InformationWeek

Inevitably, Murphy's Law took hold, and there were some incredibly embarrassing mistakes along the way--improper HTML code, broken tables and links, bad or mangled content, missing graphics, and so on. However, it wasn't as bad as it could have been, because, honestly, not that many people were looking--yet. Back then, those who did look were a little more forgiving. This was all new, and just having a Web site was considered to be a major achievement.

Then some of us got smart and did our development on a separate server instead of on the live Web site. We wrote a few procedures and some code to automate certain aspects of site update and deployment--perhaps a few quickly cobbled Perl and FTP scripts to move content from the development to production servers. Although it was still fairly rough, most of the time it was manageable.

Now jump forward a year or two--a few generations in Internet time--and site complexity has exploded. Dynamic content of all kinds is assembled on the fly from back-end data-bases and middle-tier application servers, coded in multiple scripts and languages, and served via Web server farms distributed across the country and around the world. The number of hits has increased exponentially, and the content has changed, too. Now, your humble Web site is a portal and a place of business--not just a showcase or information repository. A broken link or bad code isn't just embarrassing; it has impact on the bottom line.

Your site content must be updated instantly and constantly, and the site must be up all the time--with zero tolerance for errors and bad information, from any source. Perhaps a product manager, someone in corporate communications, or both must approve changes before they're posted to the site. It's likely that you're handling purchases and other transactional content online.

As your sites become more critical and complex, you need tools to automate management--and you need them now. Enter the new generation of Web-site content-management products--a seasoned batch of tools and systems ready to help you meet the challenges of the brave new Web world.

There's a wide range of products out there, and while they overlap somewhat in functionality, the phrase Web-site content management means different things to different people. For some, content management is really asset management--that is, a system to keep track of media assets, such as graphic elements, text, and video.

More commonly, however, Web-site content management refers to a set of integrated tools that helps manage some portion of the whole range of site development and deployment tasks (see table, p. 106). Although no single product can do everything, many offer deployment and publishing, versioning and rollback, site design and page authoring tools, link checking, access control, change routing and notification, and site-visualization tools among their features.

Versioning is a key feature for content management. Versioning can be done at the element level or at the page level and can include version tracking and control. If a graphic designer updates your logo or changes the text style on your pages, for instance, you may want to go back to the former version easily on one page or the whole site.

Products from InfoOffice, Interwoven, and Running Start, among others, offer the ability to perform element-level versioning. Page-level versioning is a more common feature, and some systems let you easily roll back an individual element, one or more pages, or the entire site to a previous state, should that become necessary. Some of the content-management systems include or integrate with a full source-code control system and support check-in and checkout features to help manage versioning.

As Web sites become more complex, the boundary between conventional programming-based IT projects and Web-site management gets increasingly blurred, and it pays to have a content-management system that can handle a full range of content types from graphics to Java code.

Make sure the product you select supports all the content types you use and expect to use in the near future, including current and emerging standards--from ASP (Active Server Pages) to XML, from Perl to Enterprise JavaBeans. And don't forget about traditional HTML, GIFs, and JPEGs. EBusiness Technologies' Dynabase, Fatwire's Update Engine, and solutions from Inktomi and Vignette handle a particularly large range of media types.

Another key area is work flow and approval routing. If your Web site is like most, then the business-critical nature of the information presented requires some level of approval and authorization before changes can be deployed to the live site.

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