pTools Blogs

06.07.10 - pTools - Content Transactions

I was asked again recently to discuss what we mean by content transactions. I made a comparison with real world meetings and events and how we handle them in terms of validation. For example how we confirm who attended a meeting and how people can validate who attended by their own presence.

The ability to validate real world events is so established as synonymous with the fact of the matter that it passes for just that in a court of law.  But even at meetings, just to be sure, just in case that evidence of our own eyes and ears and memories is somehow unreliable, well, just to be sure we take notes and record attendees. We validate what we know. Just in case someone repudiates it.

Well content transactions are much the same. You get an alert to respond to an event related to a piece of content within the CMS. It could be to confirm a product price, or a delivery date, or an aspect of a claim or case you handling. You go ahead and login and do what’s needed.

But later, someone asks you did you do that particular task and you say yes and they ask how can they know, in fact how can you know? It's not enough to show that the task is done, to show the price update or the claim amendment. You have to record accurately and consistently who did it, and importantly show who didn't and why they couldn’t. You have to stamp the transaction across every aspect of the process and record that in a manner that supports the validation, non-repudiation, and fulfilment of the task event. You have to record what it is you are doing as well as doing it, like the minutes of a meeting and the attendee list.

pTools does just that for every content management task and every content transaction.

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18.05.10 - pTools - Intranet Simple 

We've done a lot of work and a lot of research on Intranets. There are different opinions on what works and what doesn’t.

At one end of the spectrum there's the intranet that is a direct descendent of the pre-existing network with all the same headaches and roadblocks on getting to what you need quickly and easily. At the other end of the spectrum there's the intranet that's a direct descendent of the web with lots of stuff on, the weather and the customer charter but still nothing on what actually happens in the business.

I've even seen companies with two intranets, son of network and son of web happily moving along in opposite directions with a big piece in the middle which, no misandry intended, might be called daughter of common sense!

What we know from experience is that intranets work when they are simple, when they deliver what's expected by staff, and when the process of further development is consistent. Anything else is a bonus and unless it’s simple, self evident, and consistent it won't help the business.

By simple we mean for example: the search works; the policy/product docs are all there and up to date; the latest statements from the CEO to the press are there first; the time and task tools don't require additional logins; and the expert information systems are seamlessly linked in.

By what's expected we mean: the menu structure reflects the real day-to-day activity and not the mythical org chart; what resources there are, are maintained and up to date and single source so there's nothing there that's in effect worse than useless; everyone in the organisation has access to what affects them and a profile they can maintain; time and task tools are up-front and visible: and relevant forms exist, really.

By consistent development we mean: slower more iterative change; application features that really make a difference; and a commitment to usability that builds and builds confidence in the system.

However all too often the intranet becomes a test bed for the 57 feature applications that come out of the box on the CMS. That would be 57 (CMS) channels then, and nothing on...

Take it away Bruce; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5scpDev1qps

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30.04.10 - Accessibility, as easy as 1...

Now as soon as I publish this we’re bound to get a stinker from someone who’s found a broken link or a missing alt tag.

Well maybe not, because pTools more or less forces people to put things like Alt tags in before an image is published and any link in a links section is automatically removed if the target content is removed. The more we deliver on accessibility the easier it is to guarantee the output stays accessible even if you try to break it!

The pTools Editor for example, is as far as we know the only editor out there that doesn’t require a pre-cleansing or post-cleansing process. There’s no pasting content into notepad to remove offending tags.

There’s no post publishing check because it just isn’t needed. Instead the pTools Editor enforces the target accessibility standard full stop, one –click, as easy as 1...

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30.03.10 - pTools - mega-micro sites and mega-micro content

I am a big fan of the one page website. Just look at LinkedIn?

It's a good exercise to ask yourself, if there was just one page what would we put on it. Name, address, contact numbers? Map? Product or service description, a download or two? A catch-all feedback form and a reference from your favourite customer? A link or two to your LinkedIn or Facebook sites? An email address. That should do it. And that's just half a page. This I take it is a micro site?

