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Will Day stay committed to web standards under Adobe’s ownership?

Wednesday, July 28th, 2010

I JUST heard about Adobe’s acquisition of Day Software and have to admit my first reaction was total disappointment. I always admired Day’s commitment to architecture and standards. Day is one of the few upper upper tier web content management companies to stay focused on the web — not just as a place to dump files but as medium for information exchange and creativity. David Nuescheler and Roy Fielding seemed to have a vision for how systems could openly interoperate through lightweight architectures like REST and standards like the JCR. Day has also been a great contributor to the Java community by pushing lighter weight technologies like OSGi and server-side JavaScript to keep Java relevant in a trend toward dynamically typed, scripting languages like PHP, Python, and Ruby. Day promoted this vision through the products they sold and also by contributing to open source projects.

I feel the complete opposite about Adobe. Adobe seems more interested in conquering the web than improving it. While Adobe has contributed several technologies that lowered barriers to entry, I think the overall net impact has been negative. Yes we have more content on the web thanks to Adobe, but much of that content is locked in Adobe’s PDF and Flash formats where it is less accessible (and maintainable) than plain old DHTML. Adobe customers tend to overuse Adobe technologies like PDF for online forms when HTML would have done quite well. Flash-based navigation is also a problem; I can’t tell you how many restaurant websites I have been where you can’t link to a specific page because the whole site is one Flash movie. As a web consumer, how many hours have I waited for Acrobat reader to install/upgrade plugins (which further degrade performance) before allowing me to read PDFs that I clicked on? Expert tip: disable the PDFViewer plugin for Safari. Don’t even get me started on DreadWeaver.

As you can see, my frustration with Adobe has been building for quite some time. It felt good to let that out. I haven’t talked to David or Roy about Adobe so I don’t know their opinion of Adobe before or after the merger talks started. I hope that Adobe permits them (even better, supports them) to continue their good work in web-based architectures. More likely Adobe is buying Day for its CRX repository and CQ5’s workflow and digital asset management (DAM) functionality to connect creative teams using Adobe Creative Suite (Why couldn’t they have just bought vjoon or WoodWing?) If this is the case, I hope Adobe will invest more in web publishing than they did JRun.

Posted in commentary, day | 2 Comments »

Keeping your content DRY

Thursday, July 22nd, 2010

After over 10 years of working in content management, I have come to realize that there is only one way to learn the value of managing structured information: the hard way — and that way is only 50% effective. People can intellectually accept concepts like content re-use and content/layout separation, but in the heat of the moment, few can resist the siren song of a word processor and the clipboard. Pasting in a bunch of text into a rich text area (and then re-formatting it) provides so much more instant gratification than data entry into the fields of a structured content form. It is only after a number of painful global content changes that people come to realize that the value of all that painstaking WYSIWYG work has a very short shelf life. It is not until a migration onto another platform that one becomes aware of all that semi-redundant content. But that realization only happens around half the time. The other half of the time the site’s unmanageability is blamed on the CMS. A clear sign that the content manager didn’t make the connection is when there is a requirement that the new CMS have a global search and replace feature.

As someone who has seen many companies succeed and fail (and really fail) with content management, it is easy for me to notice these patterns. But that doesn’t mean that I can make anyone short-circuit his/her learning process. If I were able to forcefully impose a highly structured content model on a client, all they would notice was the complexity of the content entry forms. They would take for granted the downstream benefits. The best you can do is gently guide and hope that guidance will lead to recognition when the site becomes unmanageable. I don’t get too worked up about it. If I get frustrated, I can just talk to my friends in the DITA/XML advocate community. Their pain in working with technical documentation teams is way worse.

In the software development world, we have the concept of DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself). The idea is “every piece of knowledge must have a single, unambiguous, authoritative representation within a system.” I call the opposite of DRY WET (Write Everything Thrice) or DAMP (Developer Accepts Maintenance Problems. Hat tip to Brian Kelly). This means copying and pasting code (rather than referencing it) or writing the same data over and over again. Part of the development process is recognizing patterns and coming up with ways to reduce redundancy. Good developers are constantly thinking about maintaining the code they write because they will inevitably need to add a feature of fix a bug. And the feedback cycle is really short for developers. You write a bit of code, test it, fix it, write some more code, test that and the first code you wrote, fix it…. If you did anything stupid, the time you have to wait before suffering for it is usually short. I am not saying that all developers practice DRY, but they have a better track record than content contributors.

