What is a CMS?

By: Blake Haas, Andrew Kuehl, Rachel Moorehead, Berecia Stevens

Definition:
A system providing oversight to manage work flows in a collaborative environment.

Advantages:

• Control - Content Ownership  and Accessibility 
• Decrease Costs - Content Creation, Management, and Publishing 
• Increase Revenues - Time Sensitive Opportunities and Fresh Content 
• Improve Accountability - Audit Trail and Version Control
• Maintain Consistency - Presentation Consistency and Brand Integrity 

Disadvantages: 

• Contains hundreds of files
• Limited Flexibility in Design 
• Limited SEO of Web Pages 
• SEO Maintenance 
• Slow Loading 
• Expensive Design 
• Maintenance Costs

Key Features:

• A Centralized Repository
• Workflow Automation
• Rapid Content Import
• Dynamic Tracking and Alerts
• Version Control
• Automatic Distribution
• Security

Choosing a CMS:

• Scope
• Type of Projects
• Buy or Rent
• Quick and easy installation
• Simple administration interface
• Quick and easy extension of CMS for extra functionality
• Simple template manipulation
• Helpful user community

Examples:

References:


Business Software.com
http://www.business-software.com/content-management/key-features-of-content-management-systems.php


Drost Design
http://www.drostdesigns.com/the-disadvantage-of-a-content-management-system/


WorkSiteBuilder
http://www.workssitebuilder.com/file/a62d629abfff6b52baf9eb6df0983ae4/what-is-a-content-management-system-cms.html

APIs Gaining Ground with Businesses

Most people by now in the Internet Technology field have at least heard the acronym API.  An API (Application Programming Interface) is used to transfer data from product to product or service to service.  It's used to allow developers to integrate your product's offerings into another product or service creating a continuous network of connections.  APIs are new cloud-based libraries in a sense and can help bring together your business's connection to the cloud, mobile devices, and social networks.  Sam Ramji from Apigee, a company that "develops API tools for developers who use APIs", gave a presentation on this topic that can be found here.  In his presentation, he talks about how APIs help businesses stay ahead of the fast changing markets and the continuously fractured interest groups they are trying to reach.

The ideas behind APIs and API development are openness and distributing data as quickly and efficiently as possible.  This comes with risks and control issues.  Businesses need to send out their typically legacy information for use by outside sources that might not be under their control to manage.  Business though can control abuse by setting rate limits for information transfer or by setting access restrictions.  Innotas, a cloud based PMO, developed their API offerings with Apigee.  Innotas was looking for a solution to get their customers consistent service delivery and to gather information on in-bound and out-bound traffic.  They approached the risk of control by implementing separate analytics and traffic control to manage data transfer.

The benefits of APIs though far out weigh the risks.  In the same sense that businesses can push information out, they can also draw information in.  This new stream of information can be used to adapt and innovate their current business offerings and its APIs and develop the business's model around its API offerings.  Innotas, in their implementation, provided operational and business-level visibility into their APIs.  This gave them access to customer usage reports, helped to provide the quality they were striving for, and stayed competitive over their on-premise counterparts.  In conclusion, I leave you with the words of Chris Anderson from Wired Magazine:  "The Web is Dead.  Long Live the Internet."

For more information:
Another presentation by Sam Ramji
http://www.slideshare.net/samramji/punctuated-equilibrium-celestial-navigation-and-ap-is
The API Evangelist
http://www.apievangelist.com/

Welcome to the Future

This week in class we are talking about the Future of the Internet.  In preparation for class, we are reading the UK Future Internet Strategy Group's "Future Internet Report - May 2011".  In this report, the group charged defines the future of the Internet, the opportunities and challenges faced moving forward toward this future, and what the UK can do to prepare for it.  The group defines the "Future of the Internet" in terms of three emerging components: combined service offerings, shared data amongst services, and a revamped network infrastructure.

Combined Service Offerings:

As the Internet grows and expands so grows the number and type of devices that are connected to it.  Sensors and mobile connected devices and items are becoming a more integral part of the Internet and the way it is utilized.  With so many connected devices, a new type of data is being collected:  sensor collected data.  In conjunction with human entered data, sensor and device data can be used to provide a better picture of the services utilized and customize your service offerings at lower costs at anytime.  Also with this increase of data comes the breaking down of barriers between systems to make the data needed readily accessible to the person who needs it and not stored in an isolated system.

