Tagged with 'web content management'

Sonny & Doug kick off the Drupal Workshop at Web Content Conference

Delivering Drupal, in a BIG way! Some attendees of the 4th annual Web Content Conference took advantage of an amazing, educational opportunity via a POWERHOUSE team of Drupal experts. The session titled, “A Drupal Immersion for Non-Profits and Small Businesses,” was a well attended, high octane experience for all.

Sonny and I started off with a brief overview of Drupal. Sonny discussed Drupal basics, the meaning of OpenSource software, and Drupal as a business tool and business model. I gave Drupal it’s human touch as I waxed poetic about Drupal as a community of people. I mentioned how often we get together in large groups and stressed how important it is to us to educate each other.

After that Jeff Eaton took the stage to WOW the audience with an impressive showing of well built and often famous Drupal sites. Whitehouse.gov received top billing as did the New York State Senate site and Sony and Warner Brothers. Jeff also showed off some impressive magazine and newspaper sites. We were all Inspired!

Next came Ryan Szrama to show off the ecommerce side of Drupal. Ryan revealed functionality that will be available as Drupal Commerce becomes a reality when Drupal7 is released within a few months. Emanuel London armed the audience with a powerful tool that he stated is underused. He showed how the CiviCRM system integrates with Drupal to expose tremendously powerful and useful features. Lastly Josh Ward took us through an SEO trip making sure that the attendees knew that any site built in Drupal CAN be Search Engine Optimized easily. Josh stressed that Drupal has the technology and the tools but that it does take effort on the part of the stakeholders to use the tools to get the best results for their site.

I spoke with many of the attendees at lunch to get a sense of what they received from the small army of Drupalers on the stage. What I heard was that the people enjoyed the very well rounded expose of Drupal. Everyone heard a few things they already knew but they heard far more that they had never heard before. The SEO portion was the most common source of new information for the attendees. Jeff’s stellar list of Drupal sites shocked some people who had no idea that the music industry was in love with Drupal. I got a lot of questions about CiviCRM.It’s clear to me that some more training is needed on that topic.And lastly, few of the people that I spoke with had need for Drupal to act as an Ecommerce platform. The few that did express the need  said that adding payment processing would be a future addition to their projects and that Drupal-Commerce looked like it would satisfy their needs completely.

The old saying goes, “Always leave the audience wanting more.” Well, we accomplished that. Many attendees would have loved to spend hours going in to the backend of Drupal and showing off the admin screens and configuring settings etc. A Site-Building workshop is what they’re asking for. And this makes sense too. Some of these small institutions, nonprofits, clubs, associations, etc. are not going to hire a firm for $50K to build the site. They want to hire someone to train them how to build their own. I explained to one person that I have done just this very thing and that, with the exception of a few custom modules, the client was able to build the project herself. I even heard a phrase for this kind of business model. I heard it called “Product Management.” I wonder if we’ll see more and more of this as time goes on. I think we will.

As many of you already know, the whitehouse.gov site re-launched on the Drupal platform recently. There has been much talk about the implications of that, including local commentary on this very blog.

In November, we all got to see just a little bit more. The White House New Media team spoke briefly at the DC Drupal Meet-Up, and their comments were captured on video. Kent Bye has written a blow-by-blow blog about it on the Lullabot site (including an embedded version of the video itself), which is pretty comprehensive in capturing the meat of the meet.

(As a service to others, I’ll add my own highlights from the video. At about the 4 minute mark, the designer steps in and basically re-hashes the tug-of-war between designers and developers in the CMS / open source world. I found it refreshing to see that the same difficulties get encountered at all levels. At about the 10 minute mark, the floor is opened to a few questions, and the team speaks extemporaneously about various interesting topics. The middle bits are fine as far as they go, but not that interesting.)

There were a few things that I found intriguing about this little peek into what happens behind the scenes. In the first place, the team says that most of the functionality for the site is out-of-the-box (although it’s acknowledged that of course there is no box for Drupal). I would have expected that they would have needed more customized work done, but apparently not — or at least, not for this first pass. The site isn’t a simple configuration, however — multiple instances behind a CDN (Content Delivery Network).

Secondly, the team claims that their biggest time sink on the project was simply dealing with cultural and government issues. They apparently had lots of meetings about the implications of using open source technologies, how to use them, etc. Again, I find this a bit comforting, since many of our clients and prospects have had similar concerns about the possibility of using Drupal. The use of technology, and particularly open source technology, cannot be separated from the cultural environment in which it’s used — it’s very much an active dialogue. That said, it’s clearly a conversation that more and more people (White House included) think is worth consciously having.

Becker Professional Education, a subsidiary of DeVry Inc., was undergoing major re-branding and positioning of its offerings. They faced several website dilemmas. The professional services education company offers exam review programs to help professionals prepare for certifications in accounting, finance as well as providing continuing education. Each of these focused offerings was featured within one of four independent websites, BeckerCPE.com, BeckerCPA.com, BeckerPM.com and Stalla.com. The company intended to bring them all under one website, Becker.com.

Serena Collage Goes Terminal

At the same time, the content management system on which the BeckerCPA.com website was operating, Serena Collage, was approaching its technology end-of-life. Although the content management system was performing suitably, Serena, had announced there would be no further upgrades and support would be ending for its Collage web content management system (CMS). Although there was no imminent urgency, the prudent path for Becker, as well as all Serena Collage customers, was to make plans to replace Collage with a suitable CMS alternative.

