If there’s a fundamental fact organizations ignore at their peril when creating a digital strategy and implementing a web content management system, it’s this: This stuff is difficult to get right. It’s not impossible, but there are enough landmines in any project that you need to plan rigorously for success.

That’s the spirit behind an upcoming ISITE Design-Sitecore webinar intended to help you prepare wisely for your next web content management initiative and avoid so-called “site killers” that can make your projects go off the rails.

The webinar on April 24, “Avoid Site Killers with Effective CMS Planning,” will benefit anyone implementing a new CMS in 2012 or rethinking a current CMS. The event complements a recent Sitecore White Paper in which ISITE Design’s Jeff Cram addresses the important (often overlooked) role of web governance planning.

Jeff, ISITE’s co-founder and publisher of ISITE’s sibling blog, The CMS Myth, will highlight five site killers that threaten to sink your CMS project. You’ll learn how effective web governance planning can make your organization happier and more productive with CMS.

The webinar will cover make-it-or-break-it governance issues:

• Making a real plan and asking, “How will we use the CMS?”
• Planning for large-scale roll-outs of dozens (or hundreds) of sites
• Aligning customer experience planning for multi-channel success
• Finding common ground between Marketing and IT
• Preparing for “day two” and post-launch success

When: April 24, 2-3 pm Eastern (11-12 Pacific)

Where: Register here for the webinar

Download the related white paper: “Content Management: The (New) Governance Manifesto”

Name just about any city or state, or a large government agency, and I’ll show you an organization constantly juggling the demands of serving its people and prioritizing budget dollars to get stuff done. For most cities the web, out of necessity, becomes an afterthought.

Not so for the City of Cambridge, Mass., where its strategic vision for serving citizens, businesses and visitors more effectively online has propelled the city be honored as the Best Government Website for 2012 by Sitecore, whose content management system is used across Cambridge’s websites.

It’s a thrill for ISITE Design to see the city, CIO Mary Hart and her team recognized for the work they’ve done to drive the city’s digital presence to new levels of success.

We’ve been involved in supporting the city for more than four years; it began with an initial Sitecore pilot and work has included multi-site CMS architecture and development, redesigns of key city sites, training of city staff on the CMS, and creation of a mobile app (Cambridge iReport App for iOS and Android) for people to report and get fixes for common problems: potholes, graffiti, burned out street lights.

Again, it’s not every day a city decides to put the focus on the web as much as Cambridge. Their efforts and focus provide lessons to other cities that are trying to determine how best to use the web – a good vision, well supported, and well executed, can deliver great online experiences.

For Cambridge, it’s been all about serving and communicating with the people of Cambridge more effectively, and delivering more online services and information to the diverse population of residents, people who work there, colleges and universities, and tourists/visitors.

I encourage you to check out the Cambridge websites built on Sitecore. Here are a few links:

• Cambridge Public Library website
• Cambridge Public Works website
• Main City of Cambridge website

You can also read a deeper synopsis here.

And, check out CIO Magazine’s recent coverage of the City of Cambridge’s mobile app for citizen reporting.

The New England Sitecore User Group meets on Wednesday, April 4, (6 pm pizza and networking, 6:30 program starts) at ISITE Design’s new Boston office (268 Summer Street, First Floor). close neighbor, Space with a Soul at 281 Summer Street, Boston (short walk from South Station). Sitecore’s Joe Henriques will spend an hour talking about the newest advances in Sitecore Version 6.5 including customer engagement, marketing and other capabilities.

He took a few minutes this week to preview his talk.

It’s been a while since you’ve talked to the Sitecore UG. What will you be focused on?

First off, thank you for inviting us down.  We are so impressed with the grass roots, community driven growth of the New England User Group, and how it’s driven by the entire Sitecore community and not one specific vendor or partner.

For this session we will focus on some of the new features in the Sitecore 6.5 release, specifically around Customer Engagement, and Sitecore Social Connected, Sitecore Design Importer, and new Sitecore technology integrations.

Describe the reception in the market to Version 6.5.

The reception has been outstanding.  Marketers are now looking way beyond just getting content out to the web or adding community features.  We have found that the educated marketer is looking to manage their content for all of their channels in a unified system. They need the ability to make that content available in the right format and at the right time. Sitecore 6.5, in a nutshell, provides an integrated solution to make available all relevant data to the marketer and assist in delivering a personalized content and user experience to each visitor. Furthermore, it offers a cross-channel engagement analytic engine to measure the results.

