This acquisition is an unusual move, as for many years Hyland has been synonymous with document management and workflow solutions for the mid-sized banking and healthcare sectors. With this acquisition, Hyland takes a fairly serious stake in the higher education sector. But not a dominant stake: the higher ed sector has many players; for example Perceptive Software has over 400 clients there, and its a highly competitive market to get into.

Of course it's up to Hyland to decide how to run their business, and where to target their efforts, but it's for their customers and the likes of me to question if this acquisition will prove to be a distraction to the current customer base. I can't help but conclude that it will, as the Hershey acquisition not only takes them into a big new market (though to be clear Hyland did have a few higher ed customers prior to this) but it also delivers a completely new and overlapping ECM technology set. Hyland have not just bought market share, they have bought a lot of new technology. For a company that has long built and developed its own technology, it's hard to predict how this will play out. 

It may be that Hyland will take the best of both technology sets and develop something impressive, but that is hard for even the likes of Oracle and IBM to pull off. They may continue to run the two product sets completely separately, but then there will be overlapping resources and functionality and potential rivalry and confusion. Hyland could just let Hershey do their own thing but as Autonomy and Open Text can attest, that isn't easy either.

Many analysts including yours truly, as well as Hyland's arch competitors, tend to speak respectfully about them as they epitomize the ideals of midwestern honesty and friendliness when doing business.  This acquisition though will test that culture I think, and though I can see no reason for existing customers to get worried quite yet, it wouldn't be a bad idea to watch how things progress with a cautious eye. There may be lots of kisses now at Hershey, but they may not last. (Sorry, I couldn't resist that one!)

Theme of the day?  Difficult to say really, but if I were to choose two it would be the content chaos and archiving.  Where to start in hugely complex, over-running, multiple silo situations, and associated procurement practices.

I confess to being intrigued and a little surprised at how many people were attending the event to gain knowledge for major projects in the pipeline.  I mentioned this before but it bears repeating: the corner does seem to be turned in terms of organizations wanting to address information chaos. Gone is the past attitude that information disarray was either unimportant or too big a situation to take on. Savvy delegates seemed to understand that good information order and process delivers good information management - rather than technology being the starting point.

Story of the day for me though was from a major University that detailed how they manage IT contracts. The long and the short was that they never sign up-front deals, rather only a series of incremental deals and payments based on milestones met. Common enough in the world of consulting but less so for enterprise software.  The important part of this was that they enforced such payment methods without exception.  Where software vendors failed to deliver as promised they relentlessly pursue the vendor for penalty payments. Tough customers, but a practice others may want to consider.

Tomorrow the last and largest event at Earls Court London, so a long drive tonight to drop off the rental car and get to my hotel. This weekend will hopefully involve a great deal of sleep.

Possibly the highlight discussion related to a major university considering a move from LiveLink to SharePoint. Senior management are convinced it will be a simple move and very cost effective, while others have their doubts, on the grounds that 10 years of customization and integration may make the migration phase alone an extraordinarily expensive challenge. I think they may be right...

So, tonight a drive from the northwest to to Birmingham, potentially traffic hell -- but with yet another interesting venue at the end of the drive, the Motorcycle Museum.

To give a practical example, a healthcare professional will need awareness of all the documents related to a particular patient. These documents and records are sorted and managed through their lifecycle as a "Case" even though they may reside in different locations, have different owners, other relationships, and different retention policies.  Other individuals may also need to interact with these documents for the purposes of billing or insurance. Same documents, different purpose. There may also be multiple legal and compliancy requirements to attend to.

In theory at least, Case Management provides you with the tools to pre-define and orchestrate those requirements. Permissions, rules, metadata, and processes all play a part in what can be a highly complex system. 

For some organizations, Case Management applications built from ECM platforms form the core of their business, and more will in the future. The need to better manage the massive volumes of transactional documentation is growing more acute, and Case Management will certainly play an increasingly important role. 

Yet almost more than any other scenario, Case Management demands good information governance and squeaky clean relevant data. Without it everything falls apart. The fact that so many organizations are lacking here is another key reason Case Management is not as widely deployed as it could be. 

