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Today's Web sites require powerful content management solutions that address workflow, usability, deployment, flexibility, scalability, and many other make-or-break issues. This is the first book to cover every aspect of content management for the large-scale or growing site. It offers Web professionals a complete blueprint for developing, deploying, managing, maintaining, and evolving enterprise-class sites with the greatest business value -- at the lowest cost. Nakano first introduces the motivation for content management -- and the problems that rapidly arise when content management solutions are not in place. He introduces key content management concepts and techniques, then presents a complete process and methodology for introducing content management that works. Nakano addresses hot topics such as globalization and workflow, and answers key questions such as: "How can I keep my site flexible and dynamic? How can I encourage more employees to contribute content? The book presents real-world "Day-in-the-Life" case studies from a broad cross-section of companies, large and small, from many industries. For all Web site project managers, architects, administrators, managers, and content specialists working on large sites, or sites expected to grow rapidly.
Approaches to Content Management
Best Practices for Collaborative Web Development
Choosing a Content Management System
Common Work Cycles in Web Development
Integrating Microsoft Office and Content Management Server 2001
Managing Web Content with a Content Management System
Overview of Content Management
Principles of Collaborative Web Development
The Internet Changes the Rules of the Game
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nakanoch2.pdf
Foreword.
Manuel Terranova.
Peng T. Ong.@CHAPTER = Preface.
I. MOTIVATION FOR CONTENT MANAGEMENT.
1. The Internet Changes the Rules of the Game.Executive Summary.
Introduction.
Overview.
Fear and Greed.
Rules of the Game.
Rule #1: It's the Assets, Stupid!
Rule #2: Experiment. Iterate. Grow.
Rule #3: Respond to Customers Quickly and Frequently, or Lose Them!
Rule #4: Enable the Masses!
Rule #5: Make It Manageable and Reproducible.
Summary.
Roadmap.
2. Overview of Content Management.Executive Summary.
From Prototype to Enterprise.
2 a.m. Software.
The Pioneers.
The Tornado.
Go Dot-com.
Terminology.
Universality of Assets.
Managing Web Assets.
Live Editing.
Staging the Web Site.
Independent Edit Areas.
Content Management.
Content Management Architecture.
Content Creation/Editing Subsystem.
Repository Subsystem.
Workflow Subsystem.
Deployment and Operations Management.
Summary.
II. CONCEPTS AND PRINCIPLES.
3. Principles of Collaborative Web Development.Executive Summary.
Introduction.
Basic Concepts.
Stakeholder Identification.
Are We in the Chaos Zone?
Development and Production Separation.
Asset Identification.
Direct Feedback (WYSIWYG).
Parallel Development.
Versioning.
Control Mechanisms: Auditing and Enforcement.
Summary.
4. Best Practices for Collaborative Web Development.Executive Summary.
The WSE Paradigm.
Collaboration Strategies.
Collaboration Operations.
Submit Operation.
Compare Operation.
Update Operation.
Merge Operation.
Publish Operation.
Work Cycles.
Version Snapshots.
Common Work Cycles in Web Development.
Real-Time Development Work Cycle.
Compare-Update Work Cycle.
Review Work Cycle.
Major Test Work Cycle.
Summary.
5. Templating Empowers Content Contributors.Executive Summary.
Background.
The Freshness Imperative.
The Challenge of Change.
Enabling Change.
A Template System.
Example: ezSuggestionBox.com.
Advantages of a Template System.
Summary.
Practitioner's Checklist.
6. Workflow Speeds Work Cycles.Executive Summary.
Using Workflow.
Characteristics of Web Development.
People Factors.
Project Factors.
Process Factors.
Business Factors.
Virtual Assembly Line.
Workflow Concepts.
Interaction Pattern.
Tasks.
Job.
Transition Links.
Active and Inactive Tasks.
Building a Workflow.
Notification.
Designing a Workflow.
1. Identify Interaction Sequences.
2. Identify Candidate Workflow.
3. Sketch the Steps.
4. Identify Known and Not-Yet-Known Parameters.
5. Add Remaining Transitions.
6. Add Notification Steps.
Summary.
Practitioner's Checklist.
7. Deploying Content.Executive Summary.
Introduction.
Concept Review.
The Release Agreement.
Common Pitfalls.
Continuous Change.
Database Assets.
Design Considerations.
Incremental Changes.
Making Changes Transactional.
What Initiates Deployment?
Script Integration.
Rollback.
Designing a Deployment Infrastructure.
Enterprise Deployment Architecture.
Summary.
Practitioner's Checklist.
8. Multiple Web Initiatives.Executive Summary.
Introduction.
Overview.
Concepts.
Logically Independent Web Site.
Task Overlap.
Basic Branch Patterns.
Single-Branch Pattern.
