Web Content Management

The volume of digital content available on the World Wide Web has increased dramatically over the past six years. Some form of Web content management (WCM) system is becoming essential for organisations with a significant Web presence as the volume of content continues to proliferate. WCM systems have evolved rapidly from the basic HTML editors of six years ago, to the sophisticated content production and publishing tools available today. This paper presents a WCM hierarchy, examines the underlying Web content management lifecycle, and identifies the key market trends for WCM systems.

Foreword. Manuel Terranova. Peng T. Ong.@CHAPTER = Preface. Acknowledgments. I. MOTIVATION FOR CONTENT MANAGEMENT. 1. The Internet Changes the Rules of the Game. Executive Summary. Introduction. Overview. Fear and Greed. Rules of the Game. Rule #1: It's the Assets, Stupid! Rule #2: Experiment. Iterate. Grow. Rule #3: Respond to Customers Quickly and Frequently, or Lose Them! Rule #4: Enable the Masses! Rule #5: Make It Manageable and Reproducible. Summary. Roadmap. 2. Overview of Content Management. Executive Summary. From Prototype to Enterprise. 2 a.m. Software. The Pioneers. The Tornado. Go Dot-com. Terminology. Universality of Assets. Managing Web Assets. Live Editing. Staging the Web Site. Independent Edit Areas. Content Management. Content Management Architecture. Content Creation/Editing Subsystem. Repository Subsystem. Workflow Subsystem. Deployment and Operations Management. Summary. II. CONCEPTS AND PRINCIPLES. 3. Principles of Collaborative Web Development. Executive Summary. Introduction. Basic Concepts. Stakeholder Identification. Are We in the Chaos Zone? Development and Production Separation. Asset Identification. Direct Feedback (WYSIWYG). Parallel Development. Versioning. Control Mechanisms: Auditing and Enforcement. Summary. 4. Best Practices for Collaborative Web Development. Executive Summary. The WSE Paradigm. Collaboration Strategies. Collaboration Operations. Submit Operation. Compare Operation. Update Operation. Merge Operation. Publish Operation. Work Cycles. Version Snapshots. Common Work Cycles in Web Development. Real-Time Development Work Cycle. Compare-Update Work Cycle. Review Work Cycle. Major Test Work Cycle. Summary. 5. Templating Empowers Content Contributors. Executive Summary. Background. The Freshness Imperative. The Challenge of Change. Enabling Change. A Template System. Example: ezSuggestionBox.com. Advantages of a Template System. Summary. Practitioner's Checklist. 6. Workflow Speeds Work Cycles. Executive Summary. Using Workflow. Characteristics of Web Development. People Factors. Project Factors. Process Factors. Business Factors. Virtual Assembly Line. Workflow Concepts. Interaction Pattern. Tasks. Job. Transition Links. Active and Inactive Tasks. Building a Workflow. Notification. Designing a Workflow. 1. Identify Interaction Sequences. 2. Identify Candidate Workflow. 3. Sketch the Steps. 4. Identify Known and Not-Yet-Known Parameters. 5. Add Remaining Transitions. 6. Add Notification Steps. Summary. Practitioner's Checklist. 7. Deploying Content. Executive Summary. Introduction. Concept Review. The Release Agreement. Common Pitfalls. Continuous Change. Database Assets. Design Considerations. Incremental Changes. Making Changes Transactional. What Initiates Deployment? Script Integration. Rollback. Designing a Deployment Infrastructure. Enterprise Deployment Architecture. Summary. Practitioner's Checklist. 8. Multiple Web Initiatives. Executive Summary. Introduction. Overview. Concepts. Logically Independent Web Site. Task Overlap. Basic Branch Patterns. Single-Branch Pattern. Agency Pattern. Short-Term/Long-Term Branch Pattern. Dependent Branch Pattern. Identifying Branch Patterns. Example--Using Branches in a Dot-Com Company. Dependent Web Sites. Summary. Practitioner's Checklist. III. DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION. 9. Using Web Content Management for Globalization. Executive Summary. Introduction. A Globalization Initiative. The Easy Path Leads to Trouble. Design a Solid Platform for International Development. Branch Structure. Work Area Structure. Special Situations. Workflow Design. Template System Design. Deployment Design. Summary. 10. Summary and Conclusions. Executive Summary. Introduction. Revisiting the Rules. It's the Assets, Stupid! Experiment. Iterate. Grow. Respond to Customers Quickly and Frequently, or Lose Them! Enable the Masses! Make It Manageable and Reproducible. Future Trends. Content Becomes More Structured. Content Contributors and Their Tools Become More Specialized. Blurring the Distinction between Web Operations and the Rest of Business. More Distributed and Flow-based Handling of Assets, Tasks, and Jobs. More Emphasis on Content Tagging to Enable Storage, Retrieval, Search, Reuse, and Routing. Emphasize 24 x 7 Management Infrastructure. Conclusion. IV. APPENDICES. Appendix A: A Smart File System. Appendix B: A Workflow Design for Formal Hand Off Between Groups. Executive Summary. Introduction. Requirements. QA Hand-off Workflow. Summary. Appendix C: A Workflow Design for Predetermined Time Schedules. Executive Summary. Problem Scenario. Background. Time-Slot Technique. Time-Slot Techniques-Detailed Example. Discussion. Variations on the Time-Slot Technique. Appendix D: Basic Process Steps of a Best-Practice Content Management Process. Executive Summary. Example: Web Site. A Best-Practice Development Process. Example: Rebranding Initiative. Summary. Resources. Index. 0201657821T09242001

Most organizations have implemented a Web site. Many are now experiencing problems associated with maintaining the content of their Web site. The Web manager often becomes a bottleneck for new content, old content fails to be removed, and new content can be published without approval. Although Web content management (WCM) methods and technologies are emerging, the market is crowded with suppliers and there is confusion concerning what WCM is, where it came from, and what facilities and services it should incorporate. We describe the antecedents of WCM (document management, customer relationship management, software configuration management) and develop a WCM framework. The WCM framework is applied to a case study of an intranet implementation in order to test the framework and to highlight WCM problems in the case study.

