Jeff Cram: Your website is not a project

June 9th, 2010 by Seth Gottlieb

Jeff Cram started blog series called post launch paradigm with a great post called “Your website is not a project.” The article lists all the ways companies fail when they think of a website as a project to be completed.

If a website is not a project, what is it? Jeff calls it an “ongoing process.” I call it a “product.” Website product management is becoming an increasingly important service offering for Content Here and it is a natural extension of the selection work that I have been doing over the first three years of the company. During a selection engagement I create a road map of functionality to be implemented over time and set expectations for user adoption and incremental improvement. Recently selection clients have been engaging Content Here after implementation to help them progress along that road map. This feels great on a number of levels: these clients realize that their websites are not projects, they have bought in to the concept of continuous improvement, and I get to see the clients working with the products that they have selected. I even get to go through code once in a while!

Tips for Web Product Management

May 11th, 2010 by Seth Gottlieb

I am currently providing web product management services for two clients. One client is a start-up launching a new web-based product. The other is a 100 year old newspaper. While at face value these two clients couldn’t appear to be more different, they are actually quite similar. Both are trying to [...]

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Another clue about Oracle’s attitude toward Web Content Management

May 4th, 2010 by Seth Gottlieb

By now most industry analysts have grown skeptical of Oracle’s commitment to web content management (WCM). Those analysts that are still in denial are either too focused on the document management side of enterprise content management (ECM) to even care or they are on Oracle’s payroll. The writing has been on the wall [...]

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Jeff Potts strikes out on his own with Metaversant

April 30th, 2010 by Seth Gottlieb

My friend and former Optaros colleague Jeff Potts recently announced that he has left Optaros to form a new company called Metaversant. Jeff was Optaros’ superstar Alfresco guy. He put Optaros on the Alfresco map and contributed to the Alfresco community by writing a great book (The Alfresco Developer Guide), maintaining useful information [...]

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The Captcha and Mouse Game

April 26th, 2010 by Seth Gottlieb

There has been a lot of Twitter chatter about this New York Times article on offshore captcha circumvention. The article describes how link spammers are hiring cheap offshore labor to manually solve captchas and dump comment spam on websites. If you use captcha as the only way to prevent comment spam, you [...]

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World Plone Day 2010

April 26th, 2010 by Seth Gottlieb

Mark your calendars, World Plone Day is on April 28th. World Plone Day is a free, annual, international event designed to introduce the Plone content management system to people outside of the Plone community. This year it is being held in 36 locations in 29 countries. The agenda usually contains a balance [...]

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Supporting Internet Explorer 6

April 14th, 2010 by Seth Gottlieb

Over the past few days, I have been involved in a number of conversations about supporting Internet Explorer 6. Arguing about when to drop support for outdated browsers is a sport that is as old as the web itself. There is nothing really new here but the IE6 support debate feels particularly emotional [...]

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Django Action Item Follow Up

April 5th, 2010 by Seth Gottlieb

While moderating a comment on my “10 Django Master Class action items” post, I was inspired to evaluate how I am doing on these action items and whether they are helping. Below is a brief summary of my progress; but first a little background. Recently, I had the rare opportunity to rebuild (from [...]

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Pragmatic Thinking and Learning vs. Knowledge Management

April 2nd, 2010 by Seth Gottlieb

While reading Andy Hunt’s excellent book Pragmatic Thinking & Learning: Refactor Your Wetware I couldn’t help but return to a conclusion that I reached long ago: “knowledge management,” as an enterprise practice and class of software, is a false promise. Furthermore, traditional corporate training programs are doomed to failure.

I was first struck by this [...]

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Hippo’s New Version Compare Functionality

March 29th, 2010 by Seth Gottlieb

Arjé Cahn recently screencasted a demonstration of the new version compare functionality that will be released in Hippo CMS version 7.4 (due June 2010). While (as Arjé concedes) versioning and version compare are nothing new, the Hippo team has added a subtle twist that I think makes a vast improvement.

When an approver is reviewing [...]

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