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Showing posts from October, 2005

Article review: Building the Mosaic: Writing tips for Content Management

Just some quick notes here. This article (more like a memo) encourages an object oriented approach to creating content (reusable, etc), in hoping that the content elements can be reassembled by demand in an almost magical process. This is definitly what will become of content in the future (and sounds somewhat like Boiko's definition of content = information elements put together), but is still a bit abstract sci-fi. Maybe in a few years..

Article review: ContentP2P: A peer-to-peer CMS

An experiment in making a CMS based on P2P technology. A good article, scientific. Several good points. Pretty technical. The obvious benefit of having a distributed repository is scalability, but it is suggested that content ownership/quality is increased since the content is local. The authors make a point of using open standards, though not a very good one (java and XML). JXTA is one of the more exciting and relevant standards. The experimental implementation of the system had not been completed at the time of writing, and I can't find any continued effort on the net. Bit of a shame actually, sounded like a very reasonable implementation. A good idea and a good architecture, but I guess our centralized servers are still strong enough for handling all content.

Article review: Making Sense of the Organisation's Knowledge

Subtitle: Does Systematisation of the Knowledge Base have a Positive or Negative Effect on Organizational Culture? The article starts off with a pretty stupid question. Of course, I would believe the answer most of the time is yes, and the conclusion of the article doesn't differ. The article considers two sorts of KM/CM software: Workflow systems and CM systems. Funnily enough, XML CMSes is the exact term, and already it is shown how the author likes sticking his finger into irrelevant technical details (so what if the CMS is based on XML?). However silly the purpose of the paper, there is a nice view on the value of workflow systems (cause process is knowledge too). All in all, this article says nothing else than "IT affects orgnizations! Wow! Even positively most of the time!" and is pretty worthless.

Article review: Content Management Beyond English

Also a very unscientific article. Very subjective. The bottom line here is that content should be written independant of languages (good luck), or at least make accessible enough information so that content can be translated without loosing value. A finger is pointed on several issues in translation/internationalization/localization that you might not have thought about, but all in all, this article is thin, subjective and not very useful.

Article review: Plone and Content Management

A nice intro to CMSes. Not a scientific article, but easily read. Plone is similar to Magnolia in many ways, more powerful in some areas, weaker in others. Very content-specific domain model. Can not be abstracted into anything else than content. Nice that the CMS has themes, as well as new-content-wizards and template editor. They call wiki-text structured text . But why wiki when you can wysiwyg? :) Overall, nice intro to Plone, and some good ideas for WCMS in general (requirements). I could've used Plone/Zope as a candidate in my comparison, but my scope is too small I think (will stick to the java ones).

Article review: Evaluating Strategic IT Investments: An Assessment of Investment Alternatives for a Web Content Management System

Interesting material to use for analyzing the value of a WCMS. Might use it myself for comparing the candidates. The Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) is a set of principles or a framework for evaluating investments. To soften the subjectiveness of the framework, a wide range of sensitivity analyses are performed. A framework is presented, a bit similar to the one in Management Challenges of the New Infrastructure, only less complex (Input -> Process -Output). The framework is mostly applicable for doing pair-comparisons, so the candiates should be reduced to a handful before doing the benchmark. Funny how this article regards WCMS to be what most thinkers consider to be ECM.. Overall, this article uses alot of text to get to the point, but the framework presented is quite good, and I will probably use it.