Lo-fi prototype/testing

Competitive Analysis

        We decided to investigate other systems that provide content management for customers. It was difficult to investigate the interface of these systems because they are extremely expensive pieces of software that we could not gain access to. Another complication of most of the competing systems is that they combine content management with presentation. However, our system does not address presentation. We decided to investigate Blue Martini and Spectra.

      Blue Martini

      Blue Martini offers a content management system among their many other products. They state that this system manages all media assets including static images, videos, specialty visualization formats, text, HTML pages, and dynamic JSP and JHTML pages. There system offers many useful features. However, the system blends content management with the presentation of information. Some of the features that deal with presentation include: a built-in thesaurus to provide customers with aliases for null searches, and internationalization functionality to handle multilingual sites efficiently. In addition, the system ties the content to customer profiles such that content relevant to a given customer will be displayed in the browser. However, we are not addressing content presentation with our system so these features will not be evaluated in terms of our system.

      The screen shot of the interface displays that the categories of information are displayed in a logical hierarchy for the user of the system. This is a helpful feature because it provides the user with context. In addition, it prevents the user from having to recall the names of categories on their own. Providing context for the user is a useful component for a user interface. We feel that it is important that our system incorporate a listing of the categories in some form. Such a listing would be very helpful to Heather as she tries to determine which category she needs to select when she adds a press release.

      The system also allows users to assign attributes to the assets of the system. Default assets are automatically assigned if the user chooses not to select specific attributes. In addition, the system allows users to assign attributes to groups of assets in the content hierarchy. This could be a very useful feature in that it allows the user to more quickly complete repetitive tasks. This kind of a feature could be useful in our system. For example, in one of the scenarios Heather has to change the link colors for press releases to fuchsia. Suppose Heather instead needed to change the link color for all documents in all categories to fuchsia. It would be useful to have a component in the system that allowed her to complete this task with little repetition.

      Another feature of the system is that it provides "check-in and check-out features to protect the integrity of content" (from web site). Thus the changes made to the site are tied to a particular person. We would like to have some component that addresses the issue of multiple users working on a web site. In our interviews, the web design team at SIMS noted that a system of locks was maybe to aggressive, but some kind of notification of which people were working on specific tasks would be useful. Alieu also has this problem. We were thinking of solving the project management problem with some sort of a bulletin board of tasks assigned to people. At this point we are unsure how we want to solve this problem.

      Finally, Blue Martini states that the system supports both full-text and parametric searches for easy location of structured and unstructured information within the system. This feature helps users find specific information within the system. This kind of a feature could be useful for our personas. For example, suppose Heather would like to make a change to a document she posted a few months ago, but cannot remember which category the document is in. A search would prevent her from having to browse through the documents in every category.

      Blue Martini provides some features that could be useful for many of our users tasks. We will have to decide how complex we want to make the interface.

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      Spectra

      Allaire offers a comprehensive application framework for Content Management and Personalization in their product, Spectra. By offering an Cold Fusion based application that stores objects in XML and allows easy management of website resources via a browser, Allaire has managed to create a product that offers a fair amount of flexibility for deployment at a reasonable price for what is certainly an enterprise level solution. Besides WYSIWYG textual content management, the application offers the potential to define and execute clearly defined roles in the management of a website. This includes everything form Content Writers to Editors, to Web developers.

      Spectra is a compelling package for organizations that wish to intelligently and securely manage website resources, and yet do not want to have to go to the expense of a homegrown system. It does however, have a number of drawbacks. The first is that at $15,000, it is out of the price range of many, if not most small to mid sized organizations. While an Internet based company may be able to justify the expense, many others will not. A second problem with Spectra is that it is very Cold Fusion centric. While it is a strong platform (And indeed, our application is primarily written in CF) it is certainly not the only route available for deployment. An ideal package, in our view, would allow for the deployment in any one of the myriad of existing web platforms, including ASP/PHP/JSP/Perl/Cold Fusion or some other newfangled technology unknown today. Again, this is one of the main problems with Spectra. It locks organizations in to the Spectra philosophy, which although demonstrably powerful, is also quite complex. Even seasoned Cold Fusion veterans may struggle with it for a while. The approach we have taken to minimize this lock in effect is to make the source code freely available for modification, use an XML based data store in the organizations RDBMS of choice, and finally, insured a every level that there is a clear separation between the management of the content, and it’s deployment.

      Conclusion

      One of the benefits of our system of the competing systems is that it is free and it is open source. Thus people can easily make modifications to the system. In addition, our system makes a clean separation between the presentation of the content and the management of the content. This allows freedom because people can use a host of different technology with our system such as: ASP, JSP, Perl, PHP, or cold fusion. In addition, the data for the system can be stored in any relational database. Thus, our system offers users a great deal of freedom in implementation of the system for their own uses.