Unless that is, it gets 10 million visitors per month in which case I suppose it's a micro-mega site. Then there's the corporate monster site with a 1000 menu items, a library of downloads and a history of the firm that the National Museum would be proud of. But what if it gets just 10 real visitors a month. Then I suppose it's a mega-micro site. Or should that be the other way around? But in the end it isn't about the size of the site it's about the importance of the content.

Think of that simple home page with not much more than the product price or the interest rate offer, not much more than a few words and numbers. If you get it wrong, it's lost orders, lost revenues and lost customers. Customers who've gone to your competitors. That I suppose is a mega-micro-mess.

Whatever the size of the site it should be judged by the importance of the content and the value of the content and the cost of getting it right or wrong. Mega content not just mega site and micro content not just micro site. But content.

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15.03.10 - pTools –Content Managed, Content Shared, Content Consumed

Once upon a time organisations had no content online. Then one day the browser (remember Netscape?) made it possible and useful to put content online. Websites were born and most organisations have been putting more and more content into their websites, extranets and intranet sites ever since.

Right now I estimate at least 95% of all organisation website content is consumed on that organisations own websites. Think of it, where else would you put information on your products, your services, your organisation history? Where else would you expect people to come to consume that content except on your own websites?

Well think again because over the next phase of development online that emphasis is going to turn right around so that perhaps as little as 5% of your own content will be consumed at your own websites and 95% of your content like it or not, control it or not, will be consumed on other websites to which your content has been syndicated.

Already your profiles are consumed on LinkedIn, announcements on Twitter, video on YouTube, PowerPoint’s on Slideshare. Right now these profiles are uploaded to the destination site and links drive traffic back to content on the organisations website. But soon that syndicated content will be created on your website and syndicated out to the destination site with no expectation of a return visit.

Content management systems like pTools will help you manage that content and push it to any destination website, maybe even your own organisation website but maybe not. Most of the content generated will never appear on your own website and will certainly never be consumed on your website. In fact your content management system may not even manage any website. It might just manage your content. Now there's a novel idea.

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24.02.10 - pTools - Social Networking is Content Networking

I'm all a twitter, blogged out and completely facebooked off. Sounds like a roller-coaster of a night out. Firstly I want to say that I have only a vague idea of where the Social Network phenomenon is going. I don't know how right it is or isn’t for business. I am not fully sure where exactly it fits with my personal life. My feeling is that it is not as game-changing as email or mobile messaging. But then I am already the wrong side of forty let alone fourteen. But I do know that every customer is interested in how Social Media can be harnessed to improve how they work the web and they want to know how pTools can help.

Well here's the news - pTools makes social networking for business easier. And here's why - because pTools has been built from the very beginning on the understanding that content is syndicated to multiple sites and locations across the world wide web. I won't go on about the pTools content element / content assembly model. But the key point is that because pTools handles content element by element and not just as web pages, it makes it easy to re-distribute that content, your content, to any site anytime anywhere in any format on any social network.

What's more because pTools content management functions are modular you can ramp-up features around a particular function to suit the demands of the business. One example of this is embedding Twitter messaging into standard pTools content attributes. This means customers can tweet from pTools and announce any new piece of content in synch with the tweet. The tweet is released down to the minute, managed in workflow, fully recorded and controlled in the system for the business. There's no need to login to Twitter and no need to do any pre-publishing or post-publishing content tweeking for tweeting.

The content is at the heart of the social networking experience and pTools automatically pushes that content out to potentially thousands of sites and draws visitors back in to the central site, all the time controlling and managing the process and enabling the otherwise uncontrollable syndication of your content across the social media network.

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15.02.10 - 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.

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10.02.10 - pTools – forms and more forms.