Shared Data Management:

More companies than ever are collecting data about your web browsing and purchasing history.   They turn around and use that data to customize your experience with their services or sell it to other companies to do the same.  As more and more services combine, lots of data is being passed back and forth.  This can be good, and this can be bad.  One of the main concerns with storing all your data in a readily available packet of information is the security used to move the packet from place to place and the controls to determine who gets which piece of data.  How this process develops will be a big driving factor for what services can go to a cloud environment and which ones need to stay on-premise.  Another aspect of the shared data component includes centralizing access to ease service integration into an already developed access control system.

Revamping the Network:

With scenarios for communications (machine-to-machine, machine-to-man, and man-to-machine) increasing, the network that these communications move across needs to be growing and scalable too.  More and more of the data provided to end-users are large on-demand, real-time products, and the network needs to be able to handle that much information as quick as possible.  Also a large wireless network needs to be created and implemented to maintain an always-connected environment, but this also comes with challenges such as the handling of wireless spectrum interference and the need for broadly accepted IPv6 implementation.

I feel that this report accurately represents where the Internet is going: a centralized, cloud-based service provider.  I am excited about the progress being made, but I'm also hesitant about being "there" now as there is not a lot of legislation developed yet to consider the consumer's wants and needs versus the wants of the service provider.  This report, while mentioning a few big names in their case studies, also did not look at the big stake holders currently highly invested in the Internet such as Microsoft, Google, and Apple, and how their choices as companies would effect the Internet "market" and how it grows. 

The topics that we are covering in my MIST7500 class go hand-in-hand with this report.  We've so far reviewed cloud-based service offerings.  We've implemented many integrated services.  And coming up later in the semester, we will be looking at different networking technologies.  This class covers a good bit of the leading edge technology currently being developed and utilized while showing you where we've been too.

Where to next?

Exploration of Google Sites

Continuing our discovery of new SaaS offerings, I built a web prescience for my fictional infomediary, KnitWeek.

Please go check it out:
https://sites.google.com/site/knitweek/

I found that creating the Google site was fairly easy.  I did get a little confused on 'themes' versus 'layouts' versus 'templates'.  I also couldn't find where to change your template again once you get started, but that was okay in my experience.  I choose a blank template to begin with so that I could start with a clean slate.  Google Sites definitely has a lot of expandability; you can make your site as simple or as complicated as needed for your purposes.  There was not a great "Getting Started" section though other than the initial walk through of setting the appropriate site-wide settings such as title, layout, etc.

The actual design aspect wasn't exactly user friendly to begin with, but once I got started, the learning curve was fairly short.  I really enjoyed the readily available widgets and tie-ins to the other Google products such as Calendar and Forms.  However, I was displeased with the inventory of the widgets and the fact that most appeared to be user generated.  It was very hard to find the exact RSS feed reader I would like using the search, and I had to try out many before I found the right one that actually worked as documented.  The navigation was set up well though to move back and forth trying out new widgets.  It was also disappointing that there was not a "Create New" option when tying in with the other Google offerings.  It seems like a pretty easy option to implement that they choose not to.

Google Sites definitely fits in with our definition of the Software As A Service model.  It is on-demand access to webhosting, web design, and collaboration suite integration.  Also all the information posted and developed is stored centrally with Google in the cloud, making it accessible anywhere from the Internet.  Google's collaboration suite relates to the Service-Oriented Architecture concept in that it is composed of individual components that can be taken separately or in conjunction with each other in a multitude of combinations.  It also follows that each of these components is able to be accessed remotely as well.  Google's suite of resources is scalable, reusable, autonomous, and granular.

Software As A Service Comparison

This week in class we discussed cloud computing.  The first topic we are tackling in this discussion is SaaS (Software As A Service).  Here I am presenting my comparison of three SaaS competitors: Microsoft Office 365, Google Docs, and Zoho.

Microsoft Office 365 is a collaboration suite that allows you to go seamlessly from an online experience to an offline desktop experience.  It includes email, calendar, contacts, Office applications such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote, and Microsoft's Sharepoint and Lync products.  Microsoft has a great Getting Started website if you want to explore it some yourself.  I found the basic functionality such as composing an email, starting a new document, or setting up sharing on a calendar to be very easy to use and very intuitive.

