CMS and challenges in content creation

Brief overview of what a CMS provides

• rapid changes in the document tree propagating through a great number of portals
• simultaneous work of many editors on a variety of documents
• versioning of all documents
• maintenance of link consistency
• creation of web content through non-professionals
• template based mechanism maintains overall design

In short, you can quickly create a great number of web pages and produce them with consistent quality

Things a CMS does not provide

• it is not an HTML editor - reduced flexibility in design choices
• changes in software affect everybody - no easy updates
• integration of content from the outside of the system can be challenging due to constraints of the template mechanism

The main trade-off is flexibility in terms of being able to express deviations from whatever has been set down in templates or similar mechanisms
Maintaining a rather large system creates additional challenges

Putting dimension into perspective - CMS at Deutsche Telekom

The CMS at Deutsche Telekom's content provider is used to create most portals at http://www.t-online.de

• In 15 to 25 portals 1000s of resources are produced per day
• Currently some 3.5 million resources online
• Roughly 7 terabyte of data moved per day
• Delivering currently 3 billion page impressions per month

This level of productivity would not be possible without a CMS and the supporting infrastructure
The level of complexity is implicit

Content creation and delivery challenges

For us, different from hand coding web pages, using a CMS means having to fulfill many requirements simultaneously

• Imported content
  • Selection of content, possible editing needed, annotation with meta data, classification
• Home made content
  • Automatic creation of web pages via the CMS (standard)
  • hand-coded creation (exceptions)
• Embedded content
  • less control over quality of external sources

Technology challenges

Using a CMS means dealing with a variety of technological challenges with the goal of automation

• Exported content
  • depending on recipient publishing modified content (adaptation, data selection...)
• Channel delivery
  • requiring different formats (XML, RSS, HTML, binary)
  • levels of complexity (fragments (which? - rules), full pages, streams)
• Content transformation
  • based on requesting device
• Client specifics
  • Catering to different browsers and their quirks

A product and human driven world

In the end business models have to be fulfilled.
Speed and being up-to-date are key, work effort needs to be low
But, everybody wants to be special

• Time-to-market often takes precedence over technology or standardization
• Editors are not programmers - need for ease of use
• There is a strong desire to automate as much as possible...
• ...yet, the editorial decision process cannot be ignored
• Differentiation on the side of product management often conflicts with conformity to a template based mechanism

Summing up

• A CMS provides speed and maintenance of quality
• Editorial changes are easy
• Technological changes are difficult
• In terms of standardization
  • Letting go of old habits is difficult (legacy and dependency issues)
  • Business expectations are often of higher priority than standardization
  • Once a change is made it is easily propagated

Thank you