Confluence 3.4: usability goodness

Posted on October 13, 2010 by Ben Peter

Atlassian just released Confluence 3.4. While there are no heavy duty enhancements in this release, there’s a couple of usability enhancements that were long overdue, especially Keyboard shortcuts. I always wanted to have at least the ‘/’ shortcut.

User Macros are a powerful way to create your own macros within Confluence, so that at last it’s possible to create macros of medium complexity without going the long way of plugin creation.

An overview of the changes is available at the Atlassian Website: http://blogs.atlassian.com/confluence/2010/10/confluence-enterprise-wiki-faster-richer-content-creation.html

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CMS Essentials: In-Context editing – What you see is what they get

Posted on September 13, 2010 by Ben Peter

Virtually all CMS vendors claim to provide “What you see is what you get” capabilities. That terms has come to be accepted for something that is pretty different from what it means in e.g. DTP and word processing, where it means “as printed”.

In a CMS, the meaning is typically restricted in two ways:

  • it only applies to a small portion of what’s on a page (like the main copy text or a paragraph)
  • it means that you’ll be able to tell bold from plain, but not that it’ll be the same bold and the same plain as if published on the website

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CMS Essentials: Talk to the CMS Vendor

Posted on September 7, 2010 by Ben Peter

For the important decisions you make in a CMS project, talk to the CMS vendor and get their blessing (or not).

Not all CMS projects are created equal. Although most products provide straightforward paths for the most common use cases and scenarios, every project has its own special requirements or constraints that don’t fall into the 95% that the vendor has foreseen. For that remaining 5%, don’t continue on your own assumptions but talk to the CMS vendor, explain your approach and hear their advise.

This does not only make sure you use the best approach available, but also prevents ugly finger pointing between the system integrator and the product vendor that is of no benefit to anyone.

And this is not restricted to functional stuff: if the vendor’s documentation does not give you the answer on how to cut the content pie or the performance pie: go ask.

Before you do that though, double check if you can’t kill an obscure requirement before you stretch the product to do something that it wasn’t built to do. Like trying to max out URL hygiene for SEO when the effect is really negligible. Or maybe you’re trying to do something that doesn’t even call for a WCMS at all. Like trying to use a CMS when you really need a portal solution.


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ITM: be on the passive side early on

Posted on September 3, 2010 by Ben Peter

So the Internet Time Machine, according to a recent CMSWire article “aims to help companies with great ideas get ahead of the curve”. I’m not sure that this is actually the typical use case.

ITM rather seems to be a tool that help the CPC and affiliate market to score on the niche. Does this help innovation, does it add value? Doubtful. More likely, it helps add to the endless bloat of repetition and grab a bit from existing value add chains.

This is not “getting ahead of the curve”, but finding out where to tap the pipeline by making a better guess at when and where the oil will flow. Getting ahead of the curve would be to create new demand by true innovation, I think. ITM will help you to get on the passive, reacting even for yet-to-come trends. Wow.

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What’s different in a CMS Project: People, Processes, Mixed Cargo (Part 2: Transition)

Posted on August 31, 2010 by Ben Peter

The first part of this article looked at how a CMS project differs from other projects. This part will look at how the transition from traditional web publishing processes to a CMS world changes people’s lives, and how to best hand-hold them trough the transition. It also looks at how the processes transition is best managed (which at the end of the day is also more about people transitioning than artifacts moving through process).

In the first section, I’ll describe why the transition is something that needs particular attention at all, and why failing to do so will put the success of your CMS journey at risk

After that, we’ll take a closer look at some examples of processes that change.

Finally, I’ll offer suggestions how to soften the risks and make the transition from traditional web publishing to the CMS world enjoyable for everyone.

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CMS Essentials: Design for Authors

Posted on August 30, 2010 by Ben Peter

When you design templates and the pieces that go inside them, have both the web user and the author in mind. Authors are writers, not parts assemblers.

It’s important to understand how the page that is designed translates into an editing view, not only into the web user’s view. The author needs to end up with a meaningful presentation of the content she is editing in an intuitive way. Authors are information workers after all, and you want to enable them to stay in the flow, which means: get out of their way. Make it easy for them.

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What’s different in a CMS Project: People, Processes, Mixed Cargo

Posted on August 20, 2010 by Ben Peter

A CMS project is special in many ways. Each and every aspect of the project is influenced by the CMS environment and the traditional roles and processes of web projects need to be remodeled and adjusted.

The term project is not quite accurate. The project is only part of the overall endeavor from initial vision to a CMS platform that’s live, alive and being used. This is why throughout this article I will refer to the CMS Journey.

This article discusses what is so different to a CMS journey, how you can help people that have never been to the new world to evolve their ideas and visions of the to-be platform into requirements that make sure that their day-to-day processes will work in tomorrow’s world. Think of it as an 18th century farmer who you help order machinery and set up the processes and day to day operations of a 21st century industrial farm. This is hugely exaggerated, but you get the idea.

Spoiler: The big difference with the CMS Journey is that a CMS enables and entails many business processes that greatly differ from traditional processes of publishing, marketing and working with content. By that, it is hard to describe and capture requirements of the target scenario for people who have not lived these kinds of processes before. Bridging this gap and creating this depth of understanding in the people that the system is made for becomes the major challenge in any CMS journey.

The second part of this article specifically looks into how the business processes and people involved are transitioned to the new world.

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How the Adobe / Day deal affects the ASF and the OS community

Posted on July 28, 2010 by Ben Peter

Adobe and Day Software today announced that they have a done deal that will be executed this year. The move is exciting (if not totally unexpected) and makes total sense from an Adobe and a Day perspective. Let’s have a look.

The WCMS market has a host of strong players, some of them having gained strength through mergers in the last years, especially Autonomy with their Interwoven acquisition and Open Text with Vignette under their belt. So there was no way Adobe could get foothold in that game without an acquisition. Work Contribute into something that competes with Fatwire, Sitecore, let alone Open Text or Teamsite? NFW. So it was pretty clear that the next move that Adobe would do on the WCMS field would be an acquisition.

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