I extend my congratulations to my fellow MVPs and hope for good things in the future…

You can learn more about the MVP awards for SDL Tridion and see the full list of recipients on SDL Tridion World.

The lecture was very good (and quite detailed) and free pizza was supplied by Yahoo (hey, I have to have a motivator!). I find it good to watch leaders of (any) industry speak. It helps me understand how I should present in the future when I guest speak (next guest presentation is a few months away). I liked the style, content and even the jokes.

I personally am not a JavaScript developer, although I hacked a few things together in the past. As Crockford remarks, we rarely sit down and learn JavaScript, it is something we just often do because we have to. However, it seems there is much to gain from actually knowing what you are doing (this should not really be a surprise).

You can watch the lecture and the previous one on Yahoo! Theater:

• Douglas Crockford — Crockford on JavaScript — Volume 1: The Early Years
• Douglas Crockford — Crockford on JavaScript — Chapter 2: And Then There Was JavaScript

First up, the mighty CMS Watch in the form of Jarrod Gingras’ post on 2010 Technology Predictions. If anyone can do a prediction it should be these guys, right?

CMS Watch prediction #1 “Multi-lingual requirements will rise to the fore”
Good news for SDL Tridion and anyone else the handles Multi-lingual well! “Many firms are now recognizing the need to localize applications and content across cultural and geographic boundaries“, hmmm weren’t firms supposed to have done this in already? But I agree, if they did not do this in 2009 they should do this in 2010. In fact they should have done this in 2008 but lets not split hairs. Factors such as economic crisis as well as growing competition from abroad will all factor and influence this. What is more, these organizations need to invest more heavily in efficient translation.

CMS Watch prediction #2 “Cloud alternatives will become pervasive”
Any talk of the cloud and I think of Jon Marks as in this I agree. And I think the CMS vendors should better read this too before declaring cloud capability. For most large organizations I deal with, this is not an option and I am certainly not a believer in the cloud for my customers. It is nice to think of everything being in a cloud but in reality it is not actually cloud based, it just is not in your network; the two things are not the same.

Next CMS Outlook and Matthew Johnson’s article.

CMS Outlook prediction #1 “Cloud Options”
There is the “c” word again! Both CMS Outlook and CMS Watch both cite economic downturn as the reason for using the cloud as a way of saving costs. If this is going to be the case only CMS Watch gets it right saying that vendors will invest in this area, but only towards the end of the year will customers and implementers actually take up the option of implementing it.

CMS Outlook prediction #2 “WCM + Analytics + Targeting + Testing”
I am looking forward to real advances in this. The technology is there to be integrated but the customers are not up to speed to the fact that they can actually do this, it is our job to teach them. Hopefully, 2010 will indeed see a massive increase in powerful targeting of content.

Next, the personal blog of John Newton.

John Newton prediction #1 “ECM in the developing world”
For some US vendors I feel that the developing world also includes Europe. There are literally tonnes of CMS vendors we have never heard of that operate in the developing world (and the developed for that matter). As their clients outgrow them we will see a move towards larger European and US vendors with their highly developed Content Management applications.

John Newton prediction #2 “CMIS”
“I guess I have been talking about this longer and louder than anyone else out there, so you wouldn’t be surprised to see me say I think CMIS will have a significant impact in 2010.” With CMIS coming of age in Spring 2010 it will now be chance for CMS vendors to get their hands dirty and start releasing implementations with CMIS capabilities. How well this will be adopted by vendors remains to be seen, there are often long development cycles to go through before something is in a product. However, there will be allot of widget, plug-ins and extensions to satisfy the RFPs in the meantime.

And finally the personal blog of Stephane Croisier.

Stephane Croisier predicition #1 “Standardized CM infrastructure, Content Composites Applications and Content Solutions are the three layers of next generation of CMS”
I like the sound of this but I got confused. As a specialist in infrastructure I am all for standardization of the infrastructure and anything that can be done in 2010 will be great. Standards, even as simple as inbuilt SNMP monitoring or standardized logging, can help massively when implementing large scale implementations. Sadly the infrastructure is often neglected both by vendors and by customers.

Stephane Croisier predicition #2 “The Semantic Web is NOT for 2010 but Semantic Lifting will become hot”
Both CMS Watch and Stephane picked up on this one. We know what we want but not we need a way to find it, show me the internet *I* want to see!

