What has changed the most – or rather the most obvious change – is the Content Manager Explorer also known as the Tridion GUI. In 2011, apart from running on all the major browsers and also an iPad, it features a redesign that will be familiar to existing users but also taking on board lots of new usability features.

One of the nicest features of the new interface is the ribbon toolbar. On the current version of Tridion, the buttons on the toolbar are somewhat hard to see and can make it difficult to see what the particular button is supposed to do. The ribbon features a big icon and some text as well which should make finding the function you want easy.

If you don’t like the ribbon you can always collapse the ribbon down to the more traditional row of icons.

Two more features I would like to highlight. Gone are the tabs on the publishing queue and it now shows you all options in the same area. It’s common for me to forget that I have other options on the other tab, so having them all in one place is better for the old folk like myself.

And then lastly I want to show you another nice feature. Error messages in-line to the interface, so now the option to feed more back to the user about what is going on. If you missed a message, you can also get a list back of the message history.

What is publishing?

In short, Publishing is the mechanism SDL Tridion uses to put content on a presentation environment. Content and Templates are rendered together and HTML, XML, JSP etc. comes out the other side. When you chose to publish something, you start a chain reaction that sees your content successfully published on your website. During that process SDL Tridion makes sure all your dependencies are taken care of. That single item you chose to publish might lead to a few more items being published so that the website has no errors or inconsistencies in the content.
There are a number of factors that influence how publishing behaves and how you, as a user, can get along with it. The basic factors are:

• The implementation
• The content
• The hardware

So what do we want from publishing?

Mostly you want content there as soon as possible so you can move onto the next task. However, there are allot of other people doing the same thing and on large scale environments or environments with challenges on performance you might have to queue up.

So what can you do?

You need to publish content in a way that ensures the least stress and maximizes the available time for publishing. So I have gathered here some tips that might help you.

Publish Structure Groups

When you publish anything in SDL Tridion, the number of items you select in the Content Management Explorer equals the number of jobs in the publishing queue. Each job in the queue must be completed separately and therefore has all the overhead of being treated as a separate job. However, if you want to publish allot of pages, for example; part of your site, then it makes sense to publish the Structure Group rather than all the individual pages. It will take just as long to get the task done, just with less overhead. If you are worried about failures then use the failure tolerance setting on the Advanced tab of the publishing dialog.

Use priority publishing

Most users have found the priority option in the publishing dialog. It allows you to change the standard priority to change how the publisher will pick up your publishing job. High = it goes first, Low = it goes last. Normal is everything in between. Using Low priority is handy to be able to use the available publishing time of your servers without getting in the way of normal work. So for example, you need to roll out a future site to Staging; then use low priority publishing. It will get there as soon as the publishers have time to deal with it.

Publish on off peak hours

I looked at the number of items published per day for one of my customers recently. It went like this.

• Wednesday: 16952
• Thursday: 21829
• Friday: 13279
• Saturday: 1
• Sunday: 14
• Monday: 1527
• Tuesday: 2681
• Wednesday: 357

Notice anything? Many items that could have been published were not because they did not use the weekend. The servers were not turned off; they sat there wasting that publishing time for nothing. So, scheduling a task for the weekend (or even evening) could make better use of the time available.

Publish to staging or live but not to both

Too often I see publishing jobs in a queue that are the same item but going to two different places and those two places are often Staging and Live. The staging site does need to be up to date, but Live is much more important and the process should be that once you are satisfied with your content you publish it to live, so why republish it to staging? If you must publish to staging then make it low priority or maybe schedule a complete republish to Staging in the weekend (see above). To enable low priority publishing all the time you can set the default priority to low on a Publication Target. That way all jobs going to Staging would be low priority and you never need to remember to set it.

Check the details of what you are about to publish

Before you publish, take a look at what will publish and make sure it is what you expect. You can do this using the “See items to Publish” button in the bottom left of the publishing dialog.

Plan your roll outs

When rolling out websites, plan how you are going to do it and leave enough time to get everything done without impacting regular business.

A watched pot never boils

Refreshing the publishing queue frequently might give us the satisfaction that we know that the job was completed as soon as its status is changed to “success”, but in reality it does not make the job go quicker. You might also want to change the filtering options so you only see your own successful tasks.  And do not forget, if it is in the queue, it will get published; it just has to wait its turn.

