Hi all

Early next year, we will be doing a pilot that will include integration
of MCMS 2002 and SharePoint.  Will be happy to provide info, learnings
from that experience. 

Sandra Beach  
Principal Consultant
Information Strategy and Systems
Department of Primary Industries
Making information systems work FOR people

Phone: 07 32393172
Fax      07 32248561


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Today's Topics:

   1. Portal and CMS Integration (Brian Hart)
   2. Best Options...? (Morkai Kurst)
   3. RE: Best Options...? (Max Dunn)
   4. Re: Best Options...? (Rob Styles)
   5. Re: Portal and CMS Integration (=?iso-8859-1?Q?St=E9phane?=
Croisier)
   6. RE: Best Options...? (Pranshu Jain)
   7. RE: Best Options...? (Morkai Kurst)

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Message: 1
From: "Brian Hart" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Thu, 21 Nov 2002 21:05:05 -0500
Subject: [cms-list] Portal and CMS Integration

1.  Can anyone share their experiences with Portal integration with a 
Content Management package?  

1.  Can anyone provide a definition of 'Content' versus 
an 'Application'?

I'm from an applications background and often have difficultly clearly 
understanding what content is in terms of storage in a CMS versus 
applications that would be setup as .WARs in a J2ee application server, 
and/or "Portlets".


thanks,
Brian Hart


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Message: 2
Reply-To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
From: "Morkai Kurst" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Thu, 21 Nov 2002 21:29:13 -0600
Subject: [cms-list] Best Options...?

Hi, 

We have an intranet written in asp.net which basically displays product
information (prices, pictures etc) for our sales staff.

One of the problems we are beginning to encounter is that we pride
ourselves on our technical knowledge of the products we sell, but
business is picking up and we are having to hire more staff to take
calls. We have realised we need to build some sort of knowledge base to
help the new staff.

We came up with an idea for range guides (showing the history of a
particular manufacturers range) and tech notes (which is where staff can
put all the known problems with a product and how to fix it etc.)

I originally set these up as static html documents that got searched via
index services - It was fine until I realised I (being the only web
designer) just didn't have time to do this as well as take the sales
calls and run the warehouse. (We are a small family business)

I saw the anacronym 'cms' being bandied about on my .net lists and
finally took a look - I still only have a fairly vague idea of just what
a cms is (if anyone can point to a cms for dummies guide I'd be
grateful) but in my travels I came across Ektron and their $500 CMS100. 

http://www.ektron.com/cms100.cfm
<http://www.ektron.com/support/cms100_support.cfm> 

Having taken the 'test drive' it seems to be pretty much what we want -
basically a way to allow our other staff to add or correct information
to these guides with no knowledge of html. I want something that can be
accessed from our intranet but that isn't a collection of word documents
(which was one suggestion in the office) A lot of our products link
together so these guides need to show those links as well (hence the
desire for html) It also needs to be searchable.

The price is the crutial factor - $500 we can afford but not much more.
We run on pure MS systems Small Business Server, and are about to move
over to SQL server from Corel Paradox. 

What I'm basically asking is 

1) Does anyone have any experience of Ektron?

2) Is there anything else that will work in the dotnet environment at an
affordable price

3) Am I barking up the wrong tree completely or is a cms our ideal
solution?

I thought about making our own and have ordered 'Real-World ASP.NET:
Building a CMS' but a not sure if it's worth the effort so to speak. For
what Ektron offer is that a good price or should it be fairly easy to
roll something similar myself?

Hope I'm making some sense, I feel like I'm opening doors in the dark
here :)

Thanks in advance

Morkai



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multipart/alternative
  text/plain (text body -- kept)
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Message: 3
From: "Max Dunn" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: RE: [cms-list] Best Options...?
Date: Thu, 21 Nov 2002 21:16:16 -0800

> 2) Is there anything else that will 
> work in the dotnet environment at an
> affordable price

If you're talking about a canned CMS software package, I have never
encountered one in the $500 range that did anything worth doing.

> 3) Am I barking up the wrong tree completely 
> or is a cms our ideal solution?

Sounds like you've already got some level of home-built CMS. Probably
best to continue that direction unless you have a serious budget.

