Archives for Content management

Plan before CMS implementation.

It would seem to be a statement of the obvious that organisations should do their planning before embarking on the implementation of their new content management system (CMS). Yet all too often this doesn't occur. Let's state this more strongly: the day after the contract is signed with the CMS vendor, the vendor will show up asking: so, what are we actually implementing? If there is not a clear and simple answer to this, the project will go poorly, and the vendor will be more than a little frustrated (which itself may have consequences). This briefing explores the specific details

Top 10 mistakes when selecting a CMS.

Organisations often make the selection of a CMS much harder than it needs to be. They do this by running into common pitfalls that impact not just on the selection process, but on the overall success of the CMS project. Over the past ten years, we have worked with many organisations on content management systems, and have seen a huge number of tenders released to the marketplace. Across these projects, the same issues are seen again and again. These most often relate to how the requirements are documented, or how the overall tender is structured. They may also arise from

Users don’t personalise.

This keeps coming up: one of the benefits that is sold for portals is that users can "personalise" (or tailor) what content and functionality is displayed on their home page. The problem is that users don't personalise, despite the hopes (and optimism) of the IT team. Now, I "know" that the real-life statistic is that only 5-10% of users personalise. This means that 90-95% of staff will leave the portal as-is, leaving the portal owners with the same design, usability and IA challenges they had with the intranet. The problem is that I don't have an official source for this

Separate design and the CMS.

There are two major elements to most web redevelopment projects: the redesign of the existing site, and the selection of a new (or replacement) content management system (CMS). These two elements reflect the underlying issues that typically drive web projects: the problems with the structure and content of the published site, and issues with the management and publishing of the site. The temptation can be to select a single provider to deliver both the redesign of the site and the underlying CMS. This would, however, be a mistake. Instead, organisations are almost always better served by separating out the design

Tips for CMS vendor demos.

I'm sure I've written about this before, but I'm spending a lot of time at present helping organisations to select a CMS, and other than the sessions to document requirements the single biggest block of time is sitting in on vendor demos. Based on the past few years of experience, here are some tips for vendors on how to present a good session: Introduce yourselves. Start with a brief (!) introduction of who you are and what your product is. Aim to give us some useful background and context for the detail to come. Stick to the script. Follow closely

Understanding the requirement for a portal.

There is no doubt that fuelled by a compelling business need, a portal solution can provide real business advantage. However provisioning a portal when it is a content-managed site that is required, will result in the most expensive website or intranet that an organisation can build. What then should those organisations keen on entering the portal space consider? Using two case studies this article explores portals and seeks to answer this question by taking a look at: the difference between 'portal as a concept' and 'portal as a technology' the types of business initiatives that are well-suited to a portal

CMS vendors are evaluating us.

When organisations are looking for a new content management system (CMS), the selection process is designed to evaluate all the offerings in the marketplace to find the product that is the best fit to the organisation's needs. Requirements are documented, and vendors asked to provide written responses, give demonstrations, and provide whatever other information is required. All of these activities are designed to assess the quality and effectiveness of the solutions on offer. What is rarely recognised, however, is that while we are evaluating vendors, CMS vendors are also evaluating us. Submitting a tender response While we are looking for

Obtain search in your CMS?.

Organisations are looking for a wide range of capabilities when selecting a new content management system (CMS), and search is often one of the desired features. Almost every site requires a search tool, whether it