I did not like however how much needed to be downloaded and installed before the integration with my computer was complete.  It required at least two separate downloads and a reboot.  Once installed though, the Office application suite on my computer integrated well with the online experience.  Another thing that I did not particularly find easy to use was the SharePoint component.  For those of you who are not familiar with SharePoint, it is a web collaborative space where you can publish websites, share documents, and set up forms.  However, this basic implementation of the product could use an overhaul on its flow from creating to designing to publishing.

This software suite definitely has its benefits for a business.  It includes all the major functionality any business would need, no matter the size.  It's scalable, and Microsoft has become a business standard.  There are numerous support mechanisms already available and documented, and Microsoft, itself, also offers more advanced support for a price.  Also Microsoft has developed its own mobile device technology, ActiveSync, which most mobile devices support, allowing the user to access email, calendar, and contacts from a mobile device as well.  All in all, Microsoft Office 365 is not a bad base level product for a business.

Another option available is through Google.  Google offers many online applications for various tasks.  For the purpose of this comparison, we'll be looking specifically their Google Docs offering.  It's very easy to get started with Google Docs.  There is not much of a "Getting Started" guide, but it's not really needed since the interface is very basic and simple, and there is contextual help available at all times.  You have five options for document types with Google Docs (Document, Presentation, Spreadsheet, Form, Drawing, and Collection [aka Folder]), which seems limited compared to the other offerings, but it's a strong set of tools in the toolbox.

There are a couple of drawbacks to using Google's suite though.  Firstly, there is a learning curve for the Microsoft or open source converts.  There is no 'Close' button; everything is auto-saved.  There are not tons of menus to navigate; all options that are available are shown, which  limits the options available.  Another drawback is that since Google is so massive it's offerings are segregated.  In summary, you'll have to go somewhere different to check your email and calendar from where you post your website from where you build and store your documents.

All in all, Google has a nice competitive offering for businesses.  Google is very aware of their customer base, and they strive to bring more to businesses and to implement on-demand product changes.  Google also has wonderful customer support options available, and it's been around long enough now that stability and quality of service over time are not concerns anymore as they once might have been.

Lastly, I'll be looking at the new kid on the block, Zoho, which came on the SaaS scene in 2007.  Zoho offers a completely online platform of applications to businesses.  It's 25 applications range from the basic email and calendar offerings to the more advanced and specific MarketPlace, BugTracker, and CRM applications.  Zoho works well as an application portal, a one-stop shop.  It's easy to get signed up and started with Zoho.  It also integrates with Google and Microsoft Sharepoint products.  Zoho also makes it extremely easy to use your own purchased domain name.

There are a few downsides to Zoho however.  It does not have complete feature parity with its competition in its basic Writer, Meeting, and Show products.  Also it's tabbing functionality can be confusing to a new user.  It also puts strict limits on storage space unless you purchase more, where it's competitors give their users a large free beginning space.  The product's home page is also extremely cluttered and hard to understand where to get started.

For business purposes, Zoho might be a little out of its league in terms of feature sets on its core functionality (creating, editing, publishing, email/calendar), but  it tries to make up for it with breadth of applications.  I imagine that Zoho will soon grow and develop into a great business solution especially since that is their primary customer base unlike Google, but for now, I think it might need to mature a little more as a service.  Also it's mobile capabilities need further development beyond a mobile version of their website.  A product set such as these really needs good mobile integration.

The Business Model Canvas: KnitWeek

For my second business model canvas, I am creating a made-up company called KnitWeek.  KnitWeek is an infomediary business that aggregates current deals and trends in the knitting industry and collects information from the knitting community that is then sold to crafting businesses.  KnitWeek also utilizes weekly email newsletters, social forums such as Ravelry, Facebook, and Twitter, and partners such as Michael's and Hobby Lobby to connect with the community and to harvest data.

The Business Model Canvas: Shear P'zazz

We've been learning about business model canvasing based off of The Business Model Generation by Alexander Osterwalder and YvesPigneur.

For my first business model, I'm going to model the business Shear P'zazz.  Shear P'zazz is a hair salon that I worked at throughout high school.