Balancing Control and Distributed Capabilities For Web Content and Site Management
Traditionally, Web content management has supported the creation, management and delivery of content to be published on a website. But, with the sheer number of sites, subsites and stakeholders in many organizations, the concept of Web content management has evolved and taken on new meaning to include certain aspects of site management.
The usual approach in this area utilizes IT as a central management and processing point in support of multiple business units, users and websites. This is due, in part, to IT owning the tools and having the functional capability and expertise to meet business unit requirements. IT or webmaster bottleneck is just one of the issues that arise from this model. Another is that developers generally don’t want to manage content. It’s not a good use of their time, and as increased demand is placed on IT for day-to-day website and content management, the model becomes unsustainable.
Over time, IT has learned to include business units such as marketing for public sites and HR for intranets into the decision and planning process to gain consensus and raise the probability of effective implementation and broad user adoption. Conversely, marketing, for example, which cares less about technology, is demanding more control of the tools that it needs to efficiently perform certain strategic functions without relying on IT. Organizations that have found common ground and successfully reached across the aisle in a symbiotic manner have set the stage for a more streamlined interactive model.
Creating an environment where certain capabilities can be distributed to local administrators and others at the subsite or business unit level in a coordinated and controlled manner opens the door to enablement beyond creating, editing and publishing content. Extended but controlled website management at the subsite, page, content and field level can be achieved with features and functionality that introduce a flexible approach to frontline empowerment.
Granular security capabilities form the foundation for distributing this functionality to business users. Wizard-driven metadata, tiered templating, and online forms that can be fully managed by business users without the need for custom coding are just a few of the functional items that can better enable business users.
Granular user security and permissions. Security that can be applied at the subsite, template, page, content and field levels allows for great flexibility when creating and managing both pages and content. By defining users and groups, each can be granted a wide variety of general security permissions (i.e. “create pages,” “publish images,” “create keywords”) and content security permissions (i.e. “read,” “comment,” “author,” “edit,” “design,” “style,” “admin” and “approval”). This gives IT the ability to implement a tiered and controlled security model allowing key people at appropriate levels across the organization specific access and control.
Wizard-driven metadata. For many CMS implementations, standard metadata (i.e. title, keywords, description, etc.) does not provide enough flexibility for proper content organization. And while a custom metadata approach may offer the right level of flexibility, it is often difficult to manage and requires direct intervention from IT staff. To change the dynamic and reduce IT dependency, a simple, standardized approach to custom metadata can be introduced through the use of a wizard-driven architecture. This approach moves functionality to the business unit allowing content users to work closely with local administrators (not IT) to create targeted metadata forms which can be easily modified to address their particular needs more efficiently.
Flexible, template-driven architecture. A distributed hierarchal template management model that includes a base template, navigation and content templates can provide increased flexibility and control over site development and management. Central administrators can apply template inheritance restrictions to lock-down certain aspects of a template’s main navigation, design or style prior to making them available for use by business users.
By enabling business users, standardized news templates, for example, can be easily created using a combination of secondary navigation and content templates without calling on IT resources.
Distributed online forms. Online forms are used to conduct polls and surveys, collect registration information, manage newsletter subscriptions and gather feedback from website visitors. Most organizations leverage IT resources to create, manage and edit forms and to write extensive custom-code for processing and reporting on the form data.
A more flexible and practical approach not only allows business users to create forms via an intuitive, wizard-driven interface, but also automates the processing and reporting, without the need to write code. With this capability, a transformation ensues beyond the simple displacement of forms management. Business users become empowered to quickly create and edit forms, and generate reports at will without IT interaction.
By applying a combination of these and other capabilities such as self-updating page indexes, taxonomy management and content objects, organizations can easily distribute functionality beyond traditional content management to include controlled levels of site management. This promotes operational enablement by pushing certain capabilities to key stakeholders across the organization. Webmaster or IT bottleneck is reduced by moving tiered functionality to business users; adoption at the business-unit level increases as business users have tools and permissions that they need to do their jobs; and a more efficient, coordinated and leveraged model emerges across the organization. The key is having a flexible CMS that allows for the right balance of control and distribution to align to your strategy and operational needs. Since all CMS products are not the same, be sure to scrutinize carefully.
Since 1993, PaperThin (
www.paperthin.com) has helped organizations of all sizes to significantly reduce the time and expense involved in creating and managing Web content. Our flagship product, CommonSpot™ delivers full-featured, out-of-the-box Web publishing and content management. More than 300 organizations worldwide, including Cornell University, Mayo Clinic, National Park Service, Turner Sports Interactive and United Way of America rely on CommonSpot to drive their Web initiatives.
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