The ability to target content has driven real measured success to companies.  For instance, check out Easy Jet’s success due to implementing the Sitecore solution.

The Sitecore 6.5 release has also been widely viewed by analysts as one of the premiere Customer Engagement Platforms in the market. The Sitecore 6.5 solution is ranked as a leader in the most recent Gartner Magic Quadrant, being classified as providing the most Completeness of Vision for Customer Engagement.

What are the things Sitecore is focused on with this release – what is the “story”?

With the Sitecore 6.5 release we are focused on providing the marketer with power to drive marketing campaigns across all engagement channels.  Sitecore’s release provides a unified solution and user experience for marketers to manage all of their campaigns, social media, web content, landing pages, microsites, and analytic reporting needs.    By providing a single content repository to be shared across these channels and a robust analytic engine, Sitecore provides a solution built for content and feature reusability and personalization capabilities that meet business needs including increased sales and revenue.

A couple of the buzz words we have been hearing from marketers is that Sitecore has now provided them with the ability to not only create and react to a “Digital Fingerprint” (CRM or Social Media Profile Data) but at the same time react to the visitor’s “Digital Body Language” (The analytic data Sitecore provides through content profiling, goal scoring and conversions, Geo IP data, etc.).  This has been a real differentiator for Sitecore.

Can you preview a little of the roadmap you’ll be addressing at the user group? Where to next?

I hate to spoil the fun for the attendees so I won’t go into too much detail, but we will not stop at just providing the most completeness of vision for customer engagement.  Our roadmap is filled with solutions that empower marketers to merge siloed channels, provide even more analytic insight through Business Intelligence Reporting, and simplify the process of building and managing digital campaigns.

As always, we will not leave out our roots, which is the development community.  Developers can expect some great additions to an already unbelievable development platform, but you will need to come to the meeting on the 4^th to find out more …

You’re continuing to grow in 2012. Tell me about it.

Yes, Sitecore continues to grow its footprint in North America.  Recently we doubled the size of our Chicago office, created a center of excellence at our Manchester, NH, office, and started the process of educating our diverse partner channel on implementation through our Specialization Program.

Why this is news worthy? Sitecore provides a stellar solution for customer engagement, but in providing this type of technology, it becomes even more important to have such a great partner channel to deliver on this vision.   It is our belief that no company offering a Customer Engagement platform can deliver on marketers and IT needs through a professional service offering, but instead it needs to be delivered from the organizations that have embraced the knowledge and have built out the strategy of implementing a robust solution.  At Sitecore we have been blessed with working with the best, and it is our belief that working together we will easily surpass our customer’s goals of a unified, cross channel, digital marketing platform.

And, you’ve announced the 2012 Sitecore conference?

Yes. The Sitecore Symposium for North America will be in Las Vegas this year from October 22^nd to the 24^th.  This year will have separate tracks from Marketers and Business Users, Developers, and Partners.

The New England Sitecore User Group meets monthly in Boston. Membership consists of nearly 200 Sitecore developers, online marketers, CMS administrators from both client and agency organizations. The New England Sitecore User Group is the largest Sitecore user group in the world. Get involved here.

Our web governance white paper with Sitecore focused on five site killers that may sink your CMS project. One of the biggest killers is when you rush the upfront planning. Over and over we’ve seen an unhealthy dynamic evolve with organizations trying to get the site up as fast as possible.

I don’t believe anyone wants to intentionally shortchange their implementation and future success, but this pressure is built into the way CMS is bought and sold. Especially in situations where there are multiple vendors vying for the business. We discuss this challenge in the whitepaper:

“There’s always timeline pressure to launch a site, especially in the sales process. When the client is looking at different vendors, each one gets more aggressive in their promises to win the business. This pressure often reduces or eliminates the really important aspects of the planning phase. It’s short-term thinking that doesn’t bode well for the long-term return on investment. You can build a site in a month, but it won’t last for five years.”

Part of the challenge is that organizations often put the cart before the horse in purchasing the CMS before they do the strategy and planning. Once you have the product in hand, there is a sense or urgency to roll up your sleeves and start working with it.

Proper CMS planning takes discipline and a willingness to slow the process down in order to have a platform that lasts many (many) moons.

You can read more about web governance in the 14-page whitepaper, Content Management, The (new) Governance Manifesto. Let us know what you think.

I’m just wrapping up a full day workshop with Sitecore in their spiffy new East coast headquarters. The topic: Sitecore’s Digital Marketing System, part of its new Customer Engagement Platform, and a central focus of its product roadmap.

