Category: Content Management

Enterprise Content Management (ECM), Web Content Management (WCM), Document Management (DM). Whatever you call it this category covers market happenings and lessons learned.

Exposing reports & analytics through portal gets easier

CBR Online is reporting that Liferay, an open source portal, and Pentaho, an open source business intelligence platform, are working on better integration between the two products. This is good news to Enterprise clients who often want to expose BI data such as reports and dashboards to users across the company via the web. Tighter integration through JSR-168 will make it easier to personalize and deliver Pentaho portlets through Liferay.

Mixing BI, or quantitative data and technologies, with ECM, which is more qualitative, can be powerful. Here are a couple of examples. Clients sometimes ask about reporting capabilities in Alfresco. Alfresco has pretty granular auditing capabilities. When you enable it, events get written into a set of auditing tables in your relational database. Once that happens, it’s simply a matter of using a reporting or BI tool, like Pentaho, to create all the reports you might need, and you could deliver them via your Liferay portal.

Thinking more strategically, maybe you want to monitor certain analytical aspects of your business and convene a response team if any metrics fall below a certain level. You could do that with a Liferay-Pentaho-Alfresco solution. Pentaho could generate the reports and fire of an event when a certain metric is reached. That event triggers an Alfresco workflow which routes a snapshot of the report through a workflow or creates a discussion thread in the Alfresco repository, setting permissions appropriately and notifying the members of the response team who can then use Pentaho’s analytic tools to slice-and-dice the data to their heart’s content.

Give Alfresco a REST!

UPDATE (2/2014): This tutorial has been updated. Please use the latest version rather than the one linked to in this post.

A REST API, that is. The latest in the Alfresco Developer Series is an Introduction to the Web Script Framework which shows you how to create your own REST API to the Alfresco repository. As usual, the article has Example Source Code you can download and try out on your own.

The intent of the article is to walk through some hands-on examples using Alfresco’s Web Script Framework which became available in the 2.1 release of the product. The article extends the “SomeCo Whitepapers” example started in the Custom Content Model and Custom Behavior articles by using Web Scripts to create a REST API for creating user-contributed ratings. Front-end developers wire an AJAX ratings widget to the REST API to allow users to rate whitepapers on the SomeCo web site.

Give it a read, try out the code, and let me know what you think.

Read more about the Alfresco Developer Series.

CIO magazine on what makes Alfresco different

Esther Schindler wrote a short article on CIO.com about Alfresco with the premise that the presence of a marketing department and a PR firm makes them unique in the open source world. I liked how she summed up how Alfresco’s approach was different than many open source projects when she said, “Instead of a project that began with the attitude of ‘My Dad has a barn; let’s put on a play!’ the Alfresco team started with a core competency in content management and looked for new market opportunities”.

She also rightly identified Alfresco’s competition as Documentum, OpenText, and FileNet rather than Joomla, Plone, and Drupal although Microsoft (and anyone else on Gartner’s Mysterious Magic Quadrant) should be considered fair game as well.

But I don’t think they are unique in the larger realm of open source. There are many examples of commercial open source companies with much bigger marketing budgets than Alfresco’s, although in the ECM space, I can’t think of one.

InfoWorld reviews five open source CMS offerings

InfoWorld published a review of Alfresco, DotNetNuke, Plone, Drupal, and Joomla. Heck ranks Alfresco the highest out of the five, which is a good data point for people evaluating these products, but most folks should consider deeply the scenarios they will use the package for when making a decision because each package has a “fitness to purpose” that’s more important to consider than just “fit” alone.

For example, although the article gives a good high-level description of the pro’s and con’s of each package, there’s a more fundamental characteristic of Alfresco that makes comparison to the others an apples-to-oranges exercise. That characteristic is that unlike the others in the list, Alfresco isn’t focused on community-centric functionality. Can you build a community site that is managed by Alfresco and/or uses Alfresco as the back-end repository? Of course. And the new REST framework makes that even easier than it used to be. But you won’t find consumer-facing wiki, blog, or forum functionality out-of-the-box with Alfresco. In fact, you can take your entire web site, as-is, and manage it with Alfresco without any changes to the front-end code. That’s a fundamentally different model than the other packages evaluated.

So you should read the article. But when people ask you to compare Alfresco to Drupal, back them up a bit and instead, figure out the purpose and goal of the site and the business processes needed to manage it (the “how”) and then talk about the open source CMS options.

New Alfresco tutorial on implementing custom behaviors

I’ve written a follow-on article to “Alfresco Developer: Working with Custom Types”. This one is on implementing custom behavior. In the new article (with accompanying source code), I build on the SomeCo Whitepapers example by adding support to the content model for user-contributed ratings of whitepapers. The custom behavior is used to calculate the average rating for each piece of rated content.

My plan is to follow on shortly with an article that shows how to use Alfresco’s new REST-based Web Script framework to enable the front-end to rate (and get the rating of) content in the Alfresco repository.

So take a look and let me know what you think.

More about the Alfresco Developer Series.

Gartner Portals, Content, and Collaboration Conference: Day 2 Notes

Portals, SOA, and Mashups

Portals have worked well in some enterprises, but there are problems:

  • Heavyweight technology requires specialized skills
  • Over-engineered platforms and protocols are complex and expensive

Portals will likely be an entry point for enterprise mash-ups

Interesting tidbit: Systems reflect the structure of the organizations that build them. If you have a dysfunctional organization, it is likely your systems will be too. Building the “perfect” system doesn’t help. Over time, the system will degrade to match the structure of the organization. (Melvin Conway, 1968).