Most content contributors don’t have that short feedback loop. Too often, content is considered a “set it and forget it” initiative. You publish and move on. But I am seeing two positive trends in the content management industry that may shorten the feedback loop. First, there has been some great thought leadership around solving the “post launch paradigm”. Second, many CMS vendors are building in analytics and multivariate testing functionality that encourages the content manager to constantly tweak a website to maximum performance. My hope is that awareness of this functionality will compel buyers to think of their content in a more dynamic way — something that evolves and improves like software. Then maybe we will hear content managers talking about their websites being DRY, WET, or DAMP.

Posted in commentary, management, usability | 4 Comments »

The Captcha and Mouse Game

Monday, April 26th, 2010

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 should worry. However, if you are like me and use captcha only to level the playing field (by taking robots out of the equation), this is not a problem. In fact, I am happy that it raises the cost of link spamming and safe jobs are going to people that need them.

If you are manual link spammer, don’t accept less than a penny a comment. You deserve it!

Posted in commentary | No Comments »

Supporting Internet Explorer 6

Wednesday, April 14th, 2010

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 — not as charged as back when people were arguing for only supporting Internet Explorer, but close.

IE6 had a really long run. It was Microsoft’s browser offering for 5 years (late 2001 through late 2006). Up to that point, Microsoft was releasing a major version of IE every year. Now it looks like they are settling into a pace of every other year. That means that IE 6 was installed on a lot of computers. In particular, a lot of computers that were bought when internet usage was starting to get really ubiquitous. In many businesses and households, these computers were bought as an internet appliance with a really long expected lifespan — like a refrigerator or a telephone. Companies are hanging onto their old IE6 computers. Vista’s flop means that Windows XP is still the corporate standard and IE6 comes with XP. Unless you have a technical or information-intensive job or are working at a new company, chances are you are on a highly locked down, old Windows XP computer that your employer begrudgingly bought to give you access to email and the intranet. Your employer doesn’t want to upgrade your machine unless absolutely necessary. That usage pattern has caused IE6 to linger longer than other browsers. See how IE8 seems to eat up more of IE7’s market share than IE6’s?

Not only do the numbers of IE6 user continue to be significant, the types of users seem to be desirable as well: internet n00bs that click on ads and buy what they see (with the money that was not taken by Nigerian 419 scams).

Technical people have little empathy for these types of users. The first thing we do when we boot up a relative’s computer for home tech support is stop the malware/adware processes, install Firefox, and hide the IE icon. As developers, we know that a requirement for IE6 support translates into maintaining two code bases: one that uses all the goodness of the latest HTML and CSS standards and fast Javascript engines; and another that is a bundle of hacks to compensate for IE6’s quirks. Many web development firms I know are starting to charge an additional 20% – 30% to include IE6 support. They are not price gauging. This is probably less than the actual cost. The customer will probably invest an even larger percentage of additional resources to maintain the application.

For this reason, an increasingly larger number of websites are discontinuing support for IE6. They have done the calculations and have decided that the convenience for the IE6 hold-outs is not worth additional cost and drag on innovation. I don’t mean to sound like a jerk, but big web properties (like Google, Microsoft, and Content Here) dropping IE6 is a good thing for everyone (almost):

Visitors will have a greater incentive to upgrade. If they can’t upgrade on their own, they can make the case to their employers that running a 9 year old browser is not acceptable.
The more modern technology will increase overall security
Web sites and applications can be developed more cheaply and with higher quality.
The spending to upgrade outdated equipment will be good for the economy. Companies and households don’t have to buy $2,000 laptops, they can probably get away with cheap NetBooks.

This site never supported IE6. If you are stuck on that browser, I am sorry for the inconvenience that I have caused. But, I figure you are used to browsing broken websites by now

Posted in commentary, development, microsoft, standards, usability | No Comments »

Pragmatic Thinking and Learning vs. Knowledge Management

Friday, April 2nd, 2010

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 realization around ten years ago when I was working on a project for a department of the federal government. The premise of the project was to “capture the knowledge” from a generation of experienced staff that were on the cusp of retirement. This department was structured so that knowledge was concentrated in minority of senior employees. Underneath them there was a thin layer of mid-level staff; then a large group of juniors. The strategy was to video pre-retirees reminiscing about their experiences and the department could somehow do something with that “knowledge.” The idea was dead on arrival and the prime contractor (that originally pitched it) knew it. I remember suggesting an alternative strategy of setting up an apprentice program where people could learn by doing rather than watching TV; but I was laughed out of the room. They had no interest in “capturing knowledge.” Their primary business was hiring retirees and staffing them as consultants at the department. Failure was more profitable than success.

