This briefing draws a clear line between two separate functionalities: personalisation and segmentation.

This article discusses the results of a worldwide survey conducted to guage what extent personalisation is being used in intranets and portals.

The functionality of the content management system (CMS) is obviously a key deciding factor when purchasing a new product. Equally important is the usability of the CMS. If staff, particularly authors, cannot easily make use of the CMS, then the system will never be a success, regardless of how powerful it may be. The overall usability of CMS products, and their suitability for their intended users, is therefore increasingly closely scrutinised during the evaluation and selection process. One key challenge remains, however, which is how best to define (and ultimately evaluate) the 'usability' of a content management system. While there

I'm doing a lot of work at the moment helping organisations select a content management system. One of the key aspects of this is making sure that our clients get to fully understand the strengths and weaknesses of each product, and the vendor demos the major way of achieving this. The first step is to prepare scenarios that outline a "day in the life" of the CMS, and to have these used as a "script" for the vendors. At the end of the session, we then use a very simple scoring scheme for each of the narrative requirements: Score Rating

There is a ‘rule of thirds’ that can be used to categorise the main types of forms that exist on an intranet.

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

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

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

There’s been a bit of discussion recently about the central role of the WYSIWYG editor in a CMS solution. Considering that the primary purpose of a web content management system …

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