Do you have a nice Content Management 2010 prediction? I would love to hear it…

Hardware and Software

Hardware is often mentioned, it makes sense that the more servers you need to use the more the total hardware costs and their future maintenance will be. Also to be considered is the complexity of the implementation through having more servers in it and the impact on how you manage that. Consider what it will take to make your application perform within your requirements and more importantly to what hardware you really require with regard to your organizations Service Level Agreements.

When it comes to software, most Content Management Systems require some 3rd party software. Each item of 3rd party software that is required has a cost associated with it, Oracle or SQL Server? Windows or Linux? Each one has a cost not only in the purchase of a license, but also in configuration and maintenance. For instance, in my experience, Oracle is much harder to get performing correctly than say SQL Server. Having worked for Oracle in the past, I know an Oracle database can perform well within what you need for a CMS, but you will need the DBA to set it up for you and DBAs are expensive.

After such obvious 3rd party software as the operating system there are other things like file replication software, small custom solutions, scripts, utilities etc. Each one will effect the money you need to spend on the solution. Your IT team is often used to finding technical solutions to a problem without thinking about the ROI of what they are doing. Does the solution they need to solve the problem prove to be complex, costly to maintain and unreliable or can the CMS do it for you?

Installation & Upgrades

Specialist software often requires specialists to install the software for you, but some specialist software does not require specialists to do it all or even anything at all. Costs of installation and upgrades are in people and time. Who needs to complete it, what do they cost and how much time will they take. Consider the amount of people available in the market to undertake the upgrade or install tasks and the quality that they can deliver. I would rather have a consultant take two days to do a job that another can do in one day, but actually do a really quality install. Make a trade off in the resources you will need to get the job done and to the level you require.

Configuration

Two points on this; complexity and re-usability… Too often configuration of complex applications is in itself complex, but that does not have to be so. Be sure that configuration is as straight-forward as it can be, it will lower costs of maintaining servers and increase good things like uptime (people will make fewer mistakes). Re-usability is key to deploying large applications; lack of re-usability in configuration (e.g. hard-coded paths) will mean an increase in configuration mistakes between servers and an overall higher cost of maintaining large sets of differing configuration.

Maintenance

I mentioned about the extra cost of having complex configuration, but the complexity of the implementation will affect more cost. All the 3rd party software you needed for your implementation has to be maintained, all the connections between servers, all the interfaces etc. We can reduce the cost of all these through effective IT procedures and you should look if the CMS software that provides solutions for helping with those procedures. Monitoring through SNMP is one way a CMS application can help you maintain it, using standard technologies that integrate well with existing tools an IT team might already have is another.

One aspect to consider is who will maintain your application? Do you need a specialist or more than one? Do they have the time to maintain the application? Keeping it alive is one thing, making it work for you is another. To get a specialist, do they need training and who do they get that training from? And the training should not just include the CMS but also all the 3rd party software you needed too as well as training on the implementation you built; it will be different to all other implementations out there because it is the one that suits you.

Support

Nearly all vendors offer Support contracts to help you with problems with the software. In any typical implementation there will be parts that you have built yourself. These might be as simple as a template but could be as complex as a custom CRM integration. Typically neither of these two things fall under what a vendor support team would support. They support that you can write templates and the API that you interact with but they probably won’t support you getting your template to work how you wanted (unless they are really nice). Product versus Implementation is important to consider. If you needed to make a custom part of the implementation you need to be able to support that yourself or via the implementation partner who created it for you. If you never had to make that custom part of the implementation because it already existed in your CMS product, it will be supported by the vendor support team.

And so what if you had to create a CRM integration? You should be able to feed that back to the vendor so that they can include it in the product. How close are you to the enhancement request process?

Last week I attended a seminar organized by Hinttech on Agile Tridion Development. The seminar and its participants discussed the use of Agile development methods when creating sites with SDL Tridion. Agile development is something more and more customers are asking for but then how does that fit into a Tridion project? Laurens Bonnema was on hand to give his view on Agile development and how it should and should not be used. Robert Quaedvlieg from SDL Tridion was also on hand to give a view on where Agile might fit into the SDL Tridion Implementation Methodology. The Implementation Methodology is essentially a SDL Tridion variant on the traditional Waterfall model. This is the traditional project methodology and lends itself very well to projects where we need to (or do) know what we are going to build up front. Agile tends towards situations where we do not know the requirements at the start. My aim here is not to explain Agile development – you need to read one of the many good books or even Wikipedia to get a good short explanation – However, I will lay down some very basic concepts so that the rest of this document is clear. Typically, you do not know the complete requirements up front and part of the Agile process is to define the requirements or backlog. These backlog items are organized into sprints and at the end of each sprint the development team has a working product (with the features worked on for that sprint). In theory that means you have something deliverable at the end of each sprint and, in my view more importantly, you are fully away of the progress you are making. There is more to it than that but the important factor is that the priority of development can be changed at anytime without having to go back and change a monolithic requirements document. At the end, you should have a product that is what you want at the time you want it. Rather than a product which you wanted when you made the requirements.

