InformationWeek

June 21, 1999

Control The Flow

Intranet publishing and workflow software can help companies manage documents and avoid "Webmaster bottleneck"

By Charles Waltner

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evin August, national manager of communications at Laidlaw Transit Services Inc., the nation's largest private busing business, faced a transportation issue of a different sort when he set to work establishing his company's intranet in 1997. August wanted to avoid "Webmaster bottleneck"--an electronic traffic jam that results when a Webmaster manually processes every file intended for publication on a site, often slowing the flow of documents to a crawl.

In looking for a software solution to his problem, August found a group of two dozen or so increasingly sophisticated and effective tools that provide an automatic pilot of sorts for Web documents destined for an intranet, extranet, or Web site. These tools steer electronic files from employee desktops (and elsewhere) through the editing, approval, and final publishing steps. Some of the leading vendors of these applications include Eprise, Interwoven, NCompass Labs, and Open Text.

The Overland Park, Kan., company chose Eprise's Participant Server, a server-based system that lets users format Web pages with very little programming and manage the flow of those pages through the system. "Eprise's Participant Server lets our Webmaster concentrate on building the highway--the intranet architecture--while employees in my department and others can concentrate on making the cars--the content--to put on the road," says August.

Research indicates that more often than not, companies can use all the help they can get in managing their intranet content. A report from Forrester Research released in February found that slightly more than half of the 50 Web managers interviewed do not use any tools to administer their Web assets. Still, that's an improvement from a similar Forrester survey in 1997, when three-fourths of Web managers said they administered their site content manually.

Such hands-on management isn't viable as Web sites grow ever larger and more complex. According to the Forrester report, Web sites overall doubled in size from 1998 to 1999, with expectations for the sites doubling again next year.

Ray Valdes, a research director with Gartner Group, says that because intranets typically span many departments in a company and lack a tangible bottom-line impact, IS managers or Webmasters have little leverage for forcing changes. "Managing intranets is a diffuse, complex, and messy problem," Valdes says.

Intranet publishing software saves companies money by reducing the overhead in employee time required to run an intranet. Joe Forgione, CEO of Eprise, refers to the concept as "distributed responsibility," which makes every employee who contributes documents to an intranet also part of the management process.

Also, the software puts the technical skills of Webmasters to better use, redirecting their efforts from electronic paper pushing to architecture or programming tasks. The tools also relieve employees and managers of the technical onus of learning Web publishing software. In addition, the tools speed publishing times, often a significant boost in a company's competitiveness, says Harley Manning, an analyst with Forrester Research.

Easier Management
Most companies that have committed to deploying these tools report a significant difference in the ease of intranet management. But users and analysts report that implementing the tools can be challenging. David Yockelson, a director of electronic business strategy at Meta Group, says some of the software has been as complicated as the problem it tried to solve. "There has been a lot of bad experience with content-management tools," Yockelson says, noting that many of the tools have proven too challenging to learn for some end users. Says Forrester's Manning: "You'll typically invest months, not weeks, when bringing these tools online."

But that seems to be changing. Smart shoppers can find tools that, though they may not solve every issue, will generally help Web document management. Laidlaw's August, for example, says Eprise's Participant Server required only "a slight learning curve." His administrative assistant, who has no technical background, learned to use the software in only a couple of days.

Still, the more complex and widespread the structure of a company, the more these tools can help in the management of intranets. Care Canada, the Canadian arm of the nonprofit human-relief organization, must communicate among organizations in more than 60 countries. Gerard van der Burg, managing director of the organization's IT division, realized an intranet would benefit his far-flung enterprise. But he also knew controlling contributions to the site would be a nightmare without the proper workflow software.

Care Canada previously tried to share information on its various projects by having employees simply dump files into folders on a server hard drive. Given the huge volume of documentation created by Care employees, and the lack of any controllable structure or search feature, the hard drive became "gigabytes of disaster," van der Burg says.