Selecting the right software to meet your Case Management needs is difficult, since everyone claims to do it,  but very few do it well.  The nightmare scenario for a buyer of a Case Management system is to buy a vanilla ECM software system and then just bring in a .NET or Java developer. You are not only buying technical functionality you should also be buying deep and very specific domain expertise, and without the right combination of the two you can be in trouble quick.

ECM vendors such as Hyland, Objective, Open Text, EMC, Autonomy and IBM all have deep expertise and knowledge in the particular industry sectors that they design systems for (Pharma, Legal, Government, Intelligence, Healthcare, Insurance,  Law Enforcement, Retail etc). They know (mostly) what works and what does not, and they understand industry specific business processes right down to the task level. You are paying as much for that knowledge, as you are for their software.

Assuming though that you do have your document house in order, and already utilize Case Management, there are some interesting developments on the near horizon -- most notably the use of business intelligence and analytics tools to extract further value from what is already a rich information set.  Consider the possibilities of early fraud and discrepancy detection or new and emerging trend analysis from the very rich data within your documents.  BI has long been locked solely into the 20% of data that is structured in the enterprise, and is a valued tool set. But very large and clean volumes of documentation that have been given a tight structure can be mined these days too, and those documents theoretically at least, represent the other 80% of the data we deal with in business.  In fact some organizations are already starting to use tools like Cognos, Hyperion, and Business Objects in Case Management deployments, and they are liking what they see.

And remember it's our job here to ensure that technology buyers make the right decisions via the use of our research, and one of the best ways for us to do that is to continuously talk with buyers and users who are at the coalface.  So if you are an organization that is using Case Management along with some kind of BI tool, then  I would love to chat with you in confidence to hear more about what works and what does not just drop me a note and we can chat.

Ironically, it's early days for a combination of technologies that have been with us separately for many years. Yet this could prove to be a very good long term marriage.

Though not really a surprise that Documentum wants to build up its Case Management credentials in this burgeoning area (just think Healthcare, Government, Litigation and Insurance), it's far from clear why anyone would chose EMC Documentum over any other vendor's Case Management offering.

Case Management solutions vary widely, from pretenders to fully fledged players. Everyone from Autonomy to FabaSoft to Oracle has an offering,  There are even some third-party options available for SharePoint. But how each vendor approaches Case Management differs, since specific buyer requirements differ widely too.  Some enterprise buyers seek good BPM capabilities,  while others seek complex metadata management services, records management and retention or even the relative ability to manage files that can range from physical items through to rich media in the same context.  

There is much talk amongst consultants and vendors of the "commoditization" of ECM, but I see little evidence of that in the real world.  Sure, anyone can offer you check in/out and version control and workflow -- but not everyone does those things well, or even adequately -- and some do them too well and deliver you complete confusion and overkill.

One thing is for sure: one size most definitely does not fit all for Case Management.  Therefore, any buyer without a very solid handle on their business requirements and processes is walking into a selection minefield.

As for EMC Documentum, I gave up trying to understand their ever changing strategy(ies) some time back.  From once being the clear market leader they are now in an ever more crowded and ever more specialized and complex field (we cover about 30 in our evaluation research).  That said, EMC Documentum continues to be a key player, and we will continue to evaluate them, and on occasion recommend them to some advisory clients, assuming Documentum makes sense for that client's very specific needs.

People outside of highly regulated environments typically assume that records and retention management in sectors like healthcare, financial services, and energy is state of the art.  This is far from the case.

Most often Records Management is underfunded,  inadequately resourced, and unloved.  It is no cliche to say it is also often run from underground, literally in basements out of sight of those who need to do "real work." 

In places where records are actively managed, they are usually managed well, with detailed and well-maintained file plans and retention schedules.  But many organizations only manage a fraction of the records they should be.  For example very few records management departments include e-mail as part of their remit, yet e-mail is where all the "stuff" happens. 

But maybe, just maybe, the tide is starting to turn.

Here at the Real Story Group we currently support a number of large advisory customers who are looking at records management strategically across highly complex working environments.  We have others who are looking at the whole issue of information management and ECM more strategically than in the past, and have begun to include RM as a component or a recognized future element of their work. 

That might not sound like much, but just a year or so ago it seemed like nobody cared.  Things like e-government initiatives, healthcare reform, demand or need for more self-service applications, increased regulations, and so forth seldom have the immediate impact people expect. And in a world where decisions can get driven by today's opinion polls, it's easy to lose sight of the fact that many of the biggest and most profound changes we encounter in our society occur at a far slower pace.