Ever since that experience, I have been keenly interested in the process of learning. As a technologist and a consultant, I am always learning so I have developed tactics that work for me. What surprised me in reading Pragmatic Thinking & Learning is that there is actual scientific theory that supports many of the tactics that I employ. What I like most about the book is that it talks about thinking and learning as a personal process that you have to do yourself. The most a teacher or a computer can do for you is provide information — data. To turn that information into knowledge, you have to internalize it into something that is meaningful to you. You need to put the information into context with other things you know.

Most corporate professional development programs ignore this truth about learning. They practice what the book calls “sheep-dip” training programs where training classes “dip” employees in information that quickly wears off. The only way that you learn from these classes is to apply what you heard right away. The learning happens after the class. This is why I like the idea of “drop-in labs” so much. I think the industry is starting to accept this “learn by doing” philosophy. Knowledge management experts are talking less about repositories and more about communities and workspaces. Emphasis seems to be shifting from the assets to the learning process.

On a personal level, being more conscious of these ideas is helping me be more deliberate about how I learn. The book advises setting SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, and relevant) objectives and using techniques like SQ3R (Survey, Question, Read, Recite (summarize), Review). But most importantly, learning has to be fun because we learn best through play. Yet another reason to work in a field that you love.

Pragmatic Thinking & Learning lives up to the high standards set by the The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master and other books on the Pragmatic Bookshelf. It will be required reading for anyone that I hire.

Posted in commentary, intranet | 3 Comments »

How Many Microblogging Services Does the World Really Need?

Wednesday, March 24th, 2010

After hearing all this news about status.net, I took a few moments to connect my Identi.ca account with my Twitter account. I am not at all sure what good that did but I figured it couldn’t hurt. While I was there, I got to thinking what is so special about a microblog? And I came to the conclusion — nothing. You can think of a microblog as a title-only blog (entries with no bodies). What is new there? Subscriptions have already been handled quite well by RSS. What makes Twitter (and Facebook) so important is not the ability to post 140 character messages. It’s not even really the API or mobile integration. What makes Twitter/Facebook important is that they are used by so many of the people that you want to reach. There are plenty of failed status-oriented services that have had the technology but, either through bad timing or other missteps, failed to build an audience.

I wonder how attempts at internal microblogs are working out. I haven’t heard any success stories and I doubt if any survive past the initial novelty phase. If there are urges to microblog within the enterprise, employees could satisfy them with the internal blogging infrastructure that has been idle in most organizations. If there is any internal application for the microblog it is aggregating what employees are tweeting out on Twitter. But, depending on the staff, I don’t know how interesting that would be either.

I think that the microblog is going to fail as a category of software. There just isn’t a big enough market of buyers that can build a sustainable microblogging community. I can’t think of existing sites with large audiences investing to buy or build a microblogging capability. If you were CNN, would you rather have a reader tweet a story link on Twitter (where it could be re-tweeted by millions of users) or on your CNN own microblog community? The only purpose I see for status.net is just in case Twitter kills itself (by running out of money or ruining the service). I seem to remember a lot of people threatening to defect to Identi.ca and FriendFeed when Twitter was going through its problems. But that didn’t happen. How long can the status.net’s and Identi.ca’s of the world sustain the energy and motivation to be an understudy behind a healthy actor?

I know the argument that suggests that distributed communication services will eventually win like how the open, distributed web was destined to eventually beat out then popular online services like AOL, Compuserve, and Prodigy. But I don’t think this is the same. If I am missing the point here, please enlighten me. I would love to see competition in this sector if it makes sense. I just don’t see it.

Posted in Web2.0, commentary | 6 Comments »

Text Killed the Multi-Media Star

Wednesday, March 10th, 2010

Recently it occurred to me that video and (to some extent audio) has become a less important requirement for most of my web content management clients these days. If I were to extrapolate the interest trend I was seeing back in 2004, I would expect to see the web resemble billions of tiny television stations. But that hasn’t happened. While video and audio remain important for companies in the business of developing and/or distributing multi-media content (primarily for entertainment), multi-media has not achieved ubiquity as a medium for communication. Instead, the focus is still heavily weighted towards text and images. There are some obvious explanations for this trend. Services like YouTube, Vimeo, and BrightCove are taking care of video hosting so my clients don’t have to worry about it. Also, companies have realized that, other than the large file sizes, video is just not so special that deserves so much special concern and attention.

But I think that there are larger forces at work. I experience issues with video both as a content consumer and a content management professional. As a content consumer, I don’t like how video takes control over my experience of the information. Unlike text, you can’t scan video for the little bit information that you want. You have to sit back and wait for the video to get to the point. This is great for entertainment (suspense!) but less so for information exchange. Take, for example, this video (below) where the spokesman just spurts out technical information about a computer. It would be so much better just to have a spec sheet so you could scan right to the part of the specification you want. For a while it seemed like all companies were looking to make their websites more “dynamic” by leveraging multi-media. Customers may have reacted positively at first to the novelty of seeing moving pictures but I think this has played out.