The workshop is part of a new training curriculum and planning framework Sitecore is rolling out to help partners and customers better implement and adopt DMS.

It’s a welcome focus because DMS has been a very complicated proposition to date. In part because of the ambitious vision Sitecore has embarked on. They are combining what most people use 4-5 different products for into a single platform.  E-mail, web analytics, personalization all rolled into one.

We’re working with several clients right now to plan and implement Sitecore DMS-driven engagement strategies. This involves a comprehensive process to define target personas, identify goals, map content and then implement it within Sitecore.

The mistake most organizations make is thinking this is a technology-driven exercise. Clients may call us up saying “can you turn on DMS?” but quickly realize the strategic planning necessary to leverage it.

It represents a new way of thinking about your digital strategy and content. What used to be a single site that catered to all of your different stakeholders can now become multi-channel experiences that uniquely targets specific individuals. What’s more is that consumers are now expecting this coordination to happen.

We’ve been revamping our own consulting processes around these ideas and I’m excited to take what I learned here and start to put it into action with some of our clients. We’ll be blogging more on the topic in the coming weeks.

Have you been working with DMS? Leave a comment with your experiences.

I’m excited about our recent web governance white-paper we co-published with Sitecore because it’s a topic that gets very little attention.

A content management system is such a complicated technical project, it’s easy to forget about what needs to be put around it to succeed. We’ve been blogging about this on The CMS Myth for the last five years and are passionate on the topic.

This quote of ours from the whitepaper sums it up perfectly:

“So many things need to happen before a CMS is chosen, yet most organizations rush into this technology decision unprepared. The CMS is viewed as a silver bullet solution; organizations buy into this idea in the sales cycle, but are unwilling to invest in the people, processes and strategy necessary to see it succeed. When the project fails, these organizations will typically blame the technology. It’s what we call the “CMS Myth.”

For as far as we’ve come with web content management, we still see technology led projects. The organizations that prioritize the people and processes before the technology are overwhelmingly more successful (in our experiences).

If you haven’t read the full 14-page web governance report yet, it’s a free download off our site. Let us know what you think.

We recently collaborated with Sitecore on a new whitepaper titled “Content Management: The New Governance Manifesto.”

Sitecore interviewed myself and Randy Woods from non linear on the topic of web governance. We cover the five top “site killers” that are obstacles to running a successful digital channel and CMS.

The result is a nice 14-page whitepaper on web governance. A topic, by the way, that gets very little focus or attention.

We’ll be blogging about it more in the coming weeks, but you can download the report for free on our website. Let me know what you think if you read it.

Title: Proxies and Clones in Sitecore
Speaker: Dan Solavoy of Grand Circle Travel
When: 6:00pm EST
Where: The meetup will be held at ISITE Design’s offices, which are near the Kendall Square T stop.

To RSVP and for full meetup details, please visit our Meetup page:
http://www.meetup.com/Sitecore-User-Group-New-England/

Within Sitecore, Proxies are a mechanism for representing content from one location within another branch of the Content Tree. The technology is fairly old, and has its limits, but also its uses. Cloning is a relatively new Sitecore feature that essentially exposes the concept of value inheritance (with override) between copies of a given content Item. Dan and his team at Grand Circle have implemented both solutions.

If you’re in the Boston area, hope to see you there!

There’s a lot of smart thinking and doing out in the Sitecore ecosystem. We want to tap into that knowledge and share your best lessons with others working in Sitecore.

Take two minutes to answer two questions in our Sitecore Wisdom Report survey. We’ll compile the answers –all your lessons learned, advice, best practice tips, developer tricks, organizational stories, etc. — and publish them in a few weeks in the Sitecore Wisdom Report.

You’ll automatically be entered to win an iPad (we’ll choose the name of one lucky winner who takes the survey) and we’ll send you a copy of the report when it publishes.

You don’t need to be a wordsmith, or long-winded. Short and snappy answers are as great as long and verbose answers. (And, you can share your wisdom anonymously, or give your name/company/website affiliation for publication — your choice.)  Submit your wisdom here.

As a solutions architect, I have had the opportunity to review a diverse set of Sitecore installations authored by folks all over the United States. One common source of implementer and administrator consternation involves successfully implementing Sitecore’s Workflow feature. Unfortunately, the name “workflow” is charged with dozens of subtle expectations. Implementation is further complicated by the fact that Sitecore does not explicitly train developers on the use of the Workflow feature. It’s an exercise “left to the reader”. These are unfortunate circumstances; at its heart Sitecore’s Workflow system is very simple, and requires minimal setup for success. In this post, I’m going to cover the rules of thumb to get a sustainable Workflow implementation running on Sitecore.