I’ve definitely seen evidence of this at clients. A really obvious example is in workflow-centric solutions. Companies rarely take the time to streamline and cleanup processes the way they need to before formalizing the processes in automated workflows (“Implementing the new system is enough change. Let’s automate the way we do it now to encourage user adoption. We’ll come back later and tweak the business processes.”). So what you end up with is a system that works exactly like the current business process, warts and all.

More info on Conway’s Law at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway’s_Law

Portal of the Future

More discussion about the differences between Digital Natives (the generation of workers entering the workplace today) and Digital Immigrants (the generation of workers who’ve had to adapt to digital technology). Where this relates to the “Portal of the Future” is primarily about expectations regarding how we interact with relevant data. The nature of this interaction has to be client-independent, device-independent, context-aware, and truly-mobile.

Trends:

  • Portal vendors will decompose products into services
  • Portal as entry point for enterprise mash-ups
  • Portals sharing data (due to most enterprises having multiple portals deployed)

Sites to check out for good examples of alternatives models of content aggregation:

These are basically the next generation of the old “My” portals.

Portal interoperability touchpoints:

  • Portlets (Standards exist here, but not for the rest)
  • User Profiles
  • Directory
  • Security
  • Metadata

Mash-up tools/APIs:

Seven Key Strategies for Combining Portal & CM

Probably a better title for this presentation would have been, “Seven high-level ideas that are related to portals, content, and collaboration”. It didn’t really discuss the combination of the two at any level of detail.

1. Build a foundation for a high-performance workplace

  • Provide a flexible environment to support the non-routine tasks people do every day. Key technologies: Collaboration and Content Management (Basic Content Services).
  • Focus on non-routine tasks and decision-making enablement
  • Content and collaboration are “birthright” technologies for your employees

2. Use the right tool for the right task

  • The problem is that email is being used to create/share content
  • Use BCS as a way to migrate people away from email

3. Take a process view

  • If you want to really get a handle on collaboration and content you need to start by looking at the processes in which collaboration plays a part or which involve content.
  • Gartner talked about two types of content/collaboration apps using two acronyms: CEVA & WEBA. Hopefully, these new acronyms won’t out-live the conference, but just in case they do…
  • CEVA stands for Content-Enabled Verticalized Applications. This is an application that is focused on a core business process. For these apps you should be able to provide templates, workflows, and automate some or all of the business process. (A lot of the workflow apps I’ve built over the years have been CEVA’s. Who knew?)
  • WEBA stands for Workplace-Enhanced Business Applications. These are apps that our really outside of your core business process. For these you need to define policies, communicate best practices, provide support, and examples.

4. Intranet & repository consolidation

  • The path of least resistance is to freeze your legacy content and create all new content in the new repository. The legacy repositories will dry up and go away over time.
  • The other alternative is migration, which can be costly, but at least gives you the chance to clean up.
  • The route you choose is really about cost.

5. B2C web presence

  • Most enterprises will need both Portal and Content Management
  • Each has specific areas of functionality they are responsible for, but there is some overlap in the gray area between the two.
  • For some reason, the speaker went deep into eforms at this point which I found strange as the bullet is about B2C web presence. I don’t downplay eforms as important, particularly as a low-hanging fruit for most enterprises, but it seemed like a non-sequitur.

6. Customer-centric communication

  • Nothing significant to note for this one.

7. SOA framework for the assembly of services

  • Again, kind of fizzling out at this point but the speaker did point out that your metadata approach can impact your ability to provide meaningful integration between or federation of your repositories. Enterprise-wide efforts to define and update an enterprise-wide data model help but can be costly.

Usability & Productivity: Are We There Yet? (Jakob Nielsen)

This was my first time hearing Nielsen speak. I found him to be insightful, engaging, and entertaining. Catch him when you can.

Usability is not just about visual design–it must also include information architecture and interaction design. You cannot just come in after the coding is done and slap on a pretty interface.

Everyone can do (and should be doing) usability testing

  • Doesn’t require a lot of fancy equipment
    • Closed door
    • Web cam
    • Screen capture
  • Plan on roughly five users for each type of user in the system. If overlap exists across user types, you can get by with less than five.
  • Keep it simple
  • Make it iterative. Don’t make it a big production. Maybe test one user type on one iteration and another on the next.

Of award-winning intranets, the following are the usability methods employed by those teams:

  • User testing (#1 method)
  • Survey
  • Card sorting
  • User test of prototype or wireframe
  • Heuristic evaluation
  • Field studies
  • Accessibility testing

The Web 2.0 sites/technologies getting covered the most by the media are not necessarily what you should be doing in your projects

  • The ugly truth about user-contributed content: 90% of the users contribute very little, 9% contribute a moderate amount, and only 1% are the hardcore, heavy users
  • Get back to basics
  • Search
  • Task-oriented navigation
  • Learn how to write for the web
  • People scan when they read online. Writers have to adapt to that style.
  • Use HTML pages instead of PDF. PDF versions of online manuals on a corporate intranet could be costing you “hundreds of thousands of dollars” in productivity loss
  • Tiny text with low contrast is really hard for people over 45 years old to read

“Banner blindness” is a strong phenomenon

  • Showed some eye tracking test graphics in which users were not giving a single glance to any of the ads
  • Non-ad content that simply *looks* like an ad gets skipped
  • Environments where a user should know there are no ads (like an intranet) are not immune to this effect