Choosing a Replacement Content Management System

The first task was to identify a content management system that could not only replace the feature set of Collage but also accommodate the unique needs of the business units being integrated into the website.  Together with Becker, Duo selected Hannon Hill’s Cascade Server CMS. Cascade Server offered two immediate benefits. Cascade Server’s architecture and publishing model is very similar to that of Collage.  Replacing Collage with Cascade Server requires only a modest amount of retraining for site administrators. And in ways that it does differ, Cascade Server is easier to navigate for making site changes.

Migrating Content

The second non-trivial task was migrating the content from different sites with different or non-existent CMS into Cascade Server. To facilitate this migration, Duo customized Hannon Hill’s script for automating the migration of Collage’s “Contribution Types” into Cascade Server’s “Asset Factories” as well as WYSIWYG to WYSIWYG.

More Considerations

A project of this magnitude is littered with details. The BeckerCPA website is integrated with LearnLive, a separate course management system and a script drives the daily data refresh. Duo also acknowledged the legacy value of the old website pages.  Important landing pages from the old website were mapped and redirected to similarly relevant pages of the new website.

As companies continue to upgrade and revise their nth generation websites, the task of migrating old sites to the new is becoming increasingly complex. Developing a plan of action and including the migration effort into the scope of the project are essential considerations to achieve a successful outcome.

If you ask 10 different people to describe Drupal, you will get 10 different responses. That is because Drupal is so many things. Open source social publishing software, a web content management system, a web content framework, a web applications framework; these are some of the answers you will receive. If you break down these answers you quickly find a couple key points that stand out.

Open Source

Drupal is open source. This means that no one owns the code that makes Drupal what it is. It is also FREE to download and FREE to modify. Indeed, a 10,000 plus sized developer community is making Drupal better all the time. Drupal is indeed a Web Content Management System (CMS). In the 21st century it is not acceptable to have a website that only a programmer can control. A robust CMS like Drupal allows the end user to add, delete, edit, moderate, and publish the content that is on their site. This puts the power of the website into the hands of the site-owner NOT keeping it in the hands of the site-developer.

Social Publishing Software

Drupal is social publishing software. The prevailing idea behind Web2.0 is to have user contributed content on your site. Drupal allows users to create content, blogs, articles, new groups, multimedia, etc. Drupal also allows finite control of permissions so that only allowed users can add specific types of content to the site.

Web Application Framework

Drupal is a Web Application Framework. If you have some new and inventive idea that has never before been done on the web, bring your napkin sketches to Drupal. The well documented and well designed Application Program Interface (API) will aid you in writing the code to allow Drupal to make your idea into reality.

Large Developer Community

Drupal is a LARGE and growing community. Drupal is controlled by no one but owned by everyone. The community thrives on a concept that is sometimes described as “Collaboration, not competition.” By doing this, the community organically forms into overlapping cells of teams that take on the necessary tasks that have made Drupal an enterprise level solution to the web development needs of mom-&-pops, NGOs, NFPs, and Fortune 500′s as well. The community successfully handles security updates, feature adds, accessibility concerns, and the ever changing integration methods employed by 3rd party entities such as Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and others.

Drupal continues to win awards every year in a variety of categories from a variety of sources. Many members of the Drupal community are celebrated authors, employees of major companies, holders of multiple degrees, and genuinely nice people who donate a lot of free time to grow and aide the Drupal project and community. More and more companies are leveraging Drupal to build large scale, feature rich sites in relatively short time spans. With Drupal and all of its add-on modules being free, companies can spend more of their resources on configuration rather than the old system where every new project started out with re-writing a lot of the same old code.

I am fascinated by a story that has played out this week between United Airlines and Google.  If you haven’t heard, late last Saturday night the Tribune-owned Florida newspaper Sun-Sentinel inadvertently posted a 6-year old article (with no dateline) on it’s website with the headline “UAL Files For Bankruptcy.” 

Who knows why this happened – but it does demonstrate the importance of a well thought out and executed web content management system.  To continue the story and I quote from the Tribune, “Tribune Co. said the story had received a single visit about 1 a.m. Eastern time Sunday but because traffic was so light to the states business section at that hour, one click constituted “most viewed” status.  Consequently, a new link was placed in the list of “most viewed” stories on the business page and the Google search crawler picked it up.”  The next day a sloppy securities analyst from Bloomberg summarized the article and UAL stock dropped 75%, losing over one Billion dollars before trading was halted.

The article should have had a dateline.  A simple rule enforcing a dateline in their web content management system would have alleviated the problem, even if the old article was inadvertently published.  New tools to manage web content are available for a fraction of the cost five years ago. Don’t make a billion dollar mistake, consider your own web content management vulnerabilities, and engage a professional to manage your risks.

Update: The New York Times wrote a great analysis of this in, “How a Series of Mistakes Hurt Shares of United” September 15.

As business units demand more from a web presence, IT has been asked to respond with web content management (WCM) systems that do more than deliver content. This webcast from Search CIO Midmarket (registration and Real Player required) examines the types of content management systems available, the differences between standard WCM products and persuasive WCM products that manage and deliver content.

Duo Consulting CEO Michael Silverman and Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, producers of the Web Content Conferences, sift through the hype of certain features and discuss web delivery extras such as personalization, analytics, and multichannel delivery. They also offer specific advice and user examples on how you can set up a successful WCM system that meets the needs of both IT and the business.