Tag Archives: content management

Justifying Your Website In The Cloud

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The idea of putting your biggest marketing investment in the cloud might be a little scary. But that’s why you’re reading this post — you’re smart and know when to take a well-calculated risk.

The cloud is built for those with a built-in taste for success – who want to provide their customers with an updated website that’s optimized for search and ready to handle the campaigns generated from your marketing and sales departments.

THIS IS WHERE THE CLOUD COMES IN.
For those who like official definitions, Gartner came up with a good one: “The cloud is a style of computing in which scalable and elastic IT-related capabilities are provided “as a service” to customers using Internet technologies.” Gartner crammed all the important key words in there: scalable, elastic, service, Internet and IT. It makes it a good definition, but what does that mean for your public-facing website?

WHAT ARE THE BEST BETS IN THE CLOUD?
If the cloud is a scalable and elastic IT service, everything should be a good fit for the cloud, right? While that might be eventually true, for now here are the top uses for the cloud.

Public Websites with fluctuating traffic levels often require a big investment in an infrastructure (hardware, power and IT staff) that can accommodate short-term spikes. If your web analytics resembles a roller coaster, it might be a good idea to consider a cloud solution.

B2B / Partner / Client Portals are becoming extremely popular. With the right security features in place, the cloud is the perfect place to host a partner portal as it can experience fluctuations in traffic with every new product rollout or change.

Applications that can be pushed to the cloud are those that are a collection of services, like security services, mobile access, workflow integration, email, spam filtering, archiving, etc. Forrester recommends if you have an OLTP (online transaction processing) application – avoid the cloud for now.

3rd Party Integrations  Integrating 3rd party applications with your website becomes a no-brainer because the cloud acts as shield against your internal systems while providing the necessary scalability and cost savings.

BENEFITS OF USING OFFICE 365 FOR A PUBLIC WEBSITE
A content management system (CMS) makes the web more usable. It’s more important than ever these days to have your website be easy to manage, handle traffic fluctuations and be scalable with your business. Having a CMS solves many issues we face in business today.

Easy to update – Most websites grow organically over time and we find much of the content is out-of-date. If pages were manually updated using tools like Dreamweaver, its likely there are lost pages and things have gotten out of control. The benefit of a CMS is that anyone can learn to update the website.

Remote management – If the majority of your web production team (including content contributors) is off-site, a cloud CMS is a good fit for your business. Using Internet services allows individuals to easily access the information and data they need to effectively manage content and workflows all from within a single tool.

Saves time – Instead of struggling to publish content through your overloaded development team, a CMS gives non-technical staff the ability to publish directly with a push of a button. All with the added ability to revert back to an older version of the content should someone have hit publish too early.

Consistent user experience – The more your website can scale, the more you can take advantage of the cloud. Using templates gives your website consistency and pushes best practices out to your rogue teams.

Download the eBook to find out how to use Office 365 to build your public-facing website.

SharePoint 2010 Adoption – The First 14 Months

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On September 30, 2011 Forrester published statistics from a SharePoint 2010 Adoption survey with 510 IT Professionals. In this case SharePoint 2010 covers both the on-premise as well as the online version.

SharePoint 2010 Adoption Metrics

A couple things not in the infographic that surprised me was 29% of companies with SharePoint are currently enjoying its social features. Evidence that social networking is dripping into the workforce.

Source:
Forrester: SharePoint Adoption: Content And Collaboration Is Just The Start

 

Should You Use The Cloud To Manage Content?

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Trouble Managing Your Information?Like a new tree in the forest, every business has the capacity for growth – the trick is to find a break in the canopy. One of the ways to set your business up for a successful surge of growth is to create an information management strategy that makes it easier for people to sort through the forest of documents and find the content they need.