As widely recognized in the literature, information technology (IT) investments have several special characteristics that make assessing their costs and benefits complicated. Here, we address the problem of evaluating a web content management system for both internal and external use. The investment is presently undergoing an evaluation process in a multinational company. We aim at making explicit the desired benefits and expected risks of the system investment. An evaluation hierarchy at general level is constructed After this, a more detailed hierarchy is constructed to take into account the contextual issues. To catch the contextual issues key company representatives were interviewed. The investment alternatives are compared applying the principles of the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). Due to the subjective and uncertain characteristics of the strategic IT investments a wide range of sensitivity analyses is performed.

Typically, users of Web content management systems lack expert knowledge of the technology itself, let alone the security issues therein. Complicating the matter, WCMS vulnerabilities are attractive targets for potential attackers. A security analysis of two popular, open-source WCMSs exposed significant security holes, despite the obvious efforts of their developer communities. These vulnerabilities leave the applications and their nonexpert users open to exploitation.

Most organisations have implemented a Web site. Many are now experiencing problems associated with maintaining the content of that Web site. We discuss what has led to Web content management (WCM), what is driving it, and propose a WCM framework to help organisations to understand how to manage and control their Web sites better. Research involving the use of this framework is at an early stage, and any feedback is welcome.

Organizations increasingly utilize Web Con- tent Management Systems (WCMS) to improve devel- opment speed, online flexibility and cost effectiveness for web applications. However, organizations lack the organizational processes and structure to effectively maintain WCMS. We propose a WCMS Process Frame- work for the operation and maintenance phase of Web Engineering. In this paper we elaborate on the con- struction of the framework. It encompasses the de- scription of a generic IT Management framework and the inclusion of Web Content Management processes into a strategic, tactical, and operational level. The framework is validated through an expert validation consisting of three industry experts and a case study at a large Dutch telecommunications services provider. The case study substantiates our vision that the WCMS Process Framework contains a set of process descrip- tions that effectively supports the operations and main- tenance of web applications.

Introduction The processes behind corporate efforts to create, manage, publish, and archive Web information has also evolved using Web Content Management Systems (WCMS). WCMS allow teams to maintain Web content in a dynamic fashion through a user friendly interface and a modular application approach. This dynamic "on-the-fly" content creation provides Web site authors several advantages including access to information stored in databases, ability to personalize Web pages according to individual user preferences, and the opportunity to deliver a much more interactive user experience than static Web pages alone.11 However, there are distinct disadvantages as well. Dynamically generating Web content can significantly impact Web server performance, reduce the scalability of the Web site and create security vulnerabilities or denial of service.11 Organizations are adopting information technology without understanding such security concerns.1 Moreover, as Mostefaoui7 points out, even though many attempts have been made to understand the security architecture, a generic security framework is needed. Recent research amplifies the concerns and benefits of security in open source systems.2 However, there is a need for organizations to understand how to evaluate these open source systems and this paper highlights how an evaluation technique in terms of security may be used in an organization to assess a short list of possible WMCS systems. This article focuses on security issues in WCMS and the objective is to understand the security issues as well as to provide a generic security framework. The contributions of this paper are to: 1. Integrate the goals of security with eight dimensions of WCMS, 2. Specify how to secure the eight dimensions of WCMS, 3. Formulate a framework of security using this integrated view of security goals and security dimensions, and 4. Address the security of the Web architecture at WCMS software application level using the framework and evaluate security features in popular WCMS used in the industry.

Research on ‘digital’ journalism has focused largely on online news, with comparatively less interest in the longer-term implications of software and computational technologies. Drawing upon a 6-year study of the Toronto Star, this article provides an account of TOPS, an in-house web content management system which served as the backbone of thestar.com for 6 years. For some, TOPS was a successful software innovation, while for others, a strategic digital ‘property’. But for most journalists, it was slow, deficient in functionality, aesthetically unappealing and cumbersome. Although several organizational factors can explain TOPS’ obstinacy, I argue for particular attention to the complex ontology of software. Based on an outline of this ontology, I suggest software be taken seriously as an object of journalism, which implies acknowledging its partial autonomy from human use or authorization, accounting for its ability to mutate indefinitely and analysing its capacity to encourage forms of ‘computational thinking’.

43 As the World Wide Web has matured, so have people’s expectations of their Web experiences. After becoming familiar with what they can find and how to find it, Web visitors have begun to expect more and timelier information from the Web sites they visit. Web managers, in turn, have had to find new ways of meeting these expectations. For campus Web managers, the challenge is to meet these expectations in a largely decentralized environment and with a limited budget. Nearly a decade ago, Gonzaga University realized it needed to establish a Web presence. Although Gonzaga still viewed print as its primary means of communicating with students, parents, and alumni, the expectation had arisen that anyone with an interest should be able to type an institution’s name and “.edu” into a Web browser and instantly learn more about that institution. Our Web manager had the responsibility to ensure that information on the site was accurate, but no great emphasis was placed on the information being timely. Most print publications about the university were assumed to have a lifespan of a year or more, and information on our Web site was assumed to age in the same way. Web Content Management Systems in Higher Education