Portals and CMS – Why You Need Them Both

paul.browning@bristol.ac.uk

Route map

• Environmental scan• What is a CMS?• What is a Portal? • How does the CMS relate to the Portal?• Demo (maybe some magic, if there’s time)• Some reflections

True confessions …

• We don’t (yet) have a centrally supported CMS

• We don’t have an institutional portal• We plan to have made decisions on both by

August 2002• What follows is a mix of vaporware,

prototypes and incomplete understanding

Environmental scan I

• From the viewpoint of a research-led University say five years ago:– The Web is not life threatening– The Web is another hassle – what is it replacing?– We’re over-subscribed with well qualified

candidates• “It’ll be very expensive to put a server in

Mexico”

The pre-millennial Web

• A hobby for someone• Apache on a file system• Highly manual methods of content creation and

maintenance• In effect a read-only medium• A spot of Perl• A Webmaster• Let the “professionals” get back to serious computing• “Three clicks away from crap”

Environmental scan II• From the viewpoint of a research-led University

today:– DDA 1995 & SENDA 2001 – September 2002– Perhaps the Web is career threatening?

• Let’s re-do the Web to make it accessible• Let’s re-paint the Forth Road Bridge again and again and

again• Let’s work harder rather than smarter

The pre-millennial Web can’t scale

• The pre-millennial Web is broken• We need a Web Content Management

System:– A web site is like a dog – it’s for life– We need to move beyond the “Freds in the

Shed”– We need a dynamic, automated, write-enabled,

de-skilled Web …..– ….. supported by a multi-skilled Web Team

(who never touch the content)

The content life cycle

The defining features of a CMS

• A CMS has substantial overlaps with DMS, VLEs, Groupware, Weblogs, Portals ….

• Browning & Lowndes (2001)– Versioning (checkout/in, rollback)– Workflow– Integration (“joinupability”)

• Not a finished product; a concept, a set of processes, a framework

CMS Portal√ x√ x√ √

The most desirable features of a CMS

1. Template-based self-service authoring for non-technical content providers (‘frictionless publishing’)

2. Roles-based security3. Workflow management - submit, review, approve, archive 4. Integration with existing data/databases and user

authentication systems 5. Metadata management6. Flexible output - write once, publish many times

(IWMW, 2000)

The Prospectus in 5 BC(Before Cms)

E-mail

Fax

Fag packet

Annotated copy of last year’s

Word

Departments

Word

Admissions

PageMaker

Marketing

Printer

Third party Webmaster

Web pages

Fourth party

The Prospectus in 5 AC(After Cms)

Browser Web pages

Printer

Departments Admissions Marketing Web Team

Browser

Browser

Browser

Browser

Standard

Text-to-speech

CD-ROM

CMS Robot

CMS in 2002

• If you haven’t got one or aren’t thinking about getting one then you either:

– Have a web site of less than 100 pages or– Have a web site with less than three authors or– Are probably dead meat

Portal

Managed Learning Environment (MLE)

Portal = MLE = VLE + CMS

Virtual LearningEnvironment (VLE)

eTools

Student Information System

DigitalLibrary

Content Management System (CMS)

eStrategy = an institutional understanding of these relationships?

What is a portal?

• Aggregates information and applications one stop shop

• Is personalised or ‘groupilised’ one size does not fit all

• Aspires to be your desktop on the Web Webtop

A portal:

Examples of portals

• Law Intranet• Blackboard• Amazon• Tesco• LSE for You

TABS

CHANNELS or PORTLETS

The benchmark? LSE For You

Room Booking Student Photo Boards Tuition Fees

Address Maintenance Emergency Contacts Private Accommodation

Exam Results Reprographics Usage Reprographics Jobs

Mailing Lists Teaching Timetable Payslips

Examination Details Class Mailer Locate a Study Room

Transcripts DPA Consent LSE Experts

Application Progress Collect Network Account Alumni Employment

Modules (=“channels”) already implemented

The benchmark? LSE For YouRoom Booking Teaching Timetable

The benchmark? LSE For YouAddress Maintenance Tuition Fees

What is a portal architecture? Why bother?

Webified

PIMS

IRIS

BOFINS

BORIS

Coda

Dolphin

Before (i.e. now) …..

Pseudo-webified

Desk-toppedInvisible

Lots of stovepipes of variable length …

User confusion?

What is a portal architecture?Aggregation

Webified

PIMS

IRIS

BOFINS

BORIS

Coda

Dolphin

After …..

Pseudo-webified

Desk-topped

Extending, bending and merging the stovepipes …

PORTALISED

Portalframework Portal

??

Happy User

What is a portal architecture?Personalisation= “stickiness”After …..

Portalframework Portal

Casual visitorProspective student

HoDStaff

Student

Show Room http://www.bris.ac.ukBack Office https://www.bris.ac.uk

Multiple views depending on user and/or device

Prospective employee

Ahem …. don’t some CMS do …• Aggregation (a.k.a. syndication)?• Personalisation?• And other bits of a portal framework?

• Conversant, Frontier (News/magazine type)• Vignette, Broadvision (E-business/e-commerce type)• Zope + CMF (Framework type)

Yes ….

