Conceptual Clarity

It’s 5 hours before your publishing deadline.  Do you know where your web content is?

A simple question, but for many of the people I’ve been talking to recently, it’s something that can be frustratingly hard to answer with their web content management system. 

It seems that there are many other questions going unanswered out there in the web content community.  How old is my web site’s content?  Who are the most active authors?  Are there bottlenecks in my workflow?  Are there items abandoned in workflow limbo?

These questions have a common theme.  They’re focused on managing your content production process.  While WCM systems are fantastic at automating processes for generating web content it still falls to your content owners and administrators to manage the health of your content processes and adjust as required.

As requirements change and you seek to optimize content production the processes enshrined in your WCM need to change and optimize as well.  Like any business process you need metrics to be able to effectively optimize and manage the process implemented in your WCM.  Your content owners and administrators need to be able to run reports to monitor your content production and the health of your WCM on an ongoing basis.

Then, once you have these reports you need the tools to take action, and probably not just on a single content item.  If you’re going to optimize your content processes you’re likely to need to make multiple corrections and changes across your system. 

It’s these issues that have driven Ephox to develop WebRadar.  The vision for WebRadar is to enable content owners and administrators to be able to report on and analyze the content production experience for their WCM.  Then, once they see a problem, they need the tools to enable them to fix it, whether it’s on one item or one thousand.  

The launch of WebRadar 2.0 this week represents a great leap forward in achieving this.  WebRadar 2.0 enables users of the IBM Lotus Web Content Management System to create reports using any combination of the 20+ metadata fields that govern content processes in this system.  Content administrators will be able to get the insights they need to be able to optimize the content production experience throughout their system.  Then they’ll be able to affect the changes required to ensure content gets where it needs to go rapidly.

In the coming weeks I’ll explore the user feedback that’s been driving Ephox’s WebRadar roadmap and take a more detailed look at WebRadar feature set.  But if you’d like to take a test run with the software then you can take a look at webradarwcm.com or get in touch and we can organize a live demonstration.