Agency Pattern.
Short-Term/Long-Term Branch Pattern.
Dependent Branch Pattern.
Identifying Branch Patterns.
Example--Using Branches in a Dot-Com Company.
Dependent Web Sites.
Summary.
Practitioner's Checklist.
III. DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION.
9. Using Web Content Management for Globalization.Executive Summary.
Introduction.
A Globalization Initiative.
The Easy Path Leads to Trouble.
Design a Solid Platform for International Development.
Branch Structure.
Work Area Structure.
Special Situations.
Workflow Design.
Template System Design.
Deployment Design.
Summary.
10. Summary and Conclusions.Executive Summary.
Introduction.
Revisiting the Rules.
It's the Assets, Stupid!
Experiment. Iterate. Grow.
Respond to Customers Quickly and Frequently, or Lose Them!
Enable the Masses!
Make It Manageable and Reproducible.
Future Trends.
Content Becomes More Structured.
Content Contributors and Their Tools Become More Specialized.
Blurring the Distinction between Web Operations and the Rest of Business.
More Distributed and Flow-based Handling of Assets, Tasks, and Jobs.
More Emphasis on Content Tagging to Enable Storage, Retrieval, Search, Reuse, and Routing.
Emphasize 24 x 7 Management Infrastructure.
Conclusion.
IV. APPENDICES.
Appendix A: A Smart File System.Executive Summary.
Introduction.
Requirements.
QA Hand-off Workflow.
Summary.
Appendix C: A Workflow Design for Predetermined Time Schedules.Executive Summary.
Problem Scenario.
Background.
Time-Slot Technique.
Time-Slot Techniques—Detailed Example.
Discussion.
Variations on the Time-Slot Technique.
Appendix D: Basic Process Steps of a Best-Practice Content Management Process.Executive Summary.
Example: Web Site.
A Best-Practice Development Process.
Example: Rebranding Initiative.
Summary.
Resources.Content makes a web property what it is. This is as true today as it was yesterday. This will continue to be true into the future, even as technological advances create ever more sophisticated ways to run businesses, reach customers, and react to trends. Content defines the soul of the property. Managing content includes the steps to design, create, implement, modify, archive, review, approve, and deploy.
As a founding engineer, system architect, and principal consultant, I have seen content management projects across industries, geographies, and organizations. Most have struggled to manage the tremendous growth in the web space without a corresponding growth in web tools and techniques. Hence the need for a book--a practical guide for project managers and web architects.
This book has taken me two years to write. During that period, I've been involved in over 50 web development projects in various roles with Interwoven, a content infrastructure software company. My involvement ranged from informal e-mail consultation, to in-depth design meetings, to focused implementation efforts, to complete implementation engagements. These experiences exposed me to a wide range of industries and organizations. It became clear that successful content management solutions share common features and are driven by a core set of principles and techniques.
I have attempted to distill my experience and that of my colleagues into this book. It began as a series of application notes that I wrote for Interwoven project managers and technical consultants. The notes explained concepts, principles, and techniques to help guide implementers and managers of web content management solutions. The notes helped our customers and consulting partners to frame and develop their content management solutions. The notes became the backbone of this book. The true test of a book is the number of scribbles in the margins, post-its sticking from various angles, bent corners, along with the occasional coffee spill. I hope this book will receive the same measure of wear-and-tear. If it does, I know that my goal has been accomplished.
This book will be useful to three broad categories of web practitioners: managers, architects, and developers. Managers benefit from understanding content management for the purpose of structuring the flow of work and planning resource allocation. A development manager needs to know how to separate tasks to minimize interference and how to orchestrate multiple web initiatives. A production manager focuses on streamlining the flow of changes from development, through a review process, to the ultimate destinations on multiple production servers. Accuracy, reliability, and reproducibility are paramount concerns to the production manager. A business manager, especially the executive sponsor of web initiatives, needs to understand how process and infrastructure improvements generate tangible business benefits. Benefits include faster development, more effective use of staff, and greater reliability. All managers benefit from knowing what is possible with current tools.
Architects focus on internal design, integration with other business systems, and technology choices. Throughout the thought process they must pay attention to structuring the design to facilitate rapid development both with the current staff and expanded staff down the road. For these reasons, architects must be cognizant of the precepts of content management. Their goal after all, is to design what can be built, to build what can be assembled quickly, and to assemble what can be tested easily and often.
Developers are specialists who create content as their primary job, such as Java developers or graphic artists, and others who contribute content as an adjunct to their jobs, such as a marketing manager or public relations specialist. A developer who grasps the principles of content management will understand its role in a larger context. This is especially important because a strong developer is inevitably tapped to contribute in the role of lead developer, where understanding the big picture helps to effectively blend the efforts of the group.
