Tuesday, January 21, 2003

Content Management I have a tough nut to crack, and that nut is content management. I feel like Scrat, the rodent in the movie Ice Age who has such a hard time getting a meal. ITS has not made friends with people over the way the development of a content management product has been executed. I came into the picture well past midway, at least from a project momentum perspective. Before leaving last month I was working on a business case for the product, which I partially completed. My approach to the business case did not take into account all factors that should affect that decision, so I am revisiting it now. In order for Teamsite to be successful, it needs to provide a favorable cost to benefit ratio to our customers, meaning that it should provide a benefit that exceeds cost. Each of the following factors would determine if that is possible: Front Office must be implemented successfully. Using templates with Teamsite is difficult, and the training necessary to support it is heavy. Front Office allows the user to submit content from a standard office suite product, such as MS Word. The cost incurred by an agency to set up a Teamsite content management solution must be recovered in decreased site admin costs within a reasonably short period of time (6 months? shorter?). The thing has got to be relatively easy to manage from an agency perspective. Changes to their Teamsite configuration, including deployment information, should be easily changable. Training can't be too heavy. Content contributors should be flying in a short amount of time with little cost. The thing has to be available ASAP. ITS must be able to provide adequate levels of customer support to reduce the burden on agencies. ITS must be committed to it as a product, and to supporting the customers who use it. Of course, the price point must be affordable to agencies. Like I said, a tough nut to crack. I will be meeting with agencies to get their perspective over the next couple of weeks. I welcome your comments or suggestions. 3:54:30 PM

Actuate Progress. We are in the process of creating a strong actuate environment in preparation to migrate to Actuate 6. Part of this process includes beefing up the security on our production and acceptance testing servers. This process will be the focus of the acceptance test environment war room process. We are working to make sure that all agencies needs will be met. We met with a lot of our customers last week and discussed Actuate. Some have specific report monitoring requirements that we are working to meet under the new security schema. The solution we are working on will be mostly automatic, so on-call folks can sleep during the weekend. Also, it is important to keep in mind that we are working to migrate to Actuate 6. The issues listed above are all focused on getting ready to migrate to 6. 9:53:14 AM

© Copyright 2003 Dave McNamee. Last update: 2/5/2003; 8:21:11 AM.