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February 14, 2000

Get A Handle On Web Content
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Fisher Controls, for example, turned to Intra.doc from IntraNet Solutions because the tool was particularly adept at managing its engineering documents, which are large, complex files. Intra.doc creates an index and maintains links between the documents. It also offers version control and rollback.

Other aspects of Intra.doc, however, sealed the company's choice. "We didn't want a product that required us to deploy client software. We also wanted a fully Web solution, and one that wasn't priced by seat," Heindselman says. The IntraNet product met these requirements, and after a pilot test in early 1998, Fischer Controls rolled out Intra.doc.

Web startup BuyIndies.com Inc. opted for FutureTense content management as part of a complete E-commerce transaction package provided by Open Market. The company, which creates an online community for the purchase and sale of independent films, chose the Open Market solution "because we needed to pull the site together fast," CEO Michele LaMura says. FutureTense came with the package.

FutureTense creates its own database of content, which is provided by BuyIndies.com's partners. The company loads partner-provided articles and information about new titles along with some internally generated content into FutureTense, which also manages the company's set of Web-page templates. FutureTense then pours the latest content into the appropriate template and shoots it onto the Web.

"We didn't have any prior experience with content management, so we needed something that was pretty easy to use," LaMura says. With FutureTense and Open Market, the entire BuyIndies.com operation is run with just four people.

Ecampus.com, a large online college bookseller, turned to Rational's ClearCase for its Web content management. "We saw it as part of an entire process to manage and move code from development through testing to production," quality-assurance director Ted Willis says.

In particular, the company uses ClearCase version control to manage its HTML code, scripts, and content. "This allows different groups of people to work on the same pieces at the same time," Willis says. The company takes advantage of the rollback capabilities during testing and production. The company also relies on its back-end database to manage its inventory of books in real time and ensure the site is current.

Nortel Networks Corp. realized its manual process for managing content wouldn't fly in a fast-paced Web environment. The company had relied on content creators within various groups to pass content along to managers, who then passed it along to quality assurance, which sent it off to the Web team for final posting on the Web site. Faced with potentially hundreds of content creators, managers realized they had gone beyond what the manual process and associated hand-offs could handle.

Instead, Nortel turned to Interwoven's Team Site, which uses rule-based workflow to automate content management and pour it into HTML templates or steer the content to an HTML programmer for special layout.

"We liked Team Site because it is code management, not document management," says Steve Santana, Nortel's director of Web-site development. Team Site applies version control to the content, maintains the code in a staging area, then ships it off to the Web. "It also lets us have dozens of sandboxes," he says. The sandboxes let content creators experiment in a protected area.

You don't have to be as big as America Online, Disney, or Yahoo to benefit from content management. It doesn't take more than a few content changes in a day or week before a Webmaster gets swamped.

But more than just eliminating the Webmaster bottleneck, content management helps ensure that content is correct and up to date. Having correct content alone may be worth the investment, because on the Web, your mistakes sit out there for the world to see.

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