The managers, architects and developers who form the primary target of this book collectively have diverse experiences and wide skill sets. This diversity explains the difficulty that sometimes arises in explaining web content management because different people play different roles in the web endeavor. Each category of stakeholder has a different objective, and hence they tend to look at the problem of content management differently. For example, content contributors want the shortest path possible to get their changes to the web, with as few obstacles as possible. In contrast, production managers want to make sure that content is tested, reviewed, and safely under version control. Because of the difference in perspectives, different parts of the content management solution are assigned different priorities. All the views need to be accounted for, striving for a realistic balance.
Organizations are also governed by their current practices. For example, one reader may currently use "edit directly on the production server." A different reader may use the "test changes on a staging server before deploying to production server technique." Others may use the "e-mail content to the webmaster" approach. Part of the challenge is to bring all of these different perspectives up to a common starting point.
Because of all of these differences, finding the initial common ground on which to build the motivation and techniques for content management requires some effort. This includes agreeing on the vocabulary and building a common understanding of the problems. An experienced content management manager or architect will find the early portions of the book a useful refresher on concepts. However, a manager new to content management will find this information invaluable. In addition to setting the stage for later chapters, the book helps frame views on the proper interactions and interrelationships in a true web environment.
One of the important elements of this book is the use of "day-in-the-life-of" examples. New managers will find tremendous value in viewing the practices of other web organizations. These examples are based on companies that I've worked with, and represent a broad cross-section: companies both large and small, from dot-coms to brick-and-mortar companies, from many different industries.
To truly convey the meaning of web content management, we cannot merely talk about tools. This book expands the reader's view to look at people, tools, processes, and organizations as an interrelated whole. That's a big lesson that Interwoven's consulting force has learned over the course of implementing content management for customers over the last three years. It isn't just about installing a tool, loading the content, handing over a stack of manuals, and heading for the exit. Implementing a content management solution is a number of things that are much broader in scope. It is building a partnership between the consultants who understand how to use the product and the customer who understands the social and organizational dynamics of his or her company. It is a fallacy to underestimate the importance of either side of the equation. Building a flawless and pristine installation will not be successful if the implementation effort finds itself blind-sided by an entrenched "not-invented-here" attitude about software tools in general. Similarly, a perfectly aligned organization is useless if there isn't an appreciation of the "art" of managing thousands of web assets, designing effective workflow, and getting that information from content contributors.
That's the challenge and curse of implementing a web content management solution. It is essential to build strong bridges between many constituencies in order to lay a path to success. It can neither be a fully grassroots effort to build a solution from the bottom up without executive sponsorship, nor can it be a top-down solution that is imposed by executive fiat. As with most things in life, there are challenges and struggles in any implementation effort. Without a doubt, the rewards make it worthwhile.
This book primarily speaks to the practice of content management, which differs from the "science" of content management. The term "content management" has only recently been used to refer to the principles and practices around developing, managing, maintaining, and deploying content in an organization. As such, it is more common to find practitioners of content management than scientists of content management. A practitioner slings a toolkit over her shoulder and carries a collection of useful concepts in her head, but her primary objective is to help clients set up an infrastructure to manage content. The practitioner engages with clients, asking questions, sensing the lay of the land, in an attempt to gain insight into which of several approaches to bring to bear on the problem. Success is measured both by how well the implementation matches the original requirements and by how happy the client is. The former tends to be objective, while the latter is hugely subjective. Measuring against requirements moves close to the notion of the science of content management, while client happiness is scientifically unsound.
This dichotomy between the objectively measurable and the scientifically unsound is evident in this book. On one hand, we endeavor to convey the flavor of the practice of content management through experiences gained from numerous client engagements during what will undoubtedly be viewed as the formative years of the Internet revolution. On the other hand, through that limited and possibly idiosyncratic perspective, we strive to distill the common concepts and principles that have proven to be useful across many engagements. Does it rise to the level of science? Probably not. Do I wish that the concept building, hypothesis testing, and strenuous analysis could be infused with enough rigor to qualify as science? Of course. But it is my honest belief that the field isn't quite ready for that degree of consolidation. But just as pioneer farmer might have discerned the science of agriculture, or a village healer might have gleaned the beginnings of the science of medicine, we hope that some of the lessons described here will help others to point the way toward a "science" of content management.
This book has ten chapters that divide naturally into three parts. Part One lays out the motivation for content management. It examines the issues that arise when a solution is not in place. It introduces the concepts of content management that will be used throughout the rest of the book. This section paints the essential backdrop for readers unfamiliar with content management concepts. Case study examples highlight the importance of content management in the proper functioning of any organization's web sites. Readers who are more familiar with content management may wish to skim this section to refresh their understanding of the issues, and jump into Part Two for a detailed discussion of theory.
