I recently posted about how to make your IBM WCM environment easier to use for content authors. In many cases, that may be sufficient for your needs, but sometimes it may be appropriate to augment that with more formal training. This training would be specific to your WCM environment – not on generic WCM authoring. Here are some of the cases where we’ve seen clients request, and ultimately benefit from customized WCM authoring training that we have created:
- There are dozens, hundreds (or more) potential authors. It isn’t unusual to have hundreds of content authors for a portal site in a large organization, particularly when the portal is being used for intranet-type purposes.
- Content authors haven’t been involved with the creation of the site and have no context for how or why the system was created. Training can provide background on the site itself, why it exists, and how to author content for it.
- Due to complex content requirements, the WCM developers couldn’t make the authoring experience trivial in every case.
So, what are your options?
No Formal Training
Don’t create any formal training at all – just focus on making the authoring process as easy as possible.
Instructor-Led Training (Online, or in person)
You could create a custom course for WCM authoring, and make it specific to your WCM libraries and templates. We’ve seen these type of courses range in duration from 1 to 12+ hours, depending on the complexity of the WCM assets to which the authors will be exposed.
The way you’ll get the most interaction between an instructor and the students is to hold training in-person. This is obviously difficult and costly when you have a large number of authors, or a widely distributed author community.
An alternative is to have virtual instructor-led training. You’ll also need to identify tools for voice calls, screen sharing, and post-course surveys.
If you have authors in different continents, the logistics of scheduling both the students and the instructors becomes more difficult. You’re also much more likely to encounter connectivity or performance issues with conference call numbers or screen sharing software. Also, if you choose to print any material, your printing and shipping costs can go up significantly.
You will also need to consider how to the students will perform the exercises or labs. Will you need to create a course image on laptops or VMs? Do you have a dedicated training environment, or an environment that can be reserved for training occasionally?
Self-Paced Training, Recorded Demos
This could be as simple as a series of modules delivered via presentations or wiki pages, or it could be created as eLearning videos, which would be more engaging and perhaps more educational to your target audience.
Which to Choose?
At Perficient, we’ve seen each of these options multiple times. At a minimum, my recommendation would be this:
- Build the WCM environment, especially the authoring templates, so they are extremely easy to use, including liberal use of help text and descriptions for most assets and template elements.
- Provide clear, concise documentation for non-trivial authoring scenarios. Point to the documentation (in a wiki, an IBM Connections community, Sharepoint, etc) from the WCM authoring environment itself so it’s easy to find. Hint: An easy place to put this link would be on the custom launch page that you should create and also in a URL in the top navigation of the WCM authoring environment.
- Collect feedback from trial group of authors after the first few authoring templates are nearing completion. Only approach 2-5 potential authors initially for their opinion, and make revisions based on that.
Be sure to include those tasks on your project plan and allow ample time for documentation and template revisions. If you want to create formal training in any of the formats above, involve the course creators early for high-level planning, and ensure they’re available when WCM assets are getting approved so they can build the course based on final (or close to it) assets.
