Oracle Webinar

Mary and I did the Webinar with Oracle this week. You can see the recorded version and download the associated white paper over at the Oracle site. The focus was on the challenges of multisite management.
Web content management is a staple technology for thousands of enterprises–and for good reason. Every enterprise needs a basic web presence, and organizations of even modest size and complexity have multiple websites. These multiple sites likely span a range of purposes and needs, including supplier and distributor extranets, customer support websites, and corporate and departmental intranets. Every enterprise’s needs will vary of course, but the larger the organization, the likelihood that the organization will have multiple websites, spanning a range of internal and external needs.
The abundance of websites results from sound business needs. These needs begin with the obvious requirement to have a web presence, but extend to many other areas. Consider the need to work closely with suppliers, and how that requirement can be met by a content-rich and functional extranet. Human Resources is another likely arena, where the organization might want to provide benefit information through an interactive website. The examples abound, and the recent explosion of blogs and wikis has amplified the need.
A key element in multiple website management is understanding who does what when it comes to website design, content creation, and the day-to-day efforts to keep the site or sites going. Can these users be productive and efficient? The matter of scale is another central question: Are there only one or two sites, or is your enterprise in the position of having dozens or even hundreds of sites, and serving content to intranets, extranets, and portals, with new websites regularly demanded by the needs of the business?
Multiple websites present challenges in many different typical workflows and processes. These include identifying and empowering the IT personnel who need to take the lead in web architecture to the line of business manager who must decide on the content and organization of the site and keep it up to date. Perhaps most significant are the needs of the content contributors. At the end of the day, they need easy-to-use tools that allow them to create content within the policies of the overall enterprise and the specific line of business.
Given the strong demand for multiple websites and the potential costs and inefficiencies of building these out separately, there is a natural need for the right technology. At minimum, organizations need web content management technology that supports centralized strategy and governance and that uses IT resources efficiently; at the same time, the technology must give site managers and contributors the means to create and manage the content quickly and easily.