I sometimes think that the best piece of technology in our armoury is the pTools Forms application. Don't get me wrong, pTools CMS is a straight down the line enterprise piece of kit, but pTools Forms is so focussed on a single task as opposed to the myriad tasks of CMS that it's hard not to notice. Surprisingly (or not!) it's located in the extra features section of the main CMS which it seems to me is where we hide all the best features. Forms, in a nutshell allows you to build a form quickly and easily and to guarantee the result in terms of email alerts, database records, field integrity and online signatures, all-in-one. It handles simple or single-page forms and complex or multi-page forms, it allows the end user to print and save the results, combining all the relevant contract information in one document. You can add fields and control them right down to language and character specifics. You can append an attachment, a help-file, a map, or any element of content. Most importantly the actions and results are clearly defined in the database and the system dashboard so that you get solid metrics and compliance on the process. Although accessible HTML web pages are more necessary than ever, there's a trend toward document downloads and Forms as sites become more transaction oriented and bandwidth enables downloads with greater ease and reliability. pTools Forms handles just that. 

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29.01.10 - pTools – content assembly and content management

We talk about the pTools content element model and to be fair it’s not that easy to understand. But it’s at the heart of what pTools does. So I’ve decided we should call it what it is, which is really ‘content assembly’ and I hope that makes more sense.

So what’s content assembly then? Well it’s simple, pTools assembles content and published it to pages. But the trick is to assemble that content dynamically. By that I mean in a way that allows pieces of content – elements – to be assembled and re-assembled, used and re-used many many times. For different pages, without ever changing the original piece of content. That’s the trick. Publishing a piece of content to one page is fine, it’s what most CMS users want to do quickly and easily and pTools lets you focus on that task.

But what if you want to see that same piece of content on different pages? And you don’t want to spend your time accessing and editing those pages. That’s where dynamic content assembly comes in. Let’s say you have a new piece of content to put up about a new product or service your company is launching. Of course you want to publish it to the ‘new services’ section. But you might also want to see it in the ‘what’s new’ section and listed in the’ latest additions’ links on the home page and shown in a whole range of different service category pages. You may want to see it on the corporate website and a website dedicated to a specific market or to a specific customer or member of your site.

In the end this piece of content may be available in dozens of locations in different formats and the last thing you need to be doing is managing each of these different instances. Trying to do that is hugely time consuming and impossible to manage. You want one instance of that piece of content, you want to manage it effectively and you want the system to handle the multiple deliveries to different pages automatically.

You want the CMS to manage all that assembly. Content assembly and content management.

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14.01.10 - pTools - learning about Learning content management.

We've been asked many times over the years if we had a learning component in pTools and the short answer was always no. It was not because there we're lots of other good products out there that did LCM effectively. It was not because we didn’t see it as just an add-on component but more of a full featured product in its own right. It was not because we hadn't learned enough about Learning. But that's changed. Now it’s yes. Yes because pTools core feature set has developed to a level where full scale Learning can be delivered. Yes because we've learned what a Learning system should be -  from customers mostly, and yes because the convergence of WCM and LCM initiatives online has left many traditional Learning products behind. pTools LCM is now a fully fledged part of the system. It's based on the core pTools WCM engine but with some new new pieces of kit for managing the learning sessions and users, and for capturing assessment results. It's all just content really, but some content is more equal than others I think. A recent solution built on the pTools LCM is the new Pensions Board Trustee Training solution. We'll be releasing more about this particular project in the next few weeks. In the mean time, have a look and let us know what you think.

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03.12.09 - pTools delivering on information Transparency

When we did the Transparency initiative for the Irish Stock Exchange I don’t think we realised that this was a new segment in Enterprise Content Management but I’ve noticed lately it’s a hot topic with the big solution houses. Here in Ireland with the Banking crisis and the new National Asset Management Agency (NAMA) there seems to be a real gap in terms of what’s happening, what the rumour mill is saying, and what people can actually access in terms of information. As it happens we have linked up with a partner company Riverdocs to develop a solution that combines the Riverdocs document conversion service with pTools to deliver a process that helps transform a document (Pdf. Word etc.) into accessibility web pages in one go. There’s something quite amazing about dropping a Word document into a folder and then coming back an hour later to see it there, in the CMS, as web pages ready for workflow and publishing. I can see some users opting-out of WYSIWYG editing altogether if this is made available as standard. There’s a cost of course in terms of pages converted but it seems there’s no other way to get the quality needed for key documents that have to be made available online as accessible and searchable pages. In the lab we’ve been looking at next generation CMS functionality that requires no manual activity and this is a hint of what might be coming.

