pTools –Simple solutions to Complex problems - Simplexity

I am reading Gerry McGovern’s latest email about ‘good complexity’ and ‘bad complexity’ - www.gerrymcgovern.com - It makes ‘good sense’ and it reminds me of the little problem at the heart of content management. Making the complex simple.

If you don't think content management is complex try this. You're website has become central to business so you put in a new CMS to drive results online. Instead of just having one webmaster and your web designer update content you can now let marketing and customer service staff manage content directly to the site. Let's say there are just five people managing content. To start they don't do much, but pretty soon they're each publishing or editing two or three items a day on average. At the beginning they just publish straight to the page, but since that awkward issue with the 'press release'..you now have a simple three stage workflow - author, editor, publisher. Simple, standard stuff really. Well that's about 15,000 events in a working year. If you made that ten people and an average of ten items handled per day that's 100,000 events per year. If you consider that each event might involve some text, some images, some links, and a file attachment or two you're talking about 500,000 data events in  a year. And to just scale it up a little, if you're talking corporate intranet/internet systems with a mere 100 active CMS users you'll be hitting 10,000,000 data events a year at a stroll.

So just to make it interesting let's say you're auditors want to know who changed the status of the service sign-up policy online last June and changed it back again in July. Because it looks like sales were down 20% that month and it might just be because the service sign-up agreement had the wrong pricing details for a month and nobody seems to have known about it. And the CEO reckons you should be able to put your finger on that exact set of events – the who, what, when, how and why, to the minute and to the login - by 3pm today. Getting complex enough?

Well don't worry. pTools takes all of this back-end complexity and simplifies it. We call it Simplexity - something we've learned from our GUI Guru's. In the end there's just the a page, that age old metaphor that we still use to understand how to deliver content and how to consume content. Pages and pages and more beautiful simple, informative, useful, pages. The engine is a complex powerful piece of technology, the driver experience is simple and re-assuring. That's Simplexity.