will need to be entered. Sometimes this can be done programmatically in bulk, or with a migration tool such as Kapow Katalyst, but it is very frequently done manually.

If the authoring environment isn’t easy to use, this will cause delays and pushback from the business users who need to enter the content. In some cases, I’ve seen this task fall back on the development team, and content entry isn’t what they want to be doing in the weeks before go-live.

In some cases, more formal education on WCM authoring may be required. Stay tuned for a future post with opinions on that subject as well.