The most overused phrase in my personal lexicon is, "time will tell." But I fervently hope that time will tell us that awareness of the importance of RM and archiving has slowly risen to the fore.

"Remember the clip board and all the forms you had to fill in, and remember also that the healthcare professional seemed to have a lot more paperwork in addition to yours?" I then explain that Document Management is the process and management of all that paperwork, often with the goal to improving the process and making the paper electronic.  As a working example it tends to resonate with people, and they typically "get it." 

Of course after that, they tend to say either out loud or to themselves, "Wow, that must be the most boring job in the world." 

Hence I could not help but be struck by a new marketing and sales campaign launched by Hyland this week. They're promoting a new offering that combines OnBase document management and workflow software with kiosk hardware from PFU, a Fujitsu group company. They have launched industry-specific (healthcare, government, higher education) kiosks for customers to self serve their forms and related paperwork.  It such a simple and smart concept that I am frankly surprised nobody has done it before. 

Hyland is one of the vendors we evaluate in depth in our ECM research stream, so if you are one of the organizations out there considering their products check out our critical reviews first. 

As an aside, I also hope is that Dr Gustafson on Ayer Road along with the Nashoba General Hospital in Groton will read this short post and agree with me that self service kiosks might be a good idea. 

First, let's dispense with the idea that there is such a thing as a universally "best" or "leading" CMS. Instead, different vendor offerings "fit" better or worse against individual business scenarios. And of course your budget, architecture, and locale matter too.

So, let's consider the following specific case: you're the Intranet manager for a car parts manufacturer. You're looking to implement a Web CMS for your Intranet, and you've narrowed the choice down two vendors, both with local offices and competent consulting partners, both bidding approximately the same price. Do you prefer Vendor A, whose CMS has gotten implemented several automotive companies? Or Vendor B, who knows little about car parts but whose CMS offering was built primarily for Intranet environments?

For web content management I don't believe your industry matters very much. If it did, there would not be 30+ individual Web CMS vendors and open source projects with installations in the U.S. federal government space, and nearly that many among U.K. public-sector agencies. You'll find a similar breadth of WCM suppliers active within other verticals, like higher education, health care, and financial services.

Note that the situation is completely different in the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) marketplace. By ECM I'm referring to imaging + document management + records management. Document-oriented technologies are very process-oriented, so requirements can become very industry-specific. Consider the example of Autonomy (formerly Interwoven) Worksite, a product purpose-built for the legal profession. Moreover, resellers will frequently take a broad ECM platform and re-wire it for a particular industry. Consequently, in our ECM vendor evaluations -- in addition to functional and business scenarios -- we focus on the vendor's "fit" for twelve different industries ranging from Insurance to Pharmaceuticals.

Many Web CMS vendors will disagree, pointing to their industry-specific "solutions." Usually this entails turning off or on various modules, and serving the result up as a single license package. In my experience, when a vendor claims strong industry expertise, it is usually because they have honed their marketing and sales approach to succeed in that space, rather than offering very much that's functionally germane. Vendors who target your industry may know how to speak your vernacular, but that won't count for much after the vendors' account rep and sales engineers leave, and you go into development on what will become (I hope!) a 5+ year investment.

To be sure, I believe it's helpful to consult with your industry peers when selecting any technology. Joining a community of like-minded customers also has value. However, this gets out of hand when, as one U.S. university explained to me, they selected an obscure CMS package simply because they saw that an ivy league school had implemented it.

Selecting the right CMS tool for your enterprise means balancing a variety of different requirements, but a bare minimum, be sure you understand:

• What sorts of websites you intend to publish
• Your visitors' needs
• Your operational profile and goals

So, all else equal, if I were that Intranet manager, I'd give the edge to Vendor B. Of course, the best way to know for sure is to test both bidders head to head before signing any contracts.

In any case, I hope our WCM research can help you find the right fit. Good luck with your projects!

Let's first consider the positive implications: eXo will gain an audience outside of Europe.  And the JBoss Portal will have some nice new applications (content management, collaboration etc) to add to what was a fairly sparse framework.

As with any merger, the details could become inconvenient for existing licensees.

