itsMeta

It boggles my mind – it’s 2007 and yet to my knowledge, there is no out of the box Content Management System (CMS) that simply plugs & plays into an enterprise infrastructure. They all required quite a bit of customization – common estimates are that you will spend two to three times the cost of the software. Given that enterprise CMS systems run in the hundred of thousands of dollars, this is no cheap customization exercise.

In recent discussions I’ve had with various CMS implementation veterans, one common theme kept emerging – an enterprise is better off rolling their own. What’s out there is too generic, trying to solve every business model’s content management needs with the same solution. This lowest common denominator approach assumes that a publisher has the same CMS needs as a financial institution – this is simply not true. That generification & the resulting underlying complexity leads to the customization necessary that results in the two to three times the expense.

So, what’s an IT professional to do? The word on the street is to roll your own. Analyze the business problem and build the simplest solution you can think of. Remember, a CMS’ core requirements is to 1 – allow users to input content; 2 - deploy it to a number of target environments.

A few months back, I wrote a little snippet about rolling your own CMS. Although still my preferred method of tackling the IT Industry wide CMS problem, you sometimes need a solution up & running with the quickness. So if rolling your own is not an option and you need something profession, cheap and in a demonstrate-able state ASAP, consider Alfresco.

Although it's billed as an Open Source Enterprise Content Management System, it does have Web Content Management Capabilities through a Web Content Management Module. (This may sound like an afterthought, but it's not; it's actually quite robust and is built on a very powerful enterprise scale infrastructure).

Alfresco is an open source J2EE application built on Spring, Hibernate, Lucene, JSF, and all your other Java best of breeds technologies. Best of all, it's founded & built by some of the people behind Documentum and Interwoven (among others). They've brought together their lessons learned and best practices in both the Web & Enterprise Content Management spaces and built Alfresco in an open source manner. It's really a beautiful thing. Their business model is the RedHat model - provide a kick ass product and make your money off support.

Have questions? Post a comment.

Business users need to interpret and evaluate their content to best leverage it. To do so, business users need to execute searches across content with an eye to what information might be monetized, how that content might be grouped, packaged, or syndicated, and how the content will appear across various digital distribution channels.

For such activities to occur effectively across very large content collections, content must stored in a structured format: broken down into contextually-defined atomic parts (i.e. sections, sub-sections, paragraphs) in order to facilitate effective searches. Because of its ability to contextualize and structure content, XML, as we all know, is the natural format for delivering content over the internet.

Unlike PDFs, Office, Quark, InDesign and other digital formats, the XML format contains all of the data characteristics and structural information needed to aid effective searches and group data effectively. Well-designed XML is contextually self-aware because it not only defines what a specific piece of content is – but it also defines its contextual location. For example, XML may show that a particular piece of content is within a sub-section of a section of a larger object and is in the same layer as other objects, etc.

Many content creators are already storing their data in XML, and most content syndication is done through an XML format. The bottom line is that the glue that’s tying content together on the internet today is XML. Even MS Office 2007 now stores its documents natively in XML as zipped up collections of XML files under the .docx or .xlsx extension.

In the next post, we'll discuss how to manage the XML in preparation for use within a Content Interpreter.

GeekOutSummit is now "itsMeta . com". I've been thinking about doing this for some time, and with the desire to post about many more subjects, many of which don't necessarily fall under the GOS model, I wanted something a bit more generic. For awhile, I've been saying "it's meta!", trying to introduce a new adjective into my peer group. One thing led to another and to my surprise, itsmeta.com was available. The Geek Out Summits will still be occuring, albeit a little more spaced out with a little bundle of joy to be joining the family soon ;p