As a content management professional, my issue with video is that it breaks a key principle of content management: the separation between content and format. In video and audio, the information is inseparable from the format. Yes, you can transcode into different encodings and file formats, but reorganizing and editing audio and video is difficult to automate. As a result, video and audio content gets stale and out of date because it is too expensive to change. If you want to change the information, you need to re-produce the whole thing.

There are some things that belong in audio and video, like a recording of some performance or something that you need motion to understand. But in most cases, the production and maintenance effort that multi-media requires introduces an unnecessary barrier between the information source and consumer. This obstacle stands out even more in the social web that tries to blur the line between author and audience. In the social web, video is most successful when it is short, entertaining, and performance-oriented. It is less effective for basic information exchange. The best uses of video I have seen for information exchange is on some news sites where visitors are invited to upload short videos of their eye-witness account. In these cases, the video needs to be authentic (no need to edit!) and shows something that cannot be captured in text and still images. But information about that event is more accessible in plain text.

I am sure that there are people in the video field that have different experiences with the medium. If you have any insights, please leave a comment or send me an email.

Posted in commentary | 1 Comment »

Why CMS Vendor Acquisitions are Bad for Customers

Thursday, February 25th, 2010

It just occurred to me that my recent quotes on Fierce Content Management make me sound like the Statler and Waldorf of the content management industry. I really don’t mean to sound so negative but, from where I sit, software company acquisitions are nearly always bad news. My clients are software customers and my job is to help them be better software customers by making better technology decisions. Mainstream software analysts, who are mainly speaking to the vendors, spin acquisitions in terms of what it means to competitors. They talk about how the acquisition changes the landscape and competitive dynamics. Mainstream analysts get pretty excited by mergers and acquisitions. It means that there is movement that needs to be understood and explained. It means that they get to re-answer the question that their software vendor and investor customers always ask “who is the best company in the market and why.”

The software customer has a different question: “which one of these products is the best for me right now and in the foreseeable future.” Market dominance plays a role but customers should be more concerned about their requirements and that the vendor will stick around and continue to focus on what matters to the customer. Customers should care less about who acquired who (today and yesterday) and about more who is at risk of getting acquired tomorrow. Acquisition adds uncertainty and risk that a customer would do best to avoid.

The dirty little secret about software company acquisitions is that, in most cases, they have nothing to do with technology. When one software company buys another, it is usually buying customers. Implicit in the transaction is the understanding that the customers are worth something and the acquiring company can more effectively make a profit from them.
An acquired CMS customer is valuable because switching costs are really high. To switch to another product, a customer would need to rebuild its web site, migrate its content, and retrain its people. Unless the product is totally doomed, the customer will probably stick around and pay support and maintenance for a for a while. The acquiring company can increase profitability by cutting down on product development, support, and sales. Most of these cut-backs directly affect the customer. The vision for the product will get cloudy. Enhancements will come out slower. Technical support and professional services will be less knowledgeable. Market-share will gradually decline. In some cases, the product will be totally retired in favor of an alternative offering by the same company. If there is an option of terminating support and maintenance, it is probably a good idea to exercise that option because the value of the service is likely to decline steadily.

The sad thing is that this dynamic is practically built into the traditional software company business model. A typical software company burns through investments to first build a product and then build a customer base. At a certain point, the growth trajectory will flatten (or decline) and investors will want to move their money into another growth opportunity. Some companies will be satisfied by having achieved a sustainable business. Others will cash out by being acquired. Others will look to grow by acquiring steady (but declining) revenue streams. The scariest companies to deal with are the acquiring companies — what I call “portfolio companies” that buy up products for their customers and then decide what to do with the technology. When you are a customer of one of these companies the future of the software you bought is vulnerable to the shifting attention of the vendor. If the vendor decides to keep the product around, it means they can successfully drain revenue from you. If the vendor gives you a “migration plan,” it means that they have another product that is in an earlier stage of the same destiny. Neither case is good.

