Author: Bill Trippe (Page 16 of 23)

A user wrote the following question to the CMPros list, but didn’t get much response, so I offer it here, with some initial thoughts. I would love to hear more ideas about this kind of thing, as I get queries like this at least a couple of times a year.
I write and manage content for a small non-profit (80+ employees). We’re just now implementing a CMS that’s basically a set of templates with no functionality for managing and scheduling content to ‘go into’ the templates.
I’d appreciate any recommendations for software that (1) manages content development (sign-off by editors & reviewers) & (2) schedules content development from start to publication. I’m seeing the management aspect as some kind of checklist; the scheduling functionality as some kind of Gantt chart, with different development stages visually differentiated and/or indicated by milestones (like Msoft Project, but with far less need for Project’s bells and whistles). Maybe I’m dreamin’…
I’ve tried doing all that with Outlook and Sharepoint, and they kinda work, but I’m hoping there’s something a lot better out there.
I suggested the server version of Microsoft Project. The Project server can interact with Outlook clients via Exchange Server, and it can also generate Web clients. For example, you could have a server version of Project running a very high level schedule, which could then provide prompts to the user community. These prompts could be emails, they could be emails with URLs, or they could be tasks sent to the user’s email account which then appear as either tasks or calendar events in the user’s outlook. I did this for a Web development team a couple of years ago, and another client has implemented something like this recently.
Of course, this doesn’t address interaction of the Project server with the CMS, which in this case happens to be Enginuity from Pandora Systems.
Other thoughts and ideas? Feel free to email me as well as posting your comments here.

I saw Jack Welch speak at a conference the other day, and he had a lot to say about content management.

OK, not really.

But he did have a lot to say about success, and about how to effect change in an organization. It was a manufacturing audience, so he touched on quality initiatives like Six Sigma, and he made the point that you should always put good people in charge of such initiatives. “Don’t pick the guy who is a year from retirement and shows it,” he said. “People can tell who the turkeys are.”

This reminded me of a recent discussion I moderated on implementing new technology. The question came up about success factors in implementing new systems, and one theme emerged again and again–new initiatives need champions. The conventional wisdom has become that technology projects need executive champions, but we ended up agreeing that projects need champions in the trenches too. I think of my own experiences with successful projects, where there were always stubborn, determined developers and content owners who bulled through technical glitches, patched software, and system crashes. No major project unfolds without setbacks. You need to have a certain doggedness. And if I could have asked Welch such a question (400 or so people were fighting for the microphone), I would imagine he would say doggedness is a good quality as well.