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Not Content To Manage Documents


Developers are using content management systems as underpinnings for project management

By Yvonne L. Lee
March 15, 2004 — 
Corporate developers have found that content management products, which now feature scripting languages and APIs, can form the basis of more elaborate information systems. Content management originated as proprietary document archival systems but now run on Internet protocols, and with some programming have formed the underpinnings of portals and intranets.

orporate developers have found that content management products, which now feature scripting languages and APIs, can form the basis of more elaborate information systems. Content management originated as proprietary document archival systems but now run on Internet protocols, and with some programming have formed the underpinnings of portals and intranets.

"It's flat-out VBScript. If you can write VBScript, you can tailor it to do whatever you want," said Ruben Santiago, Internet technologist at Palo Alto, Calif.-based insurance company California Casualty Management Co., of the Ektron Inc. CMS 200 system he used for the company's intranets.

Santiago looked at content management systems after corporate downsizing put him in the position of having to single-handedly update intranets running on 30 servers.

"It all stems from a reduction in force we had, and I was the only one left to manage the intranet," he said. At that point, he had to update pages he previously supervised.

The system his company bought cost US$5,000, which was much less than the salaries of the cut employees, and less than Microsoft Corp.'s Content Management Server. He needed something that could be customized quickly and didn't require a heavy technical background.

"We're primarily a Microsoft shop, and [the alternative of] open source isn't really our thing because we have no resources to study up on it," he said. Moving to open source would not only involve learning new languages and tools, it would also require staying abreast of changes in the tools, he said.

While Santiago used the Ektron content management system to manage many Web sites with little manpower, Richard Brown, e-health manager at St. David's HealthCare Partnership in Austin, used it to bring a consistent appearance to Web sites updated by a number of people.

The system uses templates to standardize sites that could be maintained by nontechnical staff. Each hospital has its own intranet, but the sites retain a common corporate appearance, he said. In addition, he appreciated being able to limit particular areas of the page for updating. That way, the nontechnical staff could update data without altering the appearance of the page. He said the program also provided a way to update dynamic data by using a scripting language and by including header information linking to other files on the system.

Like Santiago, Brown said he appreciated the Ektron system's integration with Microsoft tools, but he pointed out that it also worked with other languages, including PHP and ColdFusion. In addition, it gathered data from databases such as Microsoft's Access and SQL Server, MySQL and Oracle9i, he said.

The system replaced e-mail and proprietary information systems that Nashville, Tenn.-based health-care services provider Hospital Corporation of America, a part owner of St. David's, had developed. It was more efficient than e-mail for exchanging large files and provided a better integrated system than the proprietary system did, he said.

In addition, Web assets could be annotated with information about which sites used them, he said.

CONVENIENCE AND FLEXIBILITY
Because many of the systems offer scripting, APIs and links to external programs, they combine the convenience of an out-of-box product with the flexibility of a custom-developed tool, said Raj Anantharaman, manager for Web development at Cerner Corp., a supplier of health-care information technology solutions based in Kansas City, Mo.

"We took the tool and took the core components, then bolted on a lot of add-ons," he said. "We used about 50 to 60 percent of the core that we had, and then we added another 5,000 lines of code to make the portals do what we wanted. We added a lot of functionality."

Anantharaman said he thought content management systems could be added to programmers' toolkits as a basis for developing communication systems.

"Developers have a tendency to go back and write everything," he said. "There is this core functionality that can be taken and used to write other applications."

The engineering department at Agfa Corp., the U.S. subsidiary of Belgium-based imaging company Agfa-Gevaert Group, has built several projects based on Stellent Inc.'s Universal Content Management, starting with a document retrieval system in 1997 and moving to a system that manages and automates the process of designing new machinery.

It incorporates CAD drawings, feature requests, bug-tracking and workflow management documents.

"What we built is the majority," said Chester Holleran, senior manager for central engineering at Agfa. "I would have to call the content management part a big enabler. Down at the root of everything is this big repository. We decided to make a poor man's product document management [system]. We contracted for a few extensions to the standard Stellent product and built our own information on top of that." The product document system managed changes to CAD drawings and comments made about product revisions in the company's imaging products, he said.

While Anantharaman and Holleran said they believe content management systems can be used as a springboard for development projects, Darrell Delahoussaye, project portfolio manager for engineering procurement construction systems at San Francisco-based construction giant Bechtel Corp., said he thinks the systems can be used to manage development projects.

"Web content management is a low value if that's all it's focused on. When we talk about content, the Web piece is just a presentation," he said. "The content that you're managing is part of a business process. It could be a document, it could be an image, it could be almost anything."

ROOM FOR ALL
Still, Delahoussaye said these tools don't replace traditional code configuration management tools such as Microsoft's Visual SourceSafe.

"They all have a place," he said. "I'm not saying that one completely replaces the other. The big thing about content management products is they manage the business process, and developing software is a business. A content document management system is far more capable [than a software configuration management product] from a business standpoint. What's produced in Visual SourceSafe is work in progress that a management tool can use to manage the actual delivery of that piece of software."

While the traditional content management tools handle and annotate the changes as the software is developed, the content management system can track things like management comments on the latest release and feature requests. Both kinds of products can handle version control and bug-tracking. Bechtel has integrated

its Documentum Inc. content management system with Microsoft's Visual SourceSafe code management tool so that developers can work together on building software while Documentum tracks the approval process and documentation.

Agfa's Holleran said he prefers using code management software to manage the software development process.

"Simulators, code checkers, you can do what's called code branching so that you can do variations of code-they are not present in a general-purpose repository," he said. "The software engineers need and want those things."


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