Base22 – Enterprise Web Evolution

Web Content management is the process of authoring, organizing, tagging, securing, approving, formatting, archiving, and presenting content for delivery via the web. The word “web” in the title is important. “Web Content Management” is different than Content Management and this is a mistake many organizations make when evaluating their content management needs. Systems that excel at authoring and organizing content are often very limited when it comes to getting that content out and presented as a website. The word Enterprise is also important. Systems that work very well for one person become unusable when they must be shared by hundreds of people in many different roles and departments across an organization.  The content itself could be structured data or unstructured text, images, audio, video, interactive applications or media. Once content is finally online, users must be able to discover it by search, navigation, alerts, personalization and depending on the site may need additional functionality to support sharing, discussing, saving, printing, tagging, rating, and a whole range of other activities that may, in many cases result in additional content creation. All of this user interaction must be tracked and measured and the metrics themselves must be collected, stored, and presented back to authors where the cycle continues.

These activities define a kind of information ecosystem within an organization. Each activity within that system must be supported by one or more pieces of software and processes must be defined and implemented. The system can be dominated by a single software solution that does everything or by specialized tools that are carefully integrated with each other.

Security and Filtering

An Enterprise Portal in a large organization has a difficult mission when it comes to content security and filtering.  There is information that must be communicated to everyone,

• Create Filter
  • Administrators from the Information Architecture team are responsible for creating filters, they follow standards design by  IT office and they analyze the efficiency of these filters on the day to day basis.
• Apply Filtering
  • After the filters are design and created, Content Authors are responsible for applying the filters to the piece of content they are creating. The executive editor reviews the content and can change the filtering before publishing any content.

User Management

• Add new user.
  • Administrators from the Information Architecture team are responsible for the creation of users from all over the country. The privileges and profile are essential for the security filtering when navigating through the portal.
• Create user groups.
  • IT can manage user groups for the CMS. The groups are essential for the security and filtering of the Portal.

Workflows

• Description.
  • A Workflow defines the life cycle of a piece of content and currently the Information Architecture team is responsible of the creation and edition of workflows. Every piece of content is attached to a workflow; Authoring Templates have their workflow in order to facilitate the heritage of it to the pieces of content to which they are applied. Information Architecture team is able to set the different states of the content and users involved in the approval, rejection and publication.

Authoring Templates

• Description
  • The Administrators from the Information Architecture team are responsible of designing and creating the Authoring Templates that the rest of the Content Authors use as template for their content. This is a critical feature of the CMS since an AT defines the functionality and structure that is going to be used through the entire Portal.

Presentation Templates

• Description.
  • The Presentation Templates define the layout of the content in the portal, and it is a complement to the Authoring Template, thus, it has to be design thinking in the AT that it will be map with. The Administrators from the Information Architecture team are responsible for the design and creation of these templates, including the map that is done with the corresponding Authoring Templates.

CMS Components

• Description
  • The Portal has very specific needs in terms of functionality and layout that require of custom design and construction. Many of these needs are required on different sites of the Portal with minor differences. In order to maintain a standard and reduce the overhead, the CMS has a Library feature that enables the Administrators from the Information Architecture team to save the code as components and classify them according to their code nature. This allows the reuse of code and reduces de overhead on the CMS, when an update is made to functionality, only the component has to be changed without the need of applying the change to all the places it is being used.

Component Library

• The library consists on the following types of components: File Resource, HTML, Image, JSP, Menu, Navigator, Taxonomy and Text Components. Components can also be browse by workflow.

Content Creation

• Create new content.
  • Content Authors create content for the Portal on a daily basis all over the country. When the content is created, depending on the Authors business rules, the content begins its workflow through the CMS. Content Authors are distributed in different levels, such as Corporate, Region and District levels. Some authors create content for a particular area, like Human Resources or Operations.
• Use components in content.
  • While the content is created the Content Authors use components from the library in order to add functionality to the piece of content.
• Keywords.
  • The use of keywords as metadata to identify the orientation of the content. These keywords can also be used by other components to identify the content when browsing for material to show in the Portal.
• Rich Media.
  • Images, Videos, and audio are frequently required in the content. The CMS supports rich media through different components. Content Authors point this as the orientation that the Portal is getting, as every day the plain text content is less and less used.

Content Management

• Maintenance.
  • Once the content is created the Administrators from the Information Architecture team are able to clean old content or to move misallocated content to new areas. These are tasks that may or may not need to involve the content’s original workflow; this is why the CMS enables the administrators the ability to manage content.

Portal Design

• Layout.
  • The layout of the portal is responsibility of the Information Architecture team, and it is designed to keep a standard through all the pages. Style Sheets are used to maintain this standard and to reduce the overhead. Content authors are not allowed to change the layout of the site area their content is being published in. The use of Style Sheets is considered a critical issue.