Case: Business School Netherlands

Another nice website using SharePoint for web content management is Business School Netherlands:

Case: Dutch Radiocommunications Agency

Often I’m asked for all kinds of SharePoint cases. A great resource for SharePoint web content management cases is Public Web Sites hosted on SharePoint by Ian Morrish. Also check out this selection of Ian’s list by Joel Oleson.

Inspired by Ian and Joel I’m starting a collection of cases as well. The first one is the public website of the Dutch Radiocommunications Agency.

HiSoftware Accessibility Kit for SharePoint 2.0

On March 9th HiSoftware and Microsoft released the Accessibility Kit for SharePoint (AKS) v2.0, to support an accessible development framework for Microsoft SharePoint environments. The latest release includes a series of Smart Control Adapters to reduce customization, HiSoftware’s Compliant Code Engine to assist organizations in creating code that is compliant to standards-based HTML or XHTML, support for additional regulatory standards and more. AKS 2.0 significantly reduces the level of effort and knowledge needed by customers and partners to improve the accessibility of SharePoint-based sites/applications.

Some of the key features in AKS v2.0 are:

• Smart Control adapters which greatly reduce the amount of custom configuration previously required for AKS control adapters;
• The Web Part Zone Control Adapter, a special Smart Adapter that modifies the output of SharePoint so that it does not use tables for layout of the Web parts;
• HiSoftware’s Compliant Code Engine (HCCE) to assist organizations in creating code that is compliant to standards-based HTML or XHTML;
• Additional requirements under Canadian Common Look and Feel 2.0 (CLF 2.0) guidelines;
• Examples of remediation to comply with WCAG 2.0 Level AA.

Also visit the Accessibility Community Portal for SharePoint by Microsoft and HiSoftware.

Multilingual User Interface SharePoint 2007: PointFire

Was looking for a solution for a multilingual user interface for SharePoint 2007. Via Sven’s SharePoint 2007 Developer-blog I came across IceFire’s PointFire 2007. PointFire seems to be exaclty what I was looking for.

Web content management market according to Gartner

Via contentmanager.net I ran into an article on Gartner’s MarketScope for Web Content Management, 2007. According to Gartner the web content management marketplace has opened the market to be driven by smaller players. Gartner Analyst Lou Latham:

Much of the energy and innovation in the industry is now coming from smaller players that are moving up-market and challenging the leaders with new ideas and lower prices. As new demand profiles and price points solidify, new leaders will emerge from the pack and create a next generation hierarchy.

Gartner focuses on the recent consolidation of the top end web content management vendors, which has seen significant changes in the last 12 months. They observe, this consolidation has helped to level the playing field for vendors, creating room at the bottom end of the market for new innovative vendors to move in and re-liven the WCM space.

Content management: Technology is not the solution

Masood Nasser wrote a great article on how to implement a successful content management system:

Everyone understands the business case for Content Management: Organizations drowning in information can’t learn from, act on, or leverage knowledge and resources trapped in assets that already exist. You lose the content’s value if you can’t find it to use it.

To solve problems like these, business often purchases a technology, assuming the former is a feature of the latter. In the content management world, we hear the same kinds of promises from IT stakeholders, again and again.

(…)

Unfortunately, business often confuses technology for the solution. Forms, XML, and software won’t manage your content. Neither will they help authors create content, nor do they help you leverage content for later use.

(…)

To implement content management system that really works, business and IT must think beyond internal processes and technology. If your organization keeps in mind the users who will interact with the content as well as the range of types of content, then your CMS is much more likely to succeed.

However, users and content are only the inputs that go into your CMS. Understanding the content lifecycle is the final missing piece.

Content management challenges

Rita Warren of ZiaContent surveyed a group of content management professionals (including me) to uncover trends in what challenges most often come up when implementing a content management system.

In this survey properly scoping the project and clarifying business goals were named as the two biggest challenges. This comes as no surprise: those where in my top three as well.

You can download the survey results from ZiaContent.com.