So how does a Tridion project fit into this?

Looking at any regular Tridion project, there are a number of things that look to fit well into an Agile process and others which do not. Some of the things that do not, I do not think every really could fit well into Agile development, probably because there is nothing to develop, more something to be worked upon. However, even those things can be injected with Agile juice to make them flow easily next to the sprints.

Ignoring the Tridion Implementation Methodology, I will outline some of the various parts of a Tridion project and whether or not I think you should approach them in an Agile (A), Semi-Agile (S) or Waterfall (W) way.

Organisational
Organisational aspects of a Tridion implementation are key to ensuring a successful project in the long term. Like any organizational structure it should focus on the long term and will be the foundation on which this and future projects are built.

Content Management
There are two parts to any CMS implementation, the creation of a Content Management environment and then the application to consume the content. In creating our Content Management environment we decide how we are going to manage content both functionally and structurally.

Content Consumption
Consuming the content is a very general topic; it can take any form from a simple .NET application to a MVC framework or webservice. The consuming application’s job is to take deployed content and present it to the user or another application. It is very much a technical coding exercise

Infrastructural & Integrations
These sorts of activities tend to involve a large amount of people and a very rigid process model. It makes agile work in this area very difficult and you would generally meet stiff opposition.

Additional Thoughts
Many standard engineering practices should be implemented that will help you in being agile. These practices stem from traditional development practices but are often overlooked. What is important in each sprint is that all the work you have done has broken nothing from any previous sprint, so structured testing can help you achieve this. Unit and UAT testing can both aid the development process and ensure a quality product. UAT testing can also ensure that the content management environment will work well for the content editors. Getting the editors in and letting them have a play early on might just ensure that they accept the application when the last sprint is complete.

Overall you need to use common sense (in this I very much agree with Laurens). Agile is not the way to solve all evils. Not only are some things just not possible to do Agile but some people cannot (yet) do agile.

And I had to react:
“”Tridion is boring. I wish we did open source CMS” Drupal, now featuring Content Editor excitement pack… ”

Firstly, I would like to remark that maybe someone was having a bad day when they wrote this, but the tweet really did stand out as being the largest amount of rubbish that someone could stick in 140 characters that I have read for a while. Or was it?

I did stop to ask myself is (SDL) Tridion boring? What do I find interesting? Well, what I find interesting is probably best left off this webpage but all things being equal I think you can all imagine that the leading WCM product is not going to be something that is going to light my fires of my interest on a daily basis. In short, it takes more to get me going.

Wikipedia (don’t shoot me Cheryl) defines three types of boredom, of which one of at least our tweeter must have been suffering and all of which are related to problem of engagement of attention:

• times when we are prevented from engaging in something
• when we are forced to engage in some unwanted activity
• or when we are simply unable, for no apparent reason, to maintain engagement in any activity or spectacle

I highlighted the one key word in the above types, engage (or engagement).  Now I have read allot about engaging customers on websites managed by WCM solutions but I have not read anything on engaging the users of a WCM solution. But maybe he is right, it should be exciting! But then what sort of things would make it exciting? Facebook integration so you can update your status from the WCM interface? Random page publishing? I used to have a sheep that lived on my desktop, it used to do things like munch the side of the windows and take a bath. Maybe that would be good? Maybe RedDot could have a moving RedDot that you have to catch…  or maybe we should just go ahead and integrate FarmVille. I know one website management team that would be very happy with that…

So, is your WCM product engaging to the editors? Does it light the fires of interest every time it pops up? Or does it have the same tedious tasks that other products do? Is yours open source and therefore automatically interesting? I would love to hear it, I am genuinely interested…

And before you respond, take this tweet into acount, clearly this organization has the key to editor engagement already…

“@julesdw @dirkwybe Have a Squiz @ MySource Mini – free to download as VM image here: http://bit.ly/1xCgk2 Revolutionary editing interfaces.”