> I thought about making our own and have 
> ordered 'Real-World ASP.NET: Building a 
> CMS' but a not sure if it's worth the effort 
> so to speak. For what Ektron offer is that a 
> good price or should it be fairly easy to
> roll something similar myself?

That is a too good price, I'd suspect the product probably introduces
more problems than it solves, but I have never used it so that is just a
first impression based on clicking around their site, from someone who
tends to prefer building to buying.

Unfortunately, in my experience you either need (a) time to build it
yourself or (b) money and time to buy something and make it work for
you. Content management is generally not something to enter into
lightly. Then again, at some point it makes business sense if you have
alot of content and alot of people trying to collaboratively work with
that content. Whatever you do, don't expect it to be instant: even if
that's the greatest CMS in the world you will still have to integrate it
with your workflow.

Max



--__--__--

Message: 4
Date: Fri, 22 Nov 2002 01:24:11 -0800 (PST)
From: Rob Styles <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: [cms-list] Best Options...?
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Morkai,

What you're describing is a situation where the
authors of documents and the readers are the same
group - one group of experts who wish to share
knowledge.

That is the scenario that MS Sharepoint is designed to
satisfy.  I only have brief experience with it, but it
looks good for a small office intranet.  Especially as
you are already heavily MS based.  Depending on your
license agreement with MS you may already be covered
for it, hence the cost may be v.good.

cheers

mmmmmRob


--- Morkai Kurst <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Hi, 
> 
> We have an intranet written in asp.net which
> basically displays product
> information (prices, pictures etc) for our sales
> staff.
> 
> One of the problems we are beginning to encounter is
> that we pride
> ourselves on our technical knowledge of the products
> we sell, but
> business is picking up and we are having to hire
> more staff to take
> calls. We have realised we need to build some sort
> of knowledge base to
> help the new staff.
> 
> We came up with an idea for range guides (showing
> the history of a
> particular manufacturers range) and tech notes
> (which is where staff can
> put all the known problems with a product and how to
> fix it etc.)
> 
> I originally set these up as static html documents
> that got searched via
> index services - It was fine until I realised I
> (being the only web
> designer) just didn't have time to do this as well
> as take the sales
> calls and run the warehouse. (We are a small family
> business)
> 
> I saw the anacronym 'cms' being bandied about on my
> .net lists and
> finally took a look - I still only have a fairly
> vague idea of just what
> a cms is (if anyone can point to a cms for dummies
> guide I'd be
> grateful) but in my travels I came across Ektron and
> their $500 CMS100. 
> 
> http://www.ektron.com/cms100.cfm
> <http://www.ektron.com/support/cms100_support.cfm> 
> 
> Having taken the 'test drive' it seems to be pretty
> much what we want -
> basically a way to allow our other staff to add or
> correct information
> to these guides with no knowledge of html. I want
> something that can be
> accessed from our intranet but that isn't a
> collection of word documents
> (which was one suggestion in the office) A lot of
> our products link
> together so these guides need to show those links as
> well (hence the
> desire for html) It also needs to be searchable.
> 
> The price is the crutial factor - $500 we can afford
> but not much more.
> We run on pure MS systems Small Business Server, and
> are about to move
> over to SQL server from Corel Paradox. 
> 
> What I'm basically asking is 
> 
> 1) Does anyone have any experience of Ektron?
> 
> 2) Is there anything else that will work in the
> dotnet environment at an
> affordable price
> 
> 3) Am I barking up the wrong tree completely or is a
> cms our ideal
> solution?
> 
> I thought about making our own and have ordered
> 'Real-World ASP.NET:
> Building a CMS' but a not sure if it's worth the
> effort so to speak. For
> what Ektron offer is that a good price or should it
> be fairly easy to
> roll something similar myself?
> 
> Hope I'm making some sense, I feel like I'm opening
> doors in the dark
> here :)
> 
> Thanks in advance
> 
> Morkai
> 
> 
> 
> --- StripMime Report -- processed MIME parts ---
> multipart/alternative
>   text/plain (text body -- kept)
>   text/html
> ---
> --
> http://cms-list.org/
> trim your replies for good karma.