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.

The CMS twiterarty have had various memes over the last year or so. Evil man Kas Thomas (note, I can’t call him an Evil Genius BTW) started it all with his CMS Vendor Meme, then recently we have had the Laurence Hart’s CMS Origins meme.
Around the end of July I started the Future of Content Management meme which a number of us answered (not all I noticed!). We reached no conclusion and why would we? The future is not so easy to read as all that… so when I saw this my heart skipped a beat. Not only is it not tagged correctly but it does not even mention the original post! So what happened, was it stolen or not?

To be honest I can’t see what came first, but judging by Irina’s post on CMS Wire being the first to mention the summit then I have month lead on that. I even checked the page source of the summit website to see if there was a first published date, but that revealed nothing more than a lack of metatags.

I can imagine that Day wants to discuss the future of content management with its customers, it is a fantastic idea. I don’t agree that Day is it, but their customers bought the software so I think for them it probably is the future. And before anyone mentions it, I don’t think _any_ vendor is the future.

Of course, I do not own the future of content management but it does make you think. I feel a little like the boy in the school yard who just had his lunch money stolen.

Hashtag: #CMSFuture
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Since I started my Computer Science degree at university I have been building websites. Apart from the mandatory project websites I had “Jules’ f1 Garage” which had the news and results of the F1 races. It was kind of popular and the most popular daily site at the university. From that it led me to F1Rogues.com which essentially ran an alternative fantasy league for F1 fans where the dirty tricks and misfortunes of drivers were rewarded with copious amounts of points. The site still runs as a blog, but I have not posted there in a while. It is hard to maintain so many online presences at the same time but I would hate to stop it completely. This site got me started with Content Management. Originally the site, which I ran together with a friend, was built out of plain HTML files. Working from two different countries, the change and upload method did not really work out and there were too many mistakes and confusions. So I installed and setup Mambo Server. This ran for a while until I got annoyed at the inflexibility of the whole thing so wrote my own CMS. From my own CMS we were able to link in our page management as well as our fantasy league management. It worked for a long time and is still working just fine.

When I started working, I worked for a Interactive Software who sold data warehousing solutions to BAAN customers. Taken over and sold as ASG Safari the software apparently was Content Management or so the marketers would have you believe. From there I went to an e-Logistic company, called LogiGo.com, in the good old days of the dot com. With LogiGo.com I managed the infrastructure messing around with Oracle, Weblogic and allot of other web related things. After that I moved to Oracle and worked with 9iAS and 9iAS Portal server, Oracle’s idea of a Content Management system before they purchased Stellent (still misguided by the way).

Once I had managed to get bored enough implementing websites for bus companies and petrol cards I moved to SDL Tridion. I have worked for SDL Tridion for 7 years and started as an Infrastructure Consultant, implementing CMS environments for all SDL Tridion’s customers. I am now a Technical Account Manager looking at every part of the implementation and trying to get the best technical ROI for our customers.

Today, as I write this post, I am flying between Amsterdam and Chicago on my way to San Francisco. I did not take the direct flight – before anyone points that out – because of the time I have to be back. My flight this morning was overbooked but they guaranteed me a seat on the plane and told me that I would find out later where I will sit. As it turns out, I got an upgrade to business class. Moments before I found that out I heard an announcement about an option for people to upgrade to business class for 450 Euros. I tisked scornfully under my breath and mumbled something about being an idiot to take up the option. Moments later I was in business class for free and I suddenly felt allot more important. Now that is what I call value for money!

So in-between sipping my white wine and I shall have a look at what everyone wrote about the Future of Content Management…

Whilst many of you professed and inability to look into the future, it was clear you all have more than an idea on many aspects. Some of us have more of a dream than others… some of posted based upon your leaning from either ECM, WCM and commercial or open source. And some wrote their own rules to how they were going to respond. As my only rule was “there are no rules” I liked the spirit of doing something different.

I cannot really attempt to outline exactly what everyone said; it is just too much to take on in a way that would justify the meaning of each article. For that you need to read them for yourself and you will find the links at the bottom.

