Archive forWeb Content Management

Delivering Portal and CMS as Service Part 2

April 5, 2008 @ 11:12 pm· Filed under Enterprise Content Management, Portals, Trends, Web Content Management

Tenant Specific Content

Okay the next issue to be aware of is about how actually the content is stored. So let’s for the sake of simplicity assume the content is a “News Article” with fields like Headline, Byline and Body.

A very good article on issues related to multi tenant data architecture is here. This article explains data architecture in terms of databases, schemas and tables. The same architecture principles will also apply to a more generic CMS repository which may not be based on a database. The CMS can store the same content for multiple tenants in multiple ways. It can either have a completely independent repository for each tenant. It can also use the same repository for all the tenants but with some kind of logical partitioning. I think Alfresco uses this mechanism. And finally, it can use the same repository for all the tenants without any partitioning. In this case, Tenant -> Article ownership is identified by some other mechanism. A possible way is to have a field like tenant id (along with Headline, Byline and Body) that identifies the tenant.

Each of these mechanisms have their advantages, disadvantages and associated costs. There is a trade off between security and costs.

Administration

Apart from tenant specific administration (or Federated admin), the application needs to provide capabilities like:

  • Provisioning
  • Billing and Metering
  • Management, Monitoring and Reporting

So some kind of delegated administration and centralized management application is required that enables assigning administrators for individual portals (or applications) and then Monitoring (and managing) these individual portals.

There are also issues related to Tenant Specific Security. More about that later…

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Goodbye 2007, Welcome 2008

December 30, 2007 @ 9:12 pm· Filed under Collaboration, Document Management, Enterprise Content Management, Open Source, Portals, Search, Trends, Web Content Management

2007 has been a good year for portal and content technologies. Here’s a summary of some themes that became popular and will probably be discussed in 2008 as well.

Web 2.0: There’s nothing new about it as we’ve been seeing the impact of web 2.0 for quite sometime now. What’s new is the fact that Web 2.0  is also increasingly becoming popular behind the firewalls.  Many products have incorporated web 2.0 features and they are not limited to support for AJAX  front-ends. Many portals already integrate with Google Gadgets, Alfresco announced integration with Facebook which itself is getting a lot of attention.

SaaS: Software as a Service has become quite popular in some technology horizontals like CRM. It has now started getting noticed in the CMS space as well. Interwoven and Fatwire entered the SaaS space by acquiring other companies whereas salesforce.com, an established SaaS vendor has also entered the ECM space. There are many existing vendors like Spring CM and Xythos. With salesforce.com getting into this space, along with indications of entry of more established ECM vendors, technology buyers will have another option.  

Standards: There have been a lot of discussions in blogosphere about standards or the lack thereof. Although, there are many benefits of following standards, there are often trade-offs to be made and it may not be that a “Standards approach is always better”. We must bring a balance between the two approaches as there are important trade-offs to be made. And i still think JSR-170 (or its next version JSR-283) have not been as popular as they should be.

Open Source: There has been an increased activity in the Open Source Portal and Content Management Products space. More and more people are using Open Source as a viable alternative to commercial products. In some scenarios, products like Alfresco, Magnolia, OpenCms and Liferay can give their commercial counterparts a serious run for their money.

Convergence: The lines between WCM, Portal, Web Analytics, Search etc are blurring. Many CIOs are asking for products that can do everything instead of buying multiple point solutions. However, more than technology, I think its the way an organization is structured which decides how easy or difficult is it to achieve convergence.

Google: We can’t complete this discussion without mentioning Google, can we? There are talks of a CMS by Google which already is an established player in associated areas of search, analytics, portal and collaboration.

Okay this was probably the last post of 2007. Here’s wishing you all a very happy new year.

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Open Source Mobile Content Delivery

December 3, 2007 @ 10:33 pm· Filed under Open Source, Portals, Web Content Management

Even though most CMS products claim they can deliver content to any device, the fact remains that delivering content to mobile devices is quite different. What most of them provide is the ability to separate content from its presentation and then apply a different template if you want to deliver to mobile device. BTW, this blog also uses the same technique - try accessing it from a mobile phone or a blackberry and see what I mean. You will see the same content using a different template which is optimized for mobile devices. However, mobile delivery is much more than this and so people often use multiple products to do web content management/web delivery and mobile delivery. Also, there was no option other than “build your own” if you were using Open Source products like Alfresco, OpenCms, Magnolia or others.

Volantis recently announced the availability of Volantis Mobility Server under Open Source license. I think this is an important development because it will encourage people to experiment and create more content and applications for the mobile internet.

I wish one of the Open Source CMS vendors comes up with an integration with Volantis so that there is a well integrated, end to end content management and delivery for both web as well as other channels. My limited experience in playing around with Alfresco and Volantis shows it should not be too difficult. Matt Asay is associated with Volantis and Alfresco and so I’m hoping we’ll soon have something :)

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Fatwire, SaaS and Web 2.0

November 2, 2007 @ 4:41 pm· Filed under Collaboration, Document Management, Portals, Web Content Management

In an earlier post about Fatwire, I’d written:

However, I wonder where are the other so called Web 2.0 features like blogs, wikis and so on?

I’d like to believe Fatwire noticed that :). They recently acquired Infostoria, which has offerings in this space. Infostoria also had a SaaS offering called zeegzaag.com offering hosted wikis. It will be interesting to see if Fatwire will integrate its flagship CMS Content Server as a hosted service using this new acquired platform?

One of the requirements for internal enterprise applications like Intranets is the capability to define workgroups (or spaces) where employees can collaborate, share and in general do light weight document management activities. Fatwire did not have any capabilities in this space and in document management but with this acquisition, it gets these capabilities as well.

Off course, how good the end result is obviously depends on when and how they integrate different products and what they do with overlapping functionality?

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Standards in Content Technologies: Should you care?

August 22, 2007 @ 7:01 pm· Filed under Enterprise Content Management, Portals, Web Content Management

Recently, there have been many discussions in the blogosphere regarding standards (or rather lack thereof) in the ECM space.

Are standards useful? Or are they just a set of buzzwords used to get tick marks in RFPs and analyst reports? Should you prefer standards over proprietary features?

I’ll be speaking on this topic at the excellent cmf2007 conference to be held in Denmark in November. We will address these questions and more and look at some of the popular standards that are relevant if you are considering content technologies.

So drop me a line with your views and experiences with your favorite ECM products and standards they (should) support.

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