However, I have bigger doubts that Red Hat will really make the most of the opportunity, and I wonder if the likely outcome of the merger is really what buyers and implementers are even looking for in 2009. It is a merger that makes sense for eXo but maybe not so much for those in need of an enterprise portal.

If we exclude MySQL from the discussion, JBoss (acquired by Red Hat in 2006) and Red Hat, are by far the two biggest vendor names in the open source world. They are the names that come up most often in enterprise procurement discussions as alternatives to the likes of IBM and Oracle. Be it the Application Server, BPM, Directory Services, or indeed their own longstanding version of the Linux operating system -- RedHat and JBoss are synonymous with open source for the enterprise.

But the JBoss Portal has never really figured in that equation. What should have been a direct competitor to IBM WebSphere and the Oracle WebSuite and WebLogic portals, was seldom seen in action. And adding some functionality to the product is unlikely to really change that situation.

I am not favoring commercial systems such as those from Oracle or IBM over commercial open source systems such as Red Hat.  In fact, buyers deserve a truly level playing field from which to chose from, but currently that is not the case.

In fairness to the open source community, it's not for lack of trying. Just in the past year the Liferay open source project hooked up with an enterprise-level vendor (Sun Microsystems), only to see what looked like a very promising and competitive product emerge (GlassFish), and be then thrown into doubt after Sun's agreement to be acquired by Oracle.  Who knows how that one may resolve itself.

Red Hat now has an opportunity to fill that gap, and to give enterprise buyers a more competitive open source option. But the only way to do that is to build a truly enterprise-level portal framework, not by adding new widgets. The problem before wasn't a lack of functional bells and whistles. it was a lack of direction and depth.  Merging with eXo doesn't in itself fix that.

Of course, it's not my job to advise vendors, it is to advise buyers.  My current advice to buyers has to be to tread with extreme caution in the world of enterprise portals. As subscribers to our Enterprise Portal research well know, with Oracle now effectively owning 5 of the 12 major portal offerings and somehow attempting to make sense of them, IBM on the verge of a major upgrade, Vignette acquired by Open Text, SAP losing almost complete interest in the space, and open source alternatives either falling short or themselves going through a period of upheaval, it is a market that is full of treacherous waters to navigate.

Within that service we cover XML authoring tools: the software for creating and editing highly complex documentation, be it DITA structured technical documentation, complex translation work, or product information designed for multiple re-use. But our research goes beyond the editing and authoring options at the front end, and evaluates all the leading CCM (Component Content Management) tools that have been designed to manage the publishing and workflow of these complex XML document components throughout their lifecycle.

On other occasions we separate technologies into different categories, where others may have bundled them together. An obvious case here is our Web Content Management research and our Enterprise Content Management Suites research. Just in the past fortnight I have been asked by more than one person why we have two subscription services for the same technology. Well the simple answer is that it is not the same technology: the technology to manage outward (web) facing content and sites, versus the technology to manage inward-facing (documents and files) content and filing systems is quite different. But nevertheless it is a very fair question to ask, because to someone outside the industry (and even some insiders) that distinction is not always obvious.

Confusion can come about due to vendor branding strategies or a plethora of nebulous acronyms used within the industry. For example Interwoven (recently acquired by Autonomy) did a good job of branding their WorkSite (document & files) offering quite separately from their TeamSite (web content) offering. Other vendors such as EMC Documentum or Open Text use a single brand moniker (such as "digital media") to cover all their content-focused software offerings regardless of each component's specific purpose, while in other instances product names can even be synoymous with the firm's brand, as with ADAM and Sitecore.

Then there is the issue of acronyms. We use the term ECM as it is the most commonly used term for document-based technologies, however in different regions and industry segments ECM is referred to as EDMS, EDM, EDRM, Document Control, IM, IDM even KM. As an advisory firm we have to call our research and services something, and we are faced with picking and choosing amongst a myriad of terms, typically choosing the most well-known term currently in use.

Our job at CMS Watch is to make sense of the complexity of the technology offerings out there for you, the buyer - and that can be a challenge at the best of times. We believe it's safe to say that we have more research available to our subscribers on content technologies than all of our competitors combined. But volume, depth and breadth is not all that separates us from our competitors, we are in addition avowedly a firm that follows the market rather than "makes" it. Thus, we don't try and come up with new acronyms, terminology or market segments, we don't cheerlead for the industry or get involved in market sizing, we stick to the basics of evaluating current release products side by side and evaluating the importance of current trends.