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--__--__--

Message: 5
Date: Fri, 22 Nov 2002 10:54:35 +0100
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
From: =?iso-8859-1?Q?St=E9phane?= Croisier <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: [cms-list] Portal and CMS Integration

At 21:05 21.11.2002 -0500, you wrote:
>1.  Can anyone share their experiences with Portal integration with a
>Content Management package?

Two ways to see it:
1) The CMS is on a dedicated server and you have installed another
third=20
party Portal server to create "dashboards" for employees where they
can=20
check at a glance without having to log into 20 different systems their
key=
=20
tasks and information (90% of the case). Then the CMS just provides
basic=20
views (portlets) to the Portal Server so that the employee can check
the=20
status of their CMS and can handle basic tasks.
2) The portlets are just considered as another kind of field in the
CMS=20
(among fields of types Date, Integer, Float,...). (10% of the case).
But=20
IMHO, this is the way to go.

>1.  Can anyone provide a definition of 'Content' versus
>an 'Application'?

Content =3D Static information (a structured or unstructured text, a
binary=
=20
file,...)
Application =3D Dynamic application with a certain business logic inside
to=
=20
manage some content.

>I'm from an applications background and often have difficultly clearly
>understanding what content is in terms of storage in a CMS versus
>applications that would be setup as .WARs in a J2ee application server,
>and/or "Portlets".

Portlets is a bit more than a WAR file to host on a server. You need
to=20
hot-deploy and execute it. That is not the case for a PDF file.

Regards

St=E9phane
www.jahia.org



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Message: 6
Subject: RE: [cms-list] Best Options...?
Date: Fri, 22 Nov 2002 16:27:09 +0530
From: "Pranshu Jain" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

You may be able to save some time and meet your purpose without a full =
blown
CMS by enabling other users to type in content and link them using some
wysiwyg html editors.

Look at macromedia Dreamweaver + contribute combination..

or

Someone in this list had earlier mentioned about some freeware version =
of
Sharepoint which comes with Microsoft FrontPage 2002 - that might be a =
good
option too.


As far as under $500 CMS go - i managed to find two more:

http://www.interactivetools.com/

and

http://buildacommunity.com/aardvarkpublisher/

I have no idea whether they do what they claim to do or not.

reg@rds
Pranshu

--__--__--

Message: 7
Reply-To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
From: "Morkai Kurst" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: RE: [cms-list] Best Options...?
Date: Fri, 22 Nov 2002 11:12:24 -0600


> Sounds like you've already got some level of home-built CMS. 
> Probably best to continue that direction unless you have a 
> serious budget.

At the moment it's a bunch of static html files and me with dreamweaver.
We currently have about 10, Its eventually going to be at around the
5000 mark. I just can't do that on my own not and keep up with updates
as well.
 
> That is a too good price, I'd suspect the product probably 
> introduces more problems than it solves, 

Heh, that's what I was worried about - They do a 30 day trial which I
finally got working today (not completely their fault) The documentation
seems to be a little sparse on the developers side but at least I can
integrate it and get an idea before we decide if we want to buy it. At
the same time I can hopefully get a better idea on how it all works so I
can decide wether I can build our own. It is nice to know that the
editing interface is actually the same one in Vignette (Ektron are the
ones who write it)

> Whatever you do, don't expect it to be instant: 

I appreciate that, a few weeks to build or integrate something is not a
problem, the scale of what the actual content will become is what makes
the mind boggle. To give you an idea we stock electric water heating
equipment in the UK. We have been doing this for 25 years and we stock
for nearly every oem in the country. That's a lot of ranges, and a lot
of history. Our main tech guys can identify a 20 year old heater with no
name on that even the manufactures have forgotten about - We need to get
that information into our computers so our new staff can identify it as
well. With a cms I can see people being able to create new content as
and when it is needed and on the fly - We have one word document that
was a major history of one product, complete with links to the spares in
the intranet - it's been a hit amoungst the sales staff and people have
been updating it from what I originally wrote. The main complaint is
it's not part of the intranet and whilst most people have a shortcut to
it on their desktop that isn't going to work for everything. 

Thanks for your comments - its given me food for thought. I'm going to
look more heavily into building our own.

Morkai



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