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.

Customers we met at Interwoven’s GearUp ’07 reminded us of how much really hard work goes into complex content-centric applications. We see the glittery, exposed tips of solutions, while the bulk of the application lies under the surface, often at depths where only the experts go. A presentation by Sun Microsystems at GearUp is a case in point.

The session focused on Sun’s Starlight platform, a global information management infrastructure described in a Gilbane CTW case study. It was an opportunity to hear the Starlight story live, in a panel discussion featuring Sun’s Sean Browne, director of web publishing, and three members of his team, including Kristen Harris, content management engineering manager, and Jed Michnowicz, engineering lead. In the program, we noticed that the session was being moderated by Steve Van Leishout from NEC Corporation of America (NECAM). What was the connection, we wondered, between Sun and NECAM?

During the discussion, we learned that NECAM is a long-time Sun partner, providing program management and technical expertise in support of the redesign of Sun web properties. A few examples of the heavy lifting that NECAM has done at Sun: helping to migrate nine properties into two primary vehicles of approximately 225,000 pages and assets, and coordinating the hand-offs between more than 100 stakeholders responsible for publishing content to sun.com, java.com, two developer sites, and over 35 country sites in 12 languages. The hard work below the surface enabled us to gain a new appreciation for the success story documented in the Gilbane case study on Starlight, reminding us that there’s usually much more to successful applications than meets our eye.

If you have an iceberg application that you’d like to share, consider submitting a speaking proposal for Gilbane Boston 2007. The deadline is May 15.

To learn more about Sun’s Starlight platform, see Leonor’s entry on the Gilbane globalization blog entitled Aging: Web Years Are Worse Than Dog Years.