Right now you might be thinking how easy it is to convey information to your key five people and keep everyone aligned with the business. But this kind of harmony doesn’t last forever. If you’ve been in the business as long as I have, you remember the days when we hosted websites off of an old laptop in the corner of our office. Believe it or not, this is what is happening now with documents. Your salient content is kept isolated from the rest of the company and sometimes information is being updated to some random shared location – but no one can find it. Oh, and did I mention there’s a duplicate somewhere else and your new employee is using it to Tweet about your new product?

Are you moderately alarmed yet?

This is where the cloud comes in.

For those who like official definitions, Gartner came up with a good one: “The cloud is a style of computing in which scalable and elastic IT-related capabilities are provided “as a service” to customers using Internet technologies.”

Gartner crammed all the important key words in there: scalable, elastic, service, Internet and IT. It makes it a good definition, but often we’re asked: what does that mean?  What the cloud really refers to is the data in your server room down the hall (or maybe that laptop under your desk) has simply changed location. You choose which data moves to a secure facility and will be managed by IT experts. The whole premise behind the cloud is to provide permission-based access to content, freeing up people to access content anywhere, on any device – which is especially appealing to those of us who into gadgets and like to take advantage of email and presentations on the go.

Is the cloud is a good match for Portals, Content and Collaboration?

Yes, the cloud is well suited for portals, collaboration and collaboration (aka: document management technologies). First and foremost any content distribution technology has capabilities that need to be widely deployed. For example email is not reserved for just a select few in the organization, it needs to be widely distributed to be useful. The same thing happens with other types of content and it is important that all employees use the same technologies to access the content, so it’s easily discovered, managed and updated by everyone.

Gartner is also recognizing an underlying trend of requests to share content with people outside the firewall.  This means there is a need for an easy way to share workflows and content with partners, vendors, contractors, remote staff and all the other unique structural combinations that make up your organization today.

Overall, your outlook is good if you choose to go with a cloud solution for managing information across your company.

A Simple Matrix

Get The Cloud If You… Don’t Get The Cloud If You…
Need to widely deploy services (i.e. email) Don’t trust the 3rd party provider
Need to share content outside the firewall Need to accommodate many complex customizations & applications with no intention of updating them.
Want to give people access to your content
Need flexibility and on demand capabilities
Need to clearly communicate value to non-technical business users*
Want to reduce costs

*It’s much easier to ask for an email account than to request a series of server room hardware and software upgrades from your non-technical counterparts.

Creating An Information Management Program.

Step 1: Take a content inventory.

Knowing what content you have is the first step towards creating an information management strategy. This will inform storage needs as well as create a good conversation for the next step.

Step 2: Evaluate your employee needs.

Are you employees accessing information remotely?  Does content go through an approval process? Do multiple people contribute to a document?

Step 3: Decide how people will access the content.

Understand how people will access content will establish a baseline for what you’re looking for. Do you simply need some kind of file dumping ground – or do you want to add keywords, create team sites for group sharing and have it integrated with other systems?

Step 4: Create a content map.

This defines the proper places for content, which will turn the conversation towards permissions, privacy and the resulting delivery methods.

Step 5: Choose your technology.

Once you’ve established what you have, who needs it, how they its accessed and the content segments, you’re ready to decide what technology works best for you.

Our clients typically choose Office 365 for managing all kinds of content – but there are other alternatives. Office 365 just gave our clients what they needed most: a secure email, web conferencing and a content management system that works together.

Call Aaron Nettles at (206) 781-1797 if you want to have a conversation about the cloud or join us at one of our cloud meetups.

Referenced Articles:

Alan Weintraub, S. P. (2011, 09 15). Content Mapping: The Secret To ECM Technology Selection Success. Retrieved 09 16, 2011, from Forrester.
Mann, J. (2011, 09 14). Cloud Strategies for Portals, Content, & Collaboration Projects. Retrieved 09 16, 2011, from Gartner.
Rob Karel, J. G. (2009, 08 11). Refresh Your Information Management Strategy To Deliver Business Results. Retrieved 09 16, 2011, from Forrester.