Web 2.0 for content management at Leiden University

Some weeks ago I blogged about a project I’m working on at the Vrije Universiteit, where we’re building a portal for students with SharePoint 2007.

Because of this project I was interested to watch the presentation of Adriaan Bloem on how Leiden University uses web 2.0 application for managing the university’s content. He gave this presentation at the first CM Pros Benelux theme night on June 29th, 2006 in Utrecht.

Adriaan shared some really interesting thoughts and experiences:

Many of the aplications considered Web 2.0 are used on a small scale (individuals or research groups) or have a wider user base (faculty projects or university-wide pilots). Wiki’s, Podcasts and Blogs were discussed as examples and I gave my view on the pro’s and con’s of the technologies applied and their use in an academic setting.

I concluded by stating that new Web 2.0 mediums are in between the currently most important, “old school” kinds of content management (the CMS, used in marketing & communication, and the ELO, used for educational purposes). While blogs are a very succesful medium at the university, and are certainly here to stay, it becomes more and more difficult to decide where to publish what content. A holistic content strategy is therefore imperative.

It’s a shame I couldn’t attend this session myself, since it’s really interesting stuff. Unfortunately I was on vacation at the time….

This brings me to mentioning the CM Pros Benelux Summit  next week in Utrecht. It’s about The Future of Content Management and will deal with questions like:

What’s the influence of Web 2.0 on content management? How do “faceted browsing”, social media, wiki’s and weblogs fit into a content management strategy? Is Microsoft going to control the content management market with SharePoint & Content Management Server 2007? Will the innovations be instigated by ERP vendors such as SAP and Oracle. And what’s IBM’s role? Will the growth of content management vendors continue?

Microsoft and Vignette announce strategic relationship

Vignette and Microsoft announced a strategic relationship. As part of the relationship, the two companies will work together to help ensure content stored in a 2007 Microsoft Office or Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 repository, or subscription-based and paid-for content downloaded to a PC, can be managed and delivered to any Internet-enabled device through Vignette. The relationship enables organizations to develop and catalog content in Office SharePoint Server 2007 and, leveraging Vignette’s Web solution, manage and push that content out to multiple devices such as set-top boxes and mobile devices.

The Changing Face of University Websites

At Tam Tam we’re working on a very cool Microsoft SharePoint 2007 project at a large Dutch university: in January ‘07 we’ll be launching a portal for all 18,000 students. Later on, all the universities websites will be moved to SharePoint 2007. Since I’m involved in this project as project manager, I’ve got a special interest in e-learning and other universities websites and portals.

Via Tony Byrne I ran into a nice article by Maish Nichani – founder of PebbleRoad, a Singapore based design consultancy – in which he evaluates websites of 25 universities mostly from the US, UK and Australia. Byrne explains why an increasing number of colleges and universities are investing in content management:

That may be because so many colleges are at the same time in redesign mode, transitioning their web sites from simple information centers to ones that allow students to register for classes or buy something from the book store. This requires a shift from simple brochureware sites to ones that can handle ecommerce and complex scheduling and registration, which usually signals the need for software to better manage site content.

Not only are we experiencing other requirements for publishing more complex and diverse content, as Byrne mentions, but also a demand for true multi channel capabilities: from the ability to publish content to mobile devices to publishing paper syllabi, guides and readers, all from the same content repository.

According to Maish, university websites tend to be more complicated than corporate websites. He names some of them, all true I think:

• Difficultly in defining a common vision: unlike corporate websites, it is difficult for a university to get all of its schools, divisions, centers, etc., to agree on a common vision for communicating on the web.
  
• ‘Not invented here’ syndrome: because of the above, web design tends to fall into the hands of many different local webmasters who make decisions based on local directives – usually motivated by one-upmanship.
  
• Lack of knowledge in user-centered design: this is crucial one. Because the needs of the user does not take center stage, as the above two points show, design decisions are based on varying principles and random rationales leading to haphazard design outcomes.