Part Two introduces the concepts and principles required by a practitioner, and provides the framework to develop a content management solution. Technical architects, project managers and consultants will find the basic building blocks for the content management solution within these chapters. This section presents the content management theory necessary to build a solution, used extensively in Part Three. This section starts with the importance of content management in ensuring a collaborative development environment, highlighting the practices that must be encouraged. It follows with a detailed discussion of the key levers of a successful content management solution: templating, workflow, deployment, and branch design. Each of these sections delves into the theory underpinning each content management lever to understand its value within a content management framework, its impact on an organization, and the complexity required to reach a solution. Examples are used to illustrate common uses of each lever within a business context
Part Three explains how to design and implement a content management infrastructure. It describes a step-by-step procedure to generate the implementation architecture, and proposes a task-based methodology to guide the implementation of the agreed-upon design.
Chapter One--The Internet Changes the Rules of the Game. Motivates the need for a content management solution.
Chapter Two--Overview of Content Management. An introduction to the concepts of content management used throughout the book. It enables you to understand content management without delving into the details necessary to implement the solution.
Chapter Three--Principles of Collaborative Web Development. Lays the foundational principles of collaborative development. It covers the core issues of web site versioning, and managing concurrent changes.
Chapter Four--Best Practices for Collaborative Web Development. Describes the work area-staging area-edition paradigm of development, and lays out the four basic work cycles: development, compare/update, review, and test.
Chapter Five--Templating Empowers Content Contributors. Details the rationale for templating, or separation of content from presentation.
Chapter Six--Workflow Speeds Work Cycles. Delves into the benefits and concepts of a workflow infrastructure to speed the development process.
Chapter Seven--Deploying Content. Introduces the concepts that govern a deployment infrastructure. Presents a design for a deployment infrastructure.
Chapter Eight--Multiple Web Initiatives. Covers the concept of branch design, which introduces the notion of a logically independent web site. These concepts address the core issues of project completion skew, and of long-term versus short-term projects. Details how to design a branch structure for multiple web initiatives.
Chapter Nine--Using Web Content Management for Globalization. Presents design of content management system for a globalization project.
Chapter Ten--Summary and Conclusions. Summarizes what we've learned. Discusses trends in content management and what they imply for the future.
Creating this book took four times longer than originally hoped for and the effort was ten times more strenuous than I would have wished for. But the effort has been worthwhile, in large measure because of the numerous people who have supported this project throughout its lifespan. They all shared the belief that something could be constructed where nothing had existed before.
I owe a debt of gratitude to Peng Ong, who gave me an incredible opportunity to help transform his product vision into software. The initial development team of Kevin Cochrane, Terrence Yee, and Gajanana Hegde steadfastly believed in Peng's vision and provided an intensely creative work environment to launch the product.
Several product releases later, Peng handed me another incredible opportunity: to join his fledgling consulting organization. Robert Gerega, Jennifer Marek, Zhaohong Li, Victoria Chiu, James Koh, Jon Lau, and Robert Turner were extremely supportive of my early efforts to codify knowledge in application notes. I am indebted to our early customers who were willing to put their faith in our people and our products.
I owe thanks to T. Francis Richason, Reza Haniph, Christine Owens, and Raghu Madhok who gave me the time and encouragement to complete the application notes and the manuscript. Marc Carignan deserves mention for being especially supportive and accommodating.
I extend my gratitude to the numerous people who reviewed drafts and provided helpful comments: Adam Stoller, Robert Gerega, Evers Ding, Andrew Chang, Blake Sobiloff, Dave Cadoff, Stan Cheng, Jack Jia, Patrice McCauley, Christine Owens, Dhruv Ratra, Mark Bradley, Raghu Madhok, Kevin Lindbloom, and Anurag Gupta from Interwoven; Mitchel Ahern, Ravishankar Belavadi, Ren Bitonio, Linda Brigman, Jeff Rule, Kenneth Trant Jr., and John Wegis choreographed by Addison-Wesley.
James Koh provided fascinating insights on the birth of a corporate web presence. Wes Modes enthusiastically described his approach to globalization.
This project could not have been completed without the marketing, art direction, artistic, and literary contributions from Ted Fong, Don Wong, Rick Steed, Raina Pickett, Andrew So, Helen Lee, Debbie Ryan, and Marianne Lucchesi. Executive support for this project from Martin Brauns, Marc Carignan, Mike Backlund, Joe Ruck, and Jack Jia was timely and essential.
Executive editor, Mary O'Brien, and her associates Alicia Carey, Curt Johnson, Jacquelyn Doucette, and Chanda Leary-Coutu at Addison-Wesley were tremendous.
Reza Haniph managed the project tirelessly. He deserves extra credit for playing the role of product champion.