Content Management Case Study
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Acme produces modems and network cards and wants to improve customer satisfaction by better organizing and delivering technical support information and documentation on their websites. They plan to integrate their separate customer support and main websites onto a single site. This will involve developing content across different departments, conditioning and categorizing existing content, managing workflows, and delivering personalized content to users based on their roles. The new system must support features like content syndication, wireless notifications, load balancing, and caching to improve performance as site traffic increases.
Content Management Case Study
- 1. Content Management A Case Study
- 2. Case Study for Acme This case study is based on an imaginary company (named Acme) with typical Content Management problems. It presents a simplified example that illustrates the broad scope of a Content Management project and its related challenges. An introduction to Acme and the challenges it faces is followed by sections describing how this company applies the three workflows: Content Development Content Production Content Delivery
- 3. Introduction to Acme Acme produces a line of modems and network cards. Like many companies, they’ve always strived to make resources such as software drivers, patches, problem resolutions, and information documents available as soon as possible. The content comes from various groups within Acme - in fact, they’ve discovered that they’ve been duplicating efforts internally - and multiple Web sites have evolved to deliver the content to customers and distributors. Although Acme has good products and a dedicated work force, the current public perception of the company is that they’re having customer satisfaction problems.
- 4. Users complain that they have difficulty finding what they need because of the multiplicity of servers. Acme seeks to improve the quality of their customer service by improving the delivery of information and by better matching the information to the needs of the user. For the project at hand, they want to integrate the customer support site with their main Web site.
- 5. Customer Support Challenges Acme’s Customer Support department has an “in the trenches” attitude and a strong desire to meet customer needs. They’re concerned about how long it takes support and service staff to get up to speed on Acme’s extensive product line. To address this, Customer Support has built a searchable repository of issues and resolutions to help solve problems without duplicating effort. The repository requires that users register an issue, giving it an urgency rating. Users can also search the database for information that has been approved for customer access. The user-interface is old and far from glamorous, but does provide access to support “tickets” and to the database for users.
- 6. Acme plans to move the customer support application to the main site. Users will still have to log in, but placing all supporting documentation on one site will make it easier to manage. In addition, Customer Support would like the results of database searches to dynamically list other information documents that apply to the problem at hand, including those that have been recently added or updated. They’d also like to have a method for cataloging content that will facilitate cross-referencing between documents. Links to other documents would be built automatically, based on information entered whenever new content is added to the site.
- 7. Issues with the Main Web Site The Marketing department manages the content of Acme’s main Web site Its primary function is to communicate the features and benefits of Acme’s products. When service or technical content is added to this site, there are problems with organizing and presenting the information in a way that meets the needs of the diverse user communities. Many users refuse to continue to use the site because they’re unable to find answers to their questions. Technical users complain that a search is as likely to bring up a Product overview as an in-depth article or a solution to a problem, and non-technical users are similarly dissatisfied with the search results.
- 8. Acme would like to have everyone use a single Web site to access any type of information on any of their products and they want to match the content to the needs of the user. They also want to let each user know when there’s a change to any part of the site that affects that person’s areas of interest; for instance, to let customers know when a new driver is released for a product they’ve purchased.
- 9. Content Development: Establishing the Framework Content Development is mainly concerned with: Identifying and setting standards Choosing the platforms that will be the basis for the Content Management solution Designing the content structures Setting guidelines for development.
- 10. Content Development: Getting Started Realizing that they’re going to be integrating content from different systems, Acme assigns a group to learn what platforms will need to work together, and to discover the best tools for integration and development. Acme also reviews their procedures for publishing intellectual property to the Web and, with that, the nondisclosure agreements that they have with customers and partners. In addition, they proceed with a business analysis of existing content development practices. The information gathered will affect Content Production as well.
- 11. Content Development: Integrating Applications The existing customer support application, a Web front-end to a database application, is to be integrated with the main Web site. Most aspects of this application integration project are the same as they would be in any Web integration project. Content structure is a key concern in such a project. This includes: Recording or designing the schema of any databases that will be used Managing any data conversions that need to be performed Discovering or designing any XML document type definitions that will be part of the solution.
- 12. Content Development: Creating and Adapting Content for the New Site The assumption at Acme is that the Technical Publications group will be responsible for generating the new information pieces, white papers, and other new content, as well as making existing content available for electronic publication. The impact of a new system on an organization requires the same careful planning that goes into the software itself. For example, Acme will need to determine whether Technical Publications is sufficiently staffed for this additional work. The group’s current practices (which are based on less frequent revisions and on a print environment) will need to be examined to determine whether they’ll meet the demands of the faster-paced Web environment.
- 13. The time, training, and effort required to implement the Content Management System should be part of the plan from the start. Early on, Acme needs to identify the environments within which content or applications will be created or where they already exist. Legacy systems are important to consider; for instance, document management tools Acme is already using might be integrated into the workflow of the site. The decisions made in this area will significantly affect the application architecture of the solution.
