I’ve been facilitating CMS vendor demos for most of this week, as part of the final stages of a University CMS selection project. One of the things that has changed …

This is part 3 in our series of posts that outlines how we work with clients. There are a very large number of content management systems (CMS) in the marketplace, …

There is a lot of work involved in redeveloping and relaunching an intranet or website. The project management challenges start early, and it is easy to overlook the time (and effort) needed to migrate the content from the old to the new site. Yet, for its lack of visibility, content migration is often the single biggest activity in a web redevelopment. Certainly it is the least interesting, and unfortunately unavoidable. This article explores a number of options for the migrating content, and provides some practical suggestions that should help it to go smoothly. Redeveloping a site Two factors often drive

Explores the options for migrating content as part of a site redesign, giving tips and suggestions.

The phrase 'trying to boil the ocean' refers to tasks that are clearly and heroically impossible. This is exactly what most teams take on when they try to get every intranet page up to the same high standard. In the earlier article titled Intranet authoring: a hobby?, the role of intranet authors was explored, highlighting that many are required to maintain their content 'on the side', with little training or support. Most intranets struggle to deliver consistent, accurate, readable and valuable content. Despite this, the goal of many intranet teams remains to deliver universally 'good' content. This briefing will discuss

Most modern content management systems provide two different ways of editing site content: in-context editing and back-end editing. While in-context editing is often seen as 'sexier', each method has its strengths and weaknesses. This briefing will explore these two editing options, providing advice on when to use them in practice. In-context editing In-context editing allows authors to browse the published website, using site navigation in the normal way to find the desired page. By clicking a small or hidden button (or some other equivalent action), they can switch into editing mode, updating the content of the page in place. During

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 to use, and are a …

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 all the wiki fanatics, but …