What is Web 2.0 CM (Part 2)

By Seth Gottlieb & Brice Dunwoodie (@cmswire) Apr 23, 2007

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Regardless of whether you like or are revolted by the term Web 2.0, most people can at least agree that the Web is a continually evolving place and that significant changes in both the underlying technologies and in the human interaction patterns have taken place over the past few years.

In the first article in this series we discussed in practical terms our take on meaning of Web 2.0 as it relates to content technologies. In this article, we describe the three key constituencies of Web 2.0 Content Management Systems and the functionalities needed to serve them well.

Three Groups that Matter Most

To assess your web publishing capabilities, you must consider three unique constituencies:

Your internal content producers and managers
Your human audience — those people who use, consume and potentially enhance your content
Your machine or software audience — those devices or applications that will consume machine readable forms of your content

Group 1: Content Producers & Managers

Editorial staff and content managers continue to be responsible for many of the same tasks and processes. Yet like everyone who uses Web-based tools, their expectations of the tools have changed markedly over the past few years and their set of operational tool sets have expanded to include new devices –- such as mobile browsers and Blackberry phones — and new client applications — such as RSS readers and mash-up aggregation applications.

If a content management system fails to address the new demands of this audience, frustrations develop, workflow slows, content quality can potentially suffer and knowledge can end up locked away in simpler to use, but isolated repositories. Here are a few things to pay attention to:

Focus on Interface & Workflow Simplicity
To quote Ward Cunningham, inventor of the Wiki, “What's the simplest thing that could possibly work?” You and your team may not want the simplest thing, but Wards perspective clearly has merit and those who seek tools that best manage Web 2.0 services and websites would do well to keep his ideas in the fore.

Just imagine the shock your average 22 year old would experience going from Flickr, Blogger or Twitter to a stodgy run of the mill Enterprise CMS management console.

Sure, your enterprise software does so much more. But does this new generation of business user with simple needs really care or understand? What if posting a document on the intranet was as easy as uploading a photo on Flickr or a video on YouTube?

Part of the problem is the software that has not been sufficiently paired down to optimize simplicity. Equally at fault are assumptions that users will be trained and compelled to use the software to some greater corporate good. Unlike other enterprise software, you cannot always force your employees to use software that they do not like. People can avoid using your CMS by resorting to the ultimate unstructured tool: email.

The latest entrants into your workforce are probably setting up Wikis, blogs, and other simple tools on third party sites or on hardware they can scrounge up internally.By not responding to their initiative and their needs of simplicity, you are pushing their good intentions underground. You also risk multiplying the number of isolated content silos in your enterprise, thereby missing an important opportunity to leverage evolving forms of knowledge management.

Companies like Google and 37signals are revolutionizing the field by applying consumer-oriented design values to enterprise-oriented software. They have resisted the feature clutter that has become the plague of enterprise software.They hide the complexity rather than boast about it.

Keeping things simple does not mean that the work of the content contributor is easy.It takes time to create content that is good both as an informational resource and as a reusable content asset.Extra effort by the content contributor will make the content more valuable and usable to your human audience and systems that try to re-use it.Still, tens of metadata attributes and many tier taxonomies will discourage the content contributor from making this effort.Sites such as Flickr and del.icio.us have realized great success by relying on community based tagging and fast auto-suggest features. These are important lessons your CMS vendor should be attuned to and learning from.

Deliver Immediacy
Traditionally, security and access control in companies tends to follow the policy of “guilty until proven innocent.”User privileges are kept to an absolute minimum with the expectation that if a user really needs to perform a function they will follow protocol and apply for permission and resume their task when permission is granted.

Complex workflow models that put several approval layers between a contributor and publishing do the same thing.This does not jibe well with user expectation of immediacy. Users like to be able to perform an action and see a result. Any delay discourages participation.

Look for a content management platform that provides flexibility in the workflows and leans toward lighter weight processes and quick publishing operations. If a task can be completed in one sitting, it is far more likely to get done and the tool that allows for this will be much more rewarding for your team to work with.

Encourage Trust
Where possible, look for products that support “trust but verify” policies. Ask yourself what is worse: inaccurate or undesirable content on display for a short time, or preventing a user from posting something useful.

Heavily regulated industries may not have this option.But if you can, allow a user to do more while monitoring what they do. This, of course, requires you to have functionality to report on what changes have been made and also have the staff to run the reports and review the results.In the command-control world, under staffing the editorial role leads to bottlenecks and stagnation, in this new world, it leads to chaos.

Provide a Rich Experience
While the browser has become the preferred method of delivering a UI, the Web 1.0 page-submit model really breaks down for complex tasks that require lookups and building references between assets.

Rich Internet Applications (RIA), built in Flash or leveraging AJAX technologies, solve this problem by supporting interactivity with the server between page refreshes. Many CMS vendors are doing a good job of modernizing their administrative interfaces. But don't take this for granted. Related to Simplicity and Immediacy, a tool interface that is usable and rich is going to both increase the probability of content getting published and be more rewarding for your team to use.

With that said, your evaluation should not be limited to what you see in the browser. Users want to both stay tuned to workflows and contribute content using other interfaces and devices such as email. Identify the key toolset your team will use and make sure your CMS vendor is headed in the same direction.

Group 2: The Participating Public

The public, previously known as “consumers,” have become participants. A modern Web CMS must acknowledge this and demonstrate the ability to both integrate the public as participants and deliver the tools Web 2.0-savvy visitors expect. Here are a few things to look for:

Modern Organizational Tooling
When your website was just a static brochure, you had full editorial control over what your users saw — just like the paper brochures stacked on your shelves.You made a lot of assumptions about what your users would be looking for and where they would think to look.