A nice video on marriage of Enterprise Content Magagement and Web 2.0

content management system - Scalability at the cost of simplicity

Typically most of the large enterprise grade content management systems are complex to work with and not very intuitive for the business users. A part of this observation is influenced by one of the product from a major vendor in which I have invested a lot of my professional time. The Vendor is Vignette which had seen its better days but eventually got bought over by Open Text a very recently has a solid web content management suite which they call VCM (Vignette Content Management). However using the product to product content in a website or portal is an extremely tedious job which scares away the typical business and functional users. Though one of the most prominent selling pitch for any content management system is enablement of business users in the whole content creation effort typical that does not happen in enterprise grade CMS packages. Buried in the layers of object relationships, child-parent dependencies and taxonomy considerations it is very difficult for business users to visualize the content management model and create content which is ready to serve without the intervention of technical stuff. As a result organizations ending up spending millions in implementing these packages still have to rely on an army of content authors who are trained on these packages just to enter content which otherwise have been captured in a different tool. It is understood that prime reason for this complexity in the CMS packages of enterprise grade is the goal to achieve better scalability, reusability and findability. Couple with it if your organization is highly regulated (Healthcare or Finance) you will be burdened with a validation rigor which will make the overall content lifecycle that much more complex and hard to visualize for typical functional users (marketing folks or finance guys) for whom content production is just a part of their overall role description. The organizations are therefore pleading for a CMS package which is simple on the interface and implementation but at the same time provide better scalability, findability and reusability.