While content management systems (CMS) can bring many benefits to an organization, their succesful implementation is difficult - not just meeting short term timelines, but also with regard to long term adoption and user satisfaction.

A few weeks ago, I gave a presentation at Barcamp Vancouver entitled (dis)Content Management (view presentation in PDF format), where I spoke about these challenges. It was cathartic - six years of CMS frustrations freed from my pysche; however, I realized after that I spent very little time talking about solutions. And so, today (and in future articles) I will expand on my talk and offer my views about how to overcome some of these challenges - focusing on one issue at a time…

Challenge

A key problem I’ve seen with the systems I’ve worked with is the authoring environment. If you think about the writing process - how you actually write something - it is probably not the same as the next person. My process is something like this:

First, I’ll assemble some loose notes - probably written down on sticky notes, or anything I can get my hands on. Next, I’ll start an outline, using the outline mode of Microsoft Word, or just on paper. After that, I’ll start writing out the content, building out my ideas. This process can take some time. Then begins the editing process, where I’ll cut - paste - hack - slash and cut again. This too can take awhile. Once I think I’m done, I’ll start the cleanup process - determining a title, applying styles, fitting into a template, adding meta data to the document properties (yes, I do that). Then, I usually continue on again, realizing that the editing wasn’t really done, or that my ideas needed more work, and so begins another round.

If I’m collaborating on a document, it gets much more complicated - phone calls, emails, meetings to brainstorm, meetings to review, meetings to format, more phone calls, more emails…

The CM systems I’ve worked with don’t support this mode of work. Typically, the systems are forms based - a set of fields to input information such as titles, categories, publishing dates, authors, as well as a small window for typing in your actual content. These systems don’t provide the tools that most authors are accustomed to:

• No support or limited support for outlining, brainstorming. When it is supported, your preliminary notes are often on the system for others to see - which you may not want yet.
• Tracking changes and comments not granular enough. Usually at the page level, without the ability to add comments within the page itself.
• Often difficult to collaborate with multiple people - each user will need an account on the system.

In addition, much web content is repurposed and edited from existing sources - not written from scratch.

The result: authors work in the environment in which they are comfortable (and productive). And this is not, unfortunately, their CMS.

What does this mean for our CMS? Copy –> Paste

And this is where things often get ugly. The copying part - not so bad. But the pasting…

Every CMS content editor I’ve seen has problems with pasting. Actually, they suck: loads of additional meta content is pasted, site style sheets get ignored, fonts appear from nowhere… I’ve even seen files get so corrupted that they couldn’t be opened again. The solutions I’ve seen:

• Vendor recommendations not to paste from MS Word, or other word processing software
• Recommendations to paste into an application such as Notepad, to strip the formatting, and then re-paste into the CMS editor
• Special ‘paste as text’ buttons, which strip all formatting

As you can guess, your users will love this. The final touches they just put on the layout of their document just vanished, and they’re left with a stripped down editor and a tiny window to try to clean up the mess.

Solution

I’m not sure I can say that I have a solution, but I do have the following recommendations:

• Include your authors in the buying process of a CMS - after all, they’re the ones that are going to have to use it every day
• Ensure that your users understand that web content is different from their usual non-web writing. Expectations need to me managed. Content written for the web is going to look different from other types of internal documents - different content structure, different formatting, different tone, different style. The constraints of the web are different from those of paper, and it is important that authors understand that.
• Don’t settle for a 30 minute demo from the vendor. Get access to an installed version. Play with it for a few days. Ask your authors to actually start building some pages. If you are working with a developer - and not a packaged tool - ask them to build a prototype.
• Accept that cut-and-paste will be the method of choice for many of your authors.
• Thoroughly evaluate the paste functionality of the CMS (as well as other features). Vendors will typically gloss over this - they want to show you the workflow features!

Who would have thought that the paste feature of a CMS could be so important… I never did.