TaylorMade

No play on titles this time, no attempt at clever puns, in this blog entry I want to talk straight about my experience of Content Management in a large organisation, the pitfalls, the benefits and important steps to put place for successful implementation.

I personally do not like reading through reams and reams of text on screen so for that reason I will split this discussion into a few parts.

I have over 4 years development experience with Livelink WCM Presentation Server (which I refer to as Livelink herein), formerly known as Obtree and now owned by Opentext. CMS Watch list it as on of the Major Suite Vendors as rightly so Livelink is one of the big player in the world of commerical content management products. I say commercial as there as many excellent open source products out there, such as Joomla or CMS Made Simple, which I recently implemented on the Take1 Take 2 website.

Livelink is the strategic CMS for the Northern Ireland Civil Service (NICS), so it’s used on almost all main Departmental sites and subsites, in fact more than 70% use Livelink. My experience ranges from developing sites from scratch to integration with external applications, technical consultancy to third party contractors and also managing first level support to IT Assist, the NICS ICT Shared Service Centre.

At the outset, Livelink seemed a very complicated tool to use. An intensive 3 day training course introduced me a GUI unlike any other I’d used, using concepts that were totally unfamiliar to me. However, I grasped it first time and soon learned the basics in a short space of time. Many others that were trained after me didn’t though and even with extending the course to 5 days, experienced programmers were still struggling to get to grips with the Site Administrator.

In the roll out of Livelink and migration of sites to Livelink the standard of training has been a fundamental flaw from the start. It’s hard to believe that company of the size of Opentext have very few trainers but not only that, have the poorest documentation you’re ever likely to see and as for their support forum, less said the better!

As a result I feel that, with the exception of my own team, the CMS is under utilised. Applications and documents are largely hosted outside of Livelink, built using a range of technologies and little standardisation put in place were needed. Livelink is a very powerful CMS but because most developers are versed well enough, it’s used to do the simple, static stuff.

So Step 1 - before putting any CMS in place, make absolutely sure that training is available from more than one supplier, that it’s delivered to a high standard and that a quality support structure is in place.

An addendum to this would be to think about internal support. When the NICS procured Livelink no one actually thought about who was going to provide support to our own developers and content authors. As a result it’s all a bit haphazard and where areas have their own IT team, responsibilities can become very clouded and it’s the end users that often are left hanging.

So Step 2 - Before implementation identify an appropriate resource to provide technical support to your staff. Note support can cover a wide range of issues and users. For example, often problems lie with server set up, replication etc so make sure that you cover all bases and if necessary, outsource!

That’s all for now, I hope there are people who can relate to this and learn from my experience. Please feel free to share your thoughts or point out anything I’ve missed so far.