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26.11.09 - pTools security on the .Net framework.

SharePoint 2010 beta is available at last. My first thoughts are that this platform is really going to drive the mid-market ECM space which is where we’ve always  been destined to be. But I’m not going to say too much about that for now until we’ve confirmed our own road-map for the 2010 release. What I am going to talk about is .net security and impact on the SharePoint platform. Microsoft have put body and soul behind security since the early days of .net and the beginning of the century and given our own interest in Content Management solutions for critical enterprise initiatives most recently in areas like risk and compliance and Police Forces it’s a topic we invest a great deal in.

Peter Breen one of our senior developers recently produced a white paper analysing the security features of .net and as well as it being available on the customer extranet we’re putting it out for general release on request. Enhanced and enforced security for enterprise platform WCM deployments is just one of the things pTools will deliver on and in the whitepaper we look at the whole range of vulnerabilities covered including: Cross-site scripting; Injection flaws; Malicious file executions; Insecure objects; Information leakage; Authentication and sessions; Encryption process; Insecure communications and: Failure to restrict url access.

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10.11.09 - pTools guarantees accessibility for WCM on the SharePoint platform

It's two weeks since the SharePoint conference in Las Vegas and I am still trying to get to grips with everything we saw there. SharePoint 2010 is an impressive platform and a significant step forward across all the application areas it touches from content management to document and records management. There is a renewed emphasis on WCM and that puts pTools smack bang in the middle of things. pTools Embedded for SharePoint was launched at the conference and the feedback was excellent.

One area where the new pTools for SharePoint application really enhances WCM on top of the SharePoint platform is in usability and accessibility. With pTools you get guaranteed accessibility of all output to websites and this means compliance with all the internationally recognised standards.

I realise that every CM has to handle the challenge of generating accessible content output but I know that this is something we’ve been strong on from the very beginning and I am always surprised when other systems miss the point. Without getting overly technical, pTools separates content from design using XSLT to generate raw XML data and that’s exactly what a serious CMS should do. We render this into accessible and compliant XHTML based on templates and this allows developers and designers to have endless possible layouts and looks from a single piece of content, all the while ensuring accessibility within pTools and not needing any additional step to cleanse the code.

What's more the feature set that drives these accessibility functions is out-of-the-box with pTools and that means reduced costs and reduced timescale for deployments.

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03.11.09 - All about the Blog!

People have been asking me to blog for a few years now and I’ve finally taken the plunge. And just to confirm my newly found commitment to all things Web2.0 I am also putting this out on Twitter. This may mean that blogging world-wide is officially about to come to an end!

I have been reluctant for many years because to my mind there is so much of so little business value available on corporate blogs. As for Twitter I simply cannot figure out why anyone would be interested in half the tweets that emanate from business sources.

But I finally changed my mind for three reasons. Firstly it’s become clear to me that main-stream sources of information about WCM are completely over influenced by advertising spend and that unless you are prepared to match your message with money it will not be heard.

Secondly where money is not the key influence then preferred technology often is. Specifically I see a significant pro Open Source and anti Microsoft .net bias from independent WCM analysts and consultants which runs contrary to my experience of the enterprise and our own technology alignment. Far be it from me to speak up for Microsoft but I find simplistic bashing of the .net platform in terms of WCM to be at best misguided.

Thirdly I have finally found something to write about and not surprisingly it’s about pTools software. I will not be writing about the colour of our new business cards, or my opinions on government policy on this or that, or my favourite ice cream. I can make no apologies for the fact that this blog is about pTools and the array of functionality within the product. I will be writing about how pTools compares, conflicts, competes, compliments and integrates and enhances enterprise WCM. So you’ve been warned. As they say, read it and weep.

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