Web Content Management
From AlfrescoWiki
Contents |
[edit] The Web Content Management Vision
The web has undergone a number of major evolutions. With Web 1.0, Amazon radically reset consumer expectations around the buying experience, focusing traditional business on leveraging the web and rich content to promote easy customer self-service. Technology requirements for Web 1.0 focused on enabling business users to easily create and manage rich content using basic publishing oriented content management systems. This content fed into dynamic websites custom built by teams of web developers.
Web Content Management 2.0 is as big a shift both in technology and customer expectations. Today consumers are used to using Google Maps, GMail, Blogger, Flickr, del-icio.us, and Wikipedia. These new services – associated with a new generation of websites popularly known as Web 2.0 – have again reset expectations creating a fundamental shift in both technology requirements and associated business requirements for content management. These have had a fundamental effect on user’s expectations in the areas of: Rich User Interface, Participation, Community Services, Categorization and Trust – all built on a decentralized infrastructure.
Web Content Management 2.0 is about a web content management platform that provides:
- Rich User Experience
- Dynamic Architecture for Participation
- Collective Intelligence and Trust
- Cost Effective Scaleout
- Loosely Coupled
[edit] Content Management 1.0 vs. Content Management 2.0
Content management systems for Web 1.0 focused on tools for business users to create and manage content. These tools met the challenges of Web 1.0 by supporting content rich sites. Traditional content management systems fall short of providing rich content services with full management of the entire development and release process for dynamic, interactive, community oriented sites.
Traditional WCM forces users to use multiple systems to support each team – Content Contributors, Content Managers, Application Developers and Web Designers. This makes it difficult and slow to deliver updates to sections of websites with major issues merging changes. Also, it is possible to review what is new, but not in the context of that actual site – resulting in isolated teams, isolated changes and merging nightmares. The Impact of Traditional Legacy Web 1.0 Content Management
The legacy approach has a major impact in areas of:
- Time – Weeks to months for site changes
- Cost – Multiple Systems: Hardware, Software, Helpdesks
- Quality – Manual Merging of Multiple Systems. No true preview of site updates
- Compliance – No centrally coordinated development processes. Lack of site rollback and auditability – “How did we get here”, “Where were we then”
- Migration – Updating old static sites to Web 2.0 sites
[edit] What is Alfresco Web Content Management?
Alfresco is built on state-of-the-art open source components such as Spring, Hibernate, Lucene, JSF – often the components of choice website developers today. It offers one repository for the whole team. This repository is a modern platform for Web Content Management 2.0 with:
- The industry’s most scalable JSR-170 content repository
- High-Availability, Fault Tolerance and Scalability – Any number of sites, auto failover and clustering
- Multi-Site Change Set Management – Support for projects, sandboxes, change sets, layers and snapshots
- Multi-Site Transactional Publishing – Guaranteed delivery to multiple run-time sites
- Virtualization Server – Preview web 2.0 sites updates in context. View site in past, present or future
- Deployment Server - Transactional deployment and rollback of site snapshots to a run-environments for scalable content delivery
- Web Content Compliance Server – Integrated snap-shotting, auditing and Records Management
- Business Process driven Web Content Management
- Web Content Management enables you to control your website using Advanced Versioning Model (AVM).
- Sandboxed Development and Staging Model
- Parallel content development for web-based assets (and documents)is achieved using private sandboxes, content propagation via workflow-driven approval processes through virtual test and staging environments, transparent layers, with integrated support creating virtual domain for in-context preview of website changes.
- Versioned Directories
- Support time-travel across an entire website. For example, if you are looking at a file as it appeared one week ago, and you click on a hyperlink that it contains, the target of this hyperlink will also appear as it did one week ago. Alfresco's versioned directories have semantics that are similar to those offered by Subversion.
- Transparent Layers
- Directories and files act like transparent overlays; similar to a sheet of glass, an overlay can be written upon, but protects the underlying object from modification. Unionfs offers a similar feature, but transparent layers are more portable, are integrated with a more powerful versioning system, and work on individual files, as well as directories.
[edit] Using WCM
Users get the functionality they expect from high-end, proprietary WCM tools. They have:
- Embeddable content services for community participation
- Contextual delivery of information based on community intelligence
- Standards-Based Forms to create pages – Using XForms
- Publish to Multiple Channels – Via XML
- Workflow – Email based
- In Context Review – View changes in context of live site with no broken URLs
- Manage Branches – Parallel branching and merging
- Dependency Management – Impact management and automatic updates
- Pre-Built Templates – Websites and website components
- Re-use Existing Sites – Easily reuse existing look and feel
Start with the Alfresco WCM 2.1 Product Evaluation Guide to get a basic overview of WCM architecture and product capabilities.
[edit] Benefits
This new open source WCM platform delivers significant benefits in the areas of:
- Time – Weeks to hours for change sets to be deployed
- Cost – One Virtualization Server
- Quality – One repository. One virtualization preview
- Compliance – Common Governance Framework. One virtualization server for past, present and future, Service Oriented Auditing, Migration – Simple file based migration
[edit] WCM Release Enhancements
Refer to the WCM Release Enhancements to find out what functionality has been added to each release of WCM.
