A lot of intranet and portal projects aim to deliver functionality related to personalisation or customisation. This may involve tailoring information based on staff role, delivering news relevant for specific offices, or limiting access to information based on seniority. Any of these capabilities requires the system to know who staff are, the business unit they belong to, and where they sit in the real world. Unfortunately, too many of these projects run aground before they start because a key piece of IT infrastructure has not been correctly put in place. LDAP and Active Directory Sitting invisibly behind the scenes in

Before personalisation can be implemented, underlying LDAP or Active Directory implementations need to be cleaned up.

CMS products have come along way in the last five years in terms of functionality and usability. They now (mostly) deploy quickly, are reasonably easy…

Ok, I’m going to confront the elephant in the room: wiki markup has no future. I know I’m going to burnt at the stake by…

When I posted my recent article on Time needed to select a CMS to the CM Pros mailing list, it generated a lot of discussion….

It will always take longer than hoped to select a new content management system. While an 'accelerated' approach can be taken, the reality is that somewhere between 6 and 12 months will probably be needed, from beginning to end. To help clarify this statement, this briefing provides a breakdown of the individual steps and the amount of time needed for each. Use this to set appropriate stakeholder expectations, and to develop a realistic project plan. Selecting a CMS: step-by-step Activity Duration Redesigning the site 8 weeks Making a business case 4 weeks Receiving project sign-off, approval 4 weeks Documenting CMS

I'm chairing a conference on content management at the moment, thus the flood of CM related posts. One of the topics that has repeatedly come up is web 2.0 and user-generated content in specific. The question was raised: what do content management systems provide in this space? The answer is: not much. There is a significant gap in the ability of CMS products to handle user-generated content. Let's explore this further... Content management systems are fundamentally designed to support a publishing process. That is, people within the organisation produce the original content, it's reviewed and finally published. There is also

In a lot of the work that I'm doing at the moment, I'm seeing very ambitious goals for content management system (CMS) projects. Bundled up in the project are many different capabilities, beyond just page publishing functionality. This is causing a lot of problems. Organisations are going out to market looking for too much, not understanding what CMS products are best designed to do. This leads to a lot of disappointment, as well as blown out budgets. So I thought it might be useful to post a quick summary table listing what a CMS does, and what should be obtained

I've just released an article titled: Does your CMS vendor have product expertise? Following on from that, I would argue that this is now the "ante" for CMS vendor to stay in the game, and will be one of the major differentiating factors in terms of who survives, and who doesn't. To expand on that... Even the big international vendors started from humble roots, and still go through periods of "growing pain" whey they have difficulty supporting their ever-expanding client base. Some vendors have also gained quite a reputation for the difficulty in migrating from one product version to the

Choosing a content management system (CMS) is not just about finding the product with the right functionality. It's also about dealing with a vendor who can support your needs for the lifetime of the solution. You need to be confident that there will be more than just help-desk support - the vendor should offer regular (trouble-free) product upgrades, a clear development plan, and good mechanisms for handling the needs of each CMS customer. The challenge is that many vendors are great at code development, but poor at product management. While they are small this doesn't matter, but as they grow