Vendors
With the recent acquisitions and the general downturn it is likely that the face of vendors will change more that is already has done over the course of the next year. The recent Forrester and Gartner reports have re-asserted some companies positions and surprise people with how some of the reports view other companies. Those that do well will no doubt pick on the weak until we lose a few more vendors. Is Open Source the way? Well as Adriaan Bloem pointed out Open Source is just another license. If commercial software has trappings then Open Source does too, just different ones. I am not a believer that open source will over take commercial software, just that commercial software will leverage open source (and especially open connectivity) just as well as Open Source. In that the playing field will remain level for a long time to come.

I hope and pray monolithic vendors die a slow and painful death but I just know uncreative people will continue to advise customers to invest in such solutions.

Technology
“I’ve been in this WCM industry awhile, so lets put aside the crystal ball a minute and ask if we have yet delivered on the CMS promise of 10 years ago? ”

Judging by the thoughts from everyone the simple answer is NO.

Whilst Ian was talking about making the people have the power, the quote fits right in here too. We all grumbled about the lack of standards and the continuation of proprietary standards that rule our customers. There is CMIS but it lacks a really usable implementation and JCR just is not a standard. Yes, it is if you use java but not for the rest of the world.

Uniform repository access will definitely help but mostly it is going to help with being able to migrate systems and join multiple systems together. In the end if we cannot fix even the smallest of real world problems you can forget trying to get two different CMS systems to just “Plug and Talk” On the other hand it is good to know that Sense/Net “barely has any serious CMS vendor issues that have been upsetting customers throughout the years”, even if the list was not complete.

Concepts
I spend allot of time thinking about this (well OK, a little bit of time) and it is something I like to hear people like Frank talk about. He has great views on what content is and how it should be used – but did not post on this topic (booo!). Challenges we have are how to use the content we have, how long should it exist and what even is content? Is the content that we produce going to live and die in a moment or does it have real life? Social media is perpetuating content that has a very limited life. When was the last time you looked for a Twitter post you had seen a while back? You do not, it has ceased to exist, it is an ex-piece of content. If anything Twitter is a discovery engine, you can discover what is going on, not where to buy a cheap car. This short life also means that some social content has a much more limited value and you can be more risky with it. However, most commercial CMS systems do not truly hand the power to the people, there is also limited tools to help employees create, manage and distribute content remotely or on the move which is something social media requires. For open source the picture gets better, but the most I can manage is Twitter from my iPhone.

That said, almost all vendors push social media connectivity as part of their products but as Ian points out “But, for all that, websites are still the destination – the majority of tweets are linking people with web content. “ So, do not only give us Twitter to tweet our content, give us the mobile application to write the content and then tweet it.

In the end the Twitter bubble will burst unless something happens to give it true value. If that happens the selling point of Content Management Systems will move to other new topics, and hopefully this will be a back to basics move on making content work powerfully rather than enhancing their offering with badly integrated applications that demo well.

Articles
The full list of articles is as follows:

• Technology of Content
• Contented Management
• Jon Marks
• Persuasive Content
• Sense/NET
• Darren Ferguson
• Content Circles
• Stephane Croisier
• Peter Monk
• Laurence Hart
• Tony Bailey
• Kas Thomas and the response to this post from Justin Cormack
• Lee Dallas
• Lee Smith

There is still chance to contribute to the discussion by posting your view on the Future of Content Management. We did not hear from a great many people, if you post then do not forget to tag your post.

Hashtag: #CMSFuture
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Even before Jon’s post I have been trying to be inspired to write something that I feel passionate enough about to post. I guess I have been too busy to think, net alone get the time to actually post.  However, late last night inspiration hit me and then, after consideration it hit me again! So I put aside the first idea and moved on to the latter one.

It occurred to me that all the CMS gurus are not really discussing. Sure we are partaking in the “global conversation”, blogging and commenting and some of us actually seem to do this for a job. For a discussion you need a topic. Evil genius Kas Thomas managed this, to some extent, with the CMS Vendor Meme but that was too general and too now for what I want to hear. So I have come up with the following challenge.

My challenge is to all the CMS gurus that read or see this post (and by god am I going to try and make sure you read it) is to write a blog post with the title “The Future of Content Management” and start with the line “The future of Content Management is… “. Clearly there is alot of scope in the answer which is of course the idea. Post your answer on your blog and comment on this post with your link. Don’t forget to use the tag in twitter and on your post.

After my holiday I will be checking back on progress. Some of your comments will have to wait until I am back to approve them (sorry), so please be patient.

Hashtag: #CMSFuture
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