Which is why you need to be clear about the join between the CMS and the portal

Dog’s dinner alert I ….

• what follows are just sketches• by someone with a poor sense of screen design• aimed at demonstrating some concepts• a future portal will not look like this!

The “back office” – student1

University of BristolSearch MyBristol Library Tools Publish

News and EventsTimetable

Progress FileTranscript

Filestore

Courses

Exams

Bookmarks

STUDENTph0044

My debt

My homeaddress

My termaddress

EDIT

EDIT

PAY

The “back office” - staff

University of BristolSearch MyBristol Library Tools Publish

News and EventsTimetable

Filestore

Courses

BOFINS

Bookmarks

STAFF

My parking

My homeaddress

My nextof kin

EDIT

EDIT

PAY

Porpoise

The “back office” – student2

University of BristolSearch MyBristol Library Tools Publish

The “back office” – a customisable Webtop

University of BristolSearch MyBristol Library Tools Publish

Publish Office file:

We got 15 five-stars!

wyziwyg

zlave

View of CMS and other content repositories to which

you have write access TTW editing into CMS

Tools to automagically upload, convert and publish

Office files

The portal is fundamentally

content-free – the CMS holds the

content

What makes a good portal framework?

• Interoperable (open standards)• Agnostic• Secure• Flexible (incl. “skins”)• Stable, scaleable, supportable• Future proof

Candidate portal frameworks?

• Blackboard Level 2 • Blackboard Level 3 - Now BB Learning System

£32k/annum + <= £60k consultancy for set-up?• Zope • Long list of payware options • Short list

– Oracle Portal ?– uPortal ?

Demo

• Is there time?• If not, and you’d like see it,

then back here @ 17:30

Oracle Portal demo

• Glasgow Caledonian

uPortal demo

• Delaware

Dog’s dinner alert II ….• what follows is a proto-prototype

• constructed by staff with other day jobs and some students• no concessions made w.r.t. usability or presentation• running on a desktop PC• aimed at demonstrating some concepts:

• Aggregation• Integration• Personalisation• Customisation

• a future portal will not look or work like this!

uPortal demo

• Bristol out of the box• Bristol prototype

What is a portal architecture?

Servlet container

Portal framework

XML/XSLT

Content Applicationserver

“Browsers”

Authenticationservice

PIMS, etc

Database

File system

Message store

News store

RSS feeds

Anything XML

CMS(Zope)

Views depending on user and/or device

WAP

PDF

Disabled

Applicant

Portal channel

The portal is fundamentally

content-free – the CMS holds the

content

LoadsaX’s to get our heads round

• XML• XSLT• XHTML

XMLXSLT

Applicationor Data XHTML

Browser

Printer

WAP

uPortal

We all need a Sebastian Rahtz!

Some reflections

• CMSPortal • Siloware vs. Glueware• Senior managers • Who’s the CTO?• IWMW 2003• Putting lipstick on bulldogs

CMSPortal

How we’d like things to be ….

SIS

PortalframeworkDigital

LibraryCMS

DNERAgnostic, open

standards compliant – plugs and sockets

… but how it often is

SIS

Portalframework

DigitalLibrary

CMS

DNER

Siloware

just sockets – “do it our

way”

Doncha love Senior Managers?• Why can’t we just use Google?• We don’t need a portal – we just need a

well-designed Web site• Our SIS is ‘Best of Breed’ so it must be

good• Why can’t we just use Outlook and

Exchange?

Who’s the CTO?• Your Director of IT Services?• UCISA? Siloware is often golfcourseware

– “It gets sold to senior executives by smooth-talking sales executives who claim their products solve every conceivable business problem, is a doddle to install, standards compliant, holographic user interfaces, everything.”

• SCONUL?• ALT?• JISC?• eEnvoy?• Who’s the CIO?

We need to be investing in glueware and the people who can use it

The Scaleable Web(IWMW 2003)

• Making it easy for the end-user means more complexity behind the scenes

• The increasing dynamic Web will start to fail as sites get busier

• Who in your institution is looking at:– Load balancing– Clustering– Cacheing

• Amazon & Tesco have• Overlaps with the GRID?

The technology is the easier bit"The worst thing you can do is to Web-enable a bad process," said Friedlein. "As a client once put it: 'There's no point in putting lipstick on a bulldog,'" he added.

Getting content management strategy right, ZD Net UK, Dec 12th, 2001, Geoff Choo

From Information Strategy to eStrategy?

Future performance target: Four clicks away from 7x24 crap

From Desktop to WebtopAn Information Systems Strategy?

Operationalprocessing

Maintrix

CARB

PIMS

Dolphin

Coda

User

Aleph

Envision

Sports

stellar

DataHub

Corporateinformation

eclipse

DataHaven

Informationdeployment

fsb

WebApplication

server

IRIS

VIOLET

Many readers,some writers

Multiple views,depending on role

Show Room http://www.bris.ac.ukBack Office https://www.bris.ac.uk

HEROProspective employee

The Portal

Prospective studentCasual visitor

HESAHoD

StaffStudent