So here is my challenge to you. We evaluate over 200 products and sub-divide those into 10 subscription services, which in turn are sub-divided into about 5-8 sub-categories each. We try to use common terminology so that you the buyer can relate to and locate the research that meets your needs, but that does not always work as well as it could. So if you find the product evaluation(s) you need, but locate them in a place - or grouped in a way you find 'surprising' or 'interesting', let us know. Tell us how you and your colleagues perceive these technologies, what you call them, how you would categorize them differently, how you explain them to your internal clients or project teams. Truly we would love to hear from you as this industry remains a dynamic and very moveable feast at times....

At the time, we suspected Serena would find many suitors, but thus far, no deal culminated. In this economy, I suspect any initial enthusiasm among potential acquirers has subsided. So, customers remain in limbo and share gossip about alternative products in their Yahoo! forum.

A company spokesperson says, "We continue to support Collage, however, we will not expand the
functionality."

It was decent of Serena to give its customers some notice, but the longer Collage remains in limbo, the more licensees will abandon the platform, which makes it less viable for those left behind, even if the product ultimately gets purchased by a strong company.

It may come as little surprise that an employee of Unicon, the dominant uPortal systems integrator, has good things to say about the product. By contrast, our research for the The Enterprise Portals Report 2008 finds uPortal is an unlikely fit for e-business and self-service portals. Let's briefly explore why.

As prelude, I'll note that the products we cover are among the most widely-used products in the portal industry. Consequently, almost all vendors can claim references across all scenarios.

Despite that, I'd first point out that just because uPortal has a few universities that use the product for self-service doesn't mean that the product compared to other enterprise portals, such as Vignette, is a good fit for this scenario.

Second, we find that uPortal isn't particularly rich in out-of-the-box functionality for self-service portals (below, I mention some of the features you should look for and test for this scenario). Together with Vignette, which has strengths in this area, Oracle also provides you more to get you up and running with self-service. Among the open source projects, even JBoss Portal and Plone has more to offer than uPortal with regards to self-service.

Third, self-service portals come in many flavors. The way you define self-service may not be exactly the same as I define it, or Unicon does, but there are likely a few common requirements we would all have. Good reporting, for example, is typically a key requirement, as is integration to existing repositories, such as those used for customer data. In our research we found users struggling with uPortal integration, and citing very little beyond technical and basic reporting out-of-the-box. Neither integration nor reporting was among the major improvements in the recently released uPortal 3.

Always remember, when evaluating which product to use, be sure to rely on matching your key requirements and use case scenarios to what the different products have to offer, and be sure to test with your own content. That's always more important than impressive references, however relevant they may be to your case.

Version 3.0 is mainly a technology release, but also ships with a fresher user interface and updated default content for better demonstrations. On the technology side the product now has improved portlet support (ready for JSR 286), a new unified caching framework as well as it has migrated to using the Spring development framework.

As readers of the Enterprise Portals Report know, uPortal is comparatively feature-thin, and its platform-like complexity sometimes comes as a surprise to developers expecting a simpler product. To facilitate the upgrade for existing adopters, uPortal ships with a wide set of import/export scripts, but as always make sure to test carefully before taking the plunge...

When every school in a district has its own website, and in many cases teachers can operate their own sub-sites, then multi-site management becomes a very, very big deal. As Web CMS Report readers know, effective multi-site management is a key gating feature that tends to separate less expensive from pricier products (though not all pricey products do it well!). Not surprisingly, most Web CMS projects in this space have begun as experimental Intranet implementations. Most public sites get managed manually.

Not surprisingly, web teams strapped for funding have great interest in open source, but even a simpler package like Joomla! can seem complicated to non-technical webmasters (and it won't effectively manage multiple sites). Like many government agencies, some school districts are longer on staff than discretionary funds, but the extent of their technical resources varies widely. I met some specialists from one of the wealthiest counties in the country who had an enviable technology testing lab, and then two minutes later chatted with a staffer from a small rural county who wanted to make more use of his PHP background, but spent most of his days putting out fires as the sole webmaster for the school district.

