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Disposition

A gave me some input on how to disposition the thesis

State of art. Describe the existing systems. Theory.

I've found an increasing amount of WCMS (as you can see on my links), and a lot of these are based on open source, particularly php, but I believe java will soon catch up (http://theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=33163).

Also note in the discussion between KM and CM, the CMS fall into categories like Groupware, e-Learning, Portals and Wiki. These are classical KM IT-tools, but still the KM protectors have a belief that CM is nothing but the treatment of data and information. Au contraire (*sp), but we've found our own word for that: Content Repository, and about everyone who are dealing with CMS these days are very excited about the coming Content Repository standards and implementations, either you're talking about WedDAV or Jackrabbit.

Also bring in discussion on the work of others on the subject. Write down summaries of the articles and books I read.

The requirements, the users. How we gather requirements for the WCMS.


In P, we recently had a customer session digging out the requirements from our users. We're applying a lightwheight form of the Scrum methodology, which is a lightweight variant of XP, which is again supposed to be one of the lighter, big-M Methodologies.

The point being is that we model/assign requirements as "User Stories" (written by the customer, max 3 sentences, describes a function in the system) instead of classical Use Cases. We scrambled together about 50 user stories, most of which can be applied by all our different customers, the rest are very customer specific.

Example of customer specific functionality is NAAF, where a professor up in Trondheim feeds pollen-data into the CMS so that is published NAAF's webpages (in a much more readable view), and syndicated to a set of subscribers through email.

The User Stories will lead to Acceptance Tests, which will together with software architecture make up the Unit Tests. Also bring in discussion on the work of others on the subject. Write down summaries of the articles and books I read.When we have solved the Unit Tests, hopefully the Acceptance Tests will also run successfully, and then the product will be complete. Unfortunately, by that time, 10 new User Stories have emerged. The key here is to have a component architecture which makes it easy to integrate new functionality as components.

Prototype. Design.
Appfuse, Jackrabbit, content repository JSR-170, portlets JSR-168, JSF and the middle-tier made flesh&bone oughta do it!

Use of CMS. Validate the system. Metrics.
Now this is trickier biz. As we are an external organization we have no say in how our customers measure the inward improvement in workflow and document process. We should however supply the customers with some tools and methods for doing this. Perhaps some surveys now on how publishing and web editing is done, and how much manpower is spent.

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