Posted in business, commentary | 8 Comments »

The biggest thing since wood pulp

Thursday, January 7th, 2010

One of my favorite podcasts, Planet Money, recently did a segment on bias in journalism. Apparently, back in the 1870’s, most newspapers were blatantly affiliated with a political party. In fact, their bias was openly stated in their mission statement and it was part of the newspaper industry business model. In return for political support, a newspaper publisher would get lucrative contracts for printing government documents and cushy government posts like postmaster. You historians will remember that Ben Franklin, himself a publisher, was the first postmaster general. The newspaper publishers didn’t do this because they were greedy or unscrupulous; it was hard to make a living publishing a paper any other way. The cost of printing and distributing a paper was more than the audience could afford. Given the options of the low return of serving an audience that can’t afford your product or the high return of serving a political party, the choice was easy.

But then a big technology disruption happened that drastically cut the cost of publishing a newspaper and all of the sudden made the business more profitable. It wasn’t the Internet, it was cheap paper made from wood pulp. Up until that point, the news was printed on rag paper like what our dollars bills are made of. With cheaper paper, a publisher could lower the price and get a higher volume of sales. You could sell even more papers if you had higher quality news. More newspapers entered the market but there were still barriers to entry to preserve profits. Even though the variable cost of the papers was low, the up front fixed costs of the presses and distribution channels kept competition manageable.

Like wood pulp, the Internet also disrupted the news business but in a different ways. While the Internet has reduced the cost of distributing the news (especially over large geographic areas), it has also driven the revenues down. Most importantly, the classifieds business has been eaten up by sites like Craigslist. Advertisers have other options to reach a more targeted audience than general news can. And, of course, there are no barriers to entry. Even an schmo like me can have a blog.

Will the decline of profitability push publishers back to bias? There are some concerning signs. Not so much with the big media brands (although you could definitely make the argument that all publications have their leanings), but there are plenty of examples in blogosphere (and Twitter) where bloggers are paid to promote a product or political agenda. The distinction between professional and amateur media is blurring. We tend to follow people (professionals and amateurs) who share our passion (usually on very narrow topics) and we unsubscribe when they lose our interest or confidence. But very few people are getting rich on having us as an audience — not until they sell out and exploit our trust. Then we will leave as quickly as we came because there is bound to be a fresh new voice that values our attention as unprofitable as it may be.

As an audience that wants to be informed, we need to do two things…. First, we need to figure out a way to compensate for the value that we enjoy. There have been some interesting ideas of establishing non-profits and public-media style structures. Second, we need to become very good critical thinkers. We need to be able to filter and verify the information that is bombarding us. We need to become our own editors if we can’t immediately trust anything in print. I am sure that is what people did back in the 1860’s did too.

Posted in commentary, newsmedia, publishers | 2 Comments »

WCM needs a new name. Or, perhaps, an old one.

Friday, December 18th, 2009

This post was originally written as a comment on Jon Mark’s excellent post Visions of Jon: WCM is for Losers but it got out of hand and I suspect that it is too long for a comment so I am re publishing it here.

Thanks for the great post Jon! I have to agree with you that the term Web Content Management System is misleading because of its diverse focus on multiple publishing channels. You probably remember that in the old days (~1996), the term “CMS” was first used to describe products like Vignette and what are now called ECM systems were just called Document Management Systems, Records Management Systems, etc. When the big DMS vendors started to covet the term “content,” the (then) smaller WCM vendors had to slide over a bit and qualify their category with a “W.” Then some of them started to ruin themselves by trying to expand into document, management, records management, etc. – but that’s another story.

But enough about the Ghosts of Christmas Past… I agree with the point that a WCMS has multiple aspects. I would name three: a management tier to edit semi-structured content, a repository to store the semi-structured content, and a rendering tier to render the content. Usually the repository is more tightly coupled to the management tier so it is often tucked into the management application. In fact, the three components are often bundled for convenience.

In my mind, what sets WCM apart from the other forms of CMS is the C. I still think of Content as having more structure (and less embedded formatting) than what you typically find in an ECM repository. In the ECM world, the structured information is called metadata and is not considered part of the asset (a MS Office file that jumbles together information and presentation). A WCM asset needs to be rendered (given a format) to be useful to a consumer. This is why a WCMS needs a good rendering system.

Most ECM assets can just be downloaded but the range of formats they can take is limited. You can get a different file format (like a PDF) or a different scaling or cropping of an image but the output looks essentially the same. ECM has tricks to add structured information like metadata and embedded tags but that is going against the grain. WCM, which is inherently structured, knows what each of the different elements of an asset mean. I like to say that ECM is documents pretending to be content and WCM is content pretending to be documents. That is, ECM starts with a document and tries to pull information out of it while a WCM starts with structured information and renders it into a .html, .pdf, .xml, or any other kind of document.

So, at the end of it all, I would say that WCM should be renamed back to CM and ECM should be renamed to EDM: Enterprise Document Management.

Posted in commentary, ecm | 6 Comments »