In general, districts make available more resources and attention for instructional technologies than school websites. Many districts license commercial learning content management systems (LCMS) like BlackBoard. But the open source LCMS Moodle is rapidly gaining in popularity. Some schools are stretching Moodle a bit to serve as a kind of Intranet portal and internal "Web 2.0" platform, even though that isn't what Moodle's really intended to do.

As in other sectors, most Web 2.0 initiatives (especially blogs) remain mostly behind the firewall. One school district superintendent wanted to blog publicly, but was shot down by her legal counsel, who pointed out that everything she wrote publicly became official policy and carried legal weight. No personal opinions. Too bad.

On the other hand there is great potential in podcasting, whatever the pedagogic (and production) challenges. One ambitious district figured out how to develop inventive podcasts in areas where their high school students were under-performing. The podcasts apparently became something of an underground hit, with students listening to them in the privacy of their own MP3 players, where no one could accuse them of being "uncool."

Parents often have higher expectations for school websites than the schools themselves. Central district web leaders use parental surveys and focus groups to leverage standardization measures across tiers and schools. Calendars are the #1 requested parental resource. Sports information and stats are another popular area. Parents frequently ask for printable, high-res photos of their little darlings after they appear on a school website (one district pays "Smugmug" $45 a year to handle this for them).

However, one school district manager observed that parental focus groups tend to be dominated by power-volunteers, who often are not power web users. But then more sophisticated parents complain when website redesigns end up insufficiently modern/functional. Hard to know how much of that was a stereotype. But student reactions were almost universally predictable: "the site sucks."

E-mail remains the most predominant electronic info distribution method, far dwarfing RSS. But school districts have also learned to carefully meter the frequency of these communications (lest parents opt out amid the flood of other mail they get), as well as carefully monitor them for editorial content. Suggests to me that integrated e-mail campaigns must be a more important requirement for CMS buyers in this community. Still, one web manager had mixed feelings about these blasts: "We're training parents to be passive," she argued.

If you're in the school website business, I encourage you to check out the nascent group that's forming here.

Evidently the news got leaked inadvertently, and Serena wasn't fully prepared to clarify. According to one customer, their account rep laid out a schedule whereby Serena would continue to sell new seat licenses for the next year, and then continue to offer paid support for another year. Serena will issue no new releases, just patches for issues of "the highest severity level."

In some ways, the tool was already suffering a long decline. As Web CMS Report readers know, Serena has not really invested much in Collage over the past few years, so at some level, this news was really a kind of a formality. Still, as you can imagine, some customers are angry and anxious, and a few have already received calls from competing vendors (bad news travels fast!).

Just remember though that products with a decent customer base don't go away easily. In all likelihood, Serena will sell its assets, among which the customer base may earn more than the code base. On the phone with a longtime Collage customer today, we reviewed potential scenarios:

• Serena lets the product wither after two years and customers slowly migrate to competing technologies
• Serena sells the product/customers to another Web CMS vendor -- not very comfortable for existing licensees unless the new owner commits to a second product rather than push them to migrate in a consolidation play
• Serena sells the product/customers to a systems integration partner, who continues to support (and ideally extend) the tool -- a very nice outcome for customers if they know and trust the firm, and if the integrator can actually gear up to develop and support packaged software (not a simple undertaking)
• Serena sells the product/customers to another software vendor that doesn't presently sell a Web CMS tool (like a document management vendor) -- very nice in theory, except when you remember that this is precisely how Collage ended up (and ended up unloved) at Serena in the first place
• Serena puts the code base into open source and tells customers and partners to work it all out -- not a bad outcome, but probably perceived as high-risk among existing customers.

Customers facing a 1- to 2-year support window may find some comfort in Collage's relative ease of maintenance. Said that customer today, "I spent $10k a year to Serena for support and never needed it once."

And moreover, as a decoupled, HTML "baking" system that sits behind your website or web applications, licensees' visitor-facing services are not at risk here. As Web 2.0-style coupled architectures come back in vogue, it's worth reconsidering the value of good old fashioned separation of concerns.

Usually, where universities come from is the same: academia was among the early adopters of the nascent technology and many ventured out on the web in the early nineties. With the archipelago of departments, institutes, faculties, over a decade many managed to produce hundreds of thousands or sometimes millions of published web pages. Often using different styles, editors, webservers, then CMS tools -- it's not uncommon to find hundreds of (sub)domains within a single institution.