- 14. Seeking to both use existing content and plan for new content raises questions about the construction of the content: What content would be best addressed by creating templates that dynamically present the information in an appropriate format? Information being pulled from a database is an example of content that’s best formatted by a template. What parts of the Web pages would remain the same, and which would change? Determining this will help with the planning for Content Delivery caching.
- 15. The relationship between Content Development and Content Delivery becomes very clear when the above points are considered. There must be a completed Content delivery design so that content templates can be developed properly. In addition to the standard Web interface, other Content Delivery channels (such as wireless) may be used. Using different technologies for delivery may mean that the content is best generated in, or translated to, a neutral format that can be Content Management interpreted for multiple channels. This is one reason for the popularity of XML in Content Management solutions.
- 16. Content Production: Pulling Together the Content Content Production involves processing the content in preparation for publishing it.
- 17. Content Production: Conditioning Content To provide for better-qualified searches, all unstructured content (such as articles and white papers) will have category keywords assigned to them. Acme begins by clearly separating marketing and sales materials from technical documents, and categorizing the technical documents within their respective disciplines. Acme will need to develop procedures for defining which categories are most appropriate for the content being classified. These procedures will need to be integrated into a categorization workflow.
- 18. The taxonomy, especially for the technical side, will grow as the categorization of the content takes place. If a new category is added after content has already been classified, a plan will need to be formulated to locate conditioned content that should be included in that category. One of the chief benefits of conditioning is that a search can return the most appropriate content first. To accomplish this, Acme will develop a categorization design that allows for rating the suitability of the content in relation to categories. As part of site management, reports on content use will be gathered. If the reports show that some content is not being accessed, a process will need to be in place to determine if that content is no longer meaningful or if it should be put in a more suitable category.
- 19. Content Production: Choosing a Workflow Application Acme is examining a number of applications for managing the Content Production workflow. They want to be sure that the application they choose will meet their needs now and in the future. When choosing or building such an application, it’s necessary to identify which features will be required to meet the needs of the business. The needs and corresponding features that Acme is considering include the following: Many organizations have document states other than “completed” or “incomplete”, such as “internal use only” or “available to partners but not to customers”. Being able to configure states and associate rules with them is part of a complete workflow solution. Some Workflow Applications require each user to log in and check their assignments. However, a more automatic mechanism, such as e-mail notification, would deliver workflow assignments much more effectively.
- 20. Content Production: Collecting Content Acme will assemble content from a variety of sources, both internal and external. Some of the content is contained in existing databases, but most is unstructured content. In addition, the site will deliver diagnostic tools and software patches. Other vendors have approached Acme with requests to place information and advertising for their products and services on Acme’s site. Because this would add value and encourage additional traffic to their site, Acme is determining what would be necessary to make this happen. Their Content Management solution will need to provide for some means of automated Content collection .
- 21. As content is collected, the system should automatically record certain information about it that will help track the content within the workflow. Having content carry its own metadata, if possible, can automate some of the Content Conditioning . Because Acme plans to subscribe to content from other vendors, its system should have a means of scheduling the file transfer for times of low traffic, to minimize the impact on system performance. In addition, security measures need to be taken in partnership with the parties providing the content. Content Aggregation requires a thorough security architecture plan.
- 22. Content Production: Providing Content Acme plans to supply content to other vendor sites. The Content Management solution must, therefore, provide for syndicating content. Again, corresponding security planning is critical. In addition, there are individual users who will want to know when new content has been added or when some portion of the site changes. Automated client subscription, notifying users when elements of the site have changed, should place the corresponding links within the notification. The system should support managing notification at either a folder or file level.
- 23. Content Delivery: Serving the Content Content delivery is concerned with getting personalized content to users over multiple channels.
- 24. Content Delivery: Providing Role-Based Content A key goal for Acme’s new Web site is that the most appropriate content be delivered to each visitor. Users should no longer have any reason to complain about searches yielding too many hits that were unrelated to what they wanted. Along these lines, the company has already planned to condition the content to refine searches and match them to users’ needs (or roles). In a setting like Acme’s, the most practical type of personalization is explicit: The users define their profiles, typically by completing an online form. Acme will have to determine what characteristics define a role, which will consequently be used to match content to the user.
- 25. Content Delivery: Reaching People Where They Are Acme plans to allow customers to request notification of changes or additions to the Web site. The default method will be email. In addition, distributors of Acme’s products have requested that wireless notification be a feature of the improved site. Therefore, Acme is examining the requirements for using wireless media for notification of updates, as well as for special offers. It’s clear that the standard HTML Web pages will not work over the wireless devices; however, wireless media can deliver much of the same text, and the goal is to eliminate as much redundant entry and content generation as possible.
- 26. Content Delivery: Considering Performance and Fault Tolerance As traffic to Acme’s site increases, additional servers will be added to handle and balance the load, and the site will remain operational if one server should fail. Therefore, the applications that are part of the Content Delivery solution must support a multiple-server scenario. As is typical of Content Management applications, templates will be used to place the dynamic content in an easily readable format. Recurring elements within the templates will be requested from the application server with each use, by default. Since caching reusable elements will reduce the amount of time required to build a page in response to a user request, Acme plans to include caching as a site feature.