Know the correct use for Sitecore Workflow

At its heart, the Workflow feature’s sole purpose is to flag a given version of a content item as being finalized, ergo: approved for publication. Workflow design should be anchored around this fact. Workflow should have one (and only one) “Workflow State” marked “Final”. This “final” workflow state should be the last workflow state for a given workflow. Many developers try to “disable” workflow by marking all states as final, or introduce a “final” workflow state at the beginning of workflow for a “publish-then-approve” effect. Both implementations have consequences that confuse the user and clog up the content database. 

Aside from the obvious reasons for ending Workflow in a single, final state, there’s an architectural assumption in Sitecore that cannot be ignored. The “final” workflow state signals Sitecore that an Item version is no longer available for editing. If a user attempts to edit an Item Version that is in a workflow state marked final, Sitecore will create a new Version of that Item for the user. In the scenarios listed above, the original versions will never progress to a “finalized” state from the user’s perspective, and will remain to clutter the workbox indefinitely.

Recommendation: One workflow state marked final at the end of the workflow process, to indicate that an Item version has progressed through review and is approved for publication.

Know how to assign Workflow to a Template’s Standard Values

Workflow should always be assigned to a Standard Values Item using the Review tab, as shown below.

Avoid accessing the Standard Fields to set Workflow, as it’s a common source of developer confusion. If Workflow is set using the Ribbon, this is what the Standard Fields should look like:

Note that the Workflow and State fields are blank.  This is correct for a Standard Values item, as these fields reflect the Workflow and State for a particular instance of an Item type. If you’re looking for a hint, look for Standard Values items in the Workbox, where they normally would not appear. Chances are, someone filled the Workflow and State fields accidentally. Clear them to return your installation to normal.

Shunt between Workflow States, not Workflows

In the image above, note that the Workflow field is “shared”. This indicates that all Versions in all Languages of a given Item will use the value of this field. If you programmatically alter the value of this field, the effect is universal. This is a good hint that architecturally, Sitecore was not designed to support moving Items between workflows. The solution? Consolidate all the various workflow states across all disparate workflows and use Workflow Commands to select the appropriate path between Workflow States. In addition to being more Sitecore-compliant, this solution has the benefit of being code-free.

Separate Security Concerns to Reduce your Workflow Complexity

While Sitecore Security is a post all its own, it merits consideration here. Sitecore uses three different security concerns to evaluate the authority of a user’s actions:

When designing your security scheme, ensure that each of your security roles addresses one and only one of the concerns above. One should note that Sitecore does not follow this advice itself. The “Sitecore Client Authoring” role is shipped with a set of Workflow security settings that need to be cleared in order to establish the separation described above.

In theory, all users belong to three security roles, one for each of the concerns above. The first role specifies access to Sitecore features, the second the rights for Items in the content tree, and the third access to various Workflow states and Actions.

Benefits of this security model:

• Allows you to add access to Sitecore features without having to worry about a user’s Item security
• Allows you to create fine-grained access to parts of the Content Tree without worrying about workflow permissions
• Allows you to promote a user’s workflow rights without changing any other aspect of their security scheme.
• In most cases, allows you to use a single workflow for the entire installation.

The last point is key. In order for a User to see an Item in the Workbox, they need “write” access to the Item as well as the language(s) of relevant versions. The user also needs “Workflow Write” access to the Workflow State of the relevant version(s). To move those versions to a new Workflow State, they need Workflow Command Execute rights on at least one Command for that Workflow State. Understanding this architectural detail allows workflow to be extremely flexible without creating multiple workflows. One simply creates security roles for a number of workflow personas (tyipcally this involves an editor and an approver role).  These workflow roles apply permissions only to objects in Sitecore/System/Workflow and therefore can be used by any person who has access to any part of the content tree. It is the content tree security that refines what the user “sees” in the Workbox.

Takeaways

We’ve covered a lot of ground on Workflow philosophy. Here’s the digest version:

• Use workflow to control whether a Version of an Item is publishable
• Set the default workflow in the Standard Values of your Data Templates using the Ribbon, not the Standard Fields
• Create a single Workflow for your project and use Workflow States to manage content lifecycles
• Separate Workflow security from Item security in your Role definitions

Follow these simple steps to simplify your life when it comes to Sitecore administration. Happy configuring!