Of course, much of the content is by now outdated, disorganized and hidden from everyone... but Google. Finding the oldest pages within the website can be a lot of fun (with some effort, you'd probably be able to dig up something a lot more out of date), but also quite poignantly demonstrates the need to weed out excess content. For sure, about 95% of all pages could be deleted without anyone ever missing them -- but which 95%? As visitors find it increasingly hard to get to the information they need -- or even less ambitiously, to at least not be misinformed about a conference "next April" (without the accompanying "1995") -- the need for change becomes a matter of some urgency. But where to start, if even finding the physical servers is a daunting task? (Hint: look underneath desks).

Identifying target audiences -- prospective students, students, alumni, staff -- is the easy part. So is designing a new, modern interface (though never forget to give the university seal due respect -- you wouldn't want to ignore the centuries of history there). Getting an organization without a clear hierarchy to comply with set guidelines is something else. If even the board won't commit to at least trying to get staff in line, there's little else left to do but ask nicely. It doesn't help that in most universities, the only central department at least somewhat qualified with bringing order to the medium -- the marketing and communications people -- is often still stuck firmly in the age of print.

So what I see happen over and over again these days is that some energetic and enthusiastic (though over time, increasingly less so) individuals start tackling the problems. And yes, these problems are the same ones, to the point where it becomes possible to identify three stages of development:

• First stage: building a plethora of websites;
• Second stage: trying to re-organize those into the same style, on the same server, using the same CMS -- but often, multiple instances of such a CMS, because there's no central authority to force everyone to organize the content, and everyone wants their own sandbox;
• Third stage: reorganizing those multiple websites into one CMS, with centralized control -- or at least, the opportunity to see what's happening -- and centralized landing pages for target audiences or subject channels.

As each of these stages can take anything from 5 to 10 years, and most will still be at the end of the first, one can only guess how long many of them will take to accomplish renovation. And it certainly doesn't help that most of the people struggling to make a change are working in a vacuum (from more than one perspective). It induces them to re-invent the wheel and, at the same time, making the mistakes others have made before.

So yes, they're all individuals. But it would make a huge difference to actively seek out best practices of those who are (slightly) ahead. That's good advice for any content management project, but universities in particular will be able to learn from organizations they'd never consider to be an example -- for instance, the past disarray of your average turn-of-the-century multinational's separate country websites. At the same time, many of the challenges are quite particular to a university's highly decentralized approach; sites can be more like a public-facing intranet. But likewise, many lessons learned from intranets could render helpful clues, such as how to manage the content produced by thousands of editors (and the usability requirements that ensue from not being able to train that many people in a technically challenging and abstract environment).

Of course, to give a detailed "how-to" for educational content management in a blog post would be slightly over-ambitious. But trust me, if you're in the process of structuring the web presence of a university, you're boldly going were many have gone before. And if you need a shoulder to cry on, just send me an e-mail.

Quantitatively, the UCD numbers are a bit on the thin side. What survey lacks in statistical significance, however, it makes up for in qualitative poignancy. The comments page makes interesting reading. The usual themes emerge: Know your requirements up front. Get buy-in from all constituencies, not just IT. Budget for training. Expect things to take longer than you thought.

An interesting bit of subtext that seems to weave together many of the survey respondents' comments is that when rolling out a Web CMS, the cost of failure is often better-defined than the cost of success. If a system rolls out within budget and fails due to (say) poor adoption, the cost of the exercise is well known. If, on the other hand, a system rolls out to great fanfare, unanticipated costs can surface.

"Adding a CMS changes how people think about the web," one survey respondent said, pointing out that when authors are able to post content in real- or near-real-time, it gives them a new sense of what's possible. "In the days when you needed a programmer to do just about anything in a site, people settled for getting very little done. Now they may assume they can have a lot for very little cost, so expectations management becomes a real educational endeavor."

One survey respondent said: "Be very conscious that if you do succeed with a vision of centralized management of a decentralized publishing system . . . the infrastructure (server and database) may not be able to handle the load of success, even with a scalable system."

Several of those surveyed warned against buying more functionality than needed, lest users add unexpected administrative (or other) burdens. This corroborates our research suggesting that most Web CMS customers face a greater risk of over-buying than under-buying. As one person said: "Getting the right system to meet your needs is the trick, not getting a great system."