Intranet Journal
The online resource for intranet professionals
The Multi-Site Management Balancing Act
10/20/2004
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In today's business world, the Web has become the standard for widespread communication. And for disseminating targeted information to specific audiences, Web sites are a convenient, relatively inexpensive, and efficient method. But one Web site is seldom enough. Rapid improvements in technology, combined with rapid user adoption of the Web, have resulted in an ever-increasing consumer demand for new information and organizations' never-ending need to distribute it to customers, prospects, partners, employees, investors, and analysts.
This dramatic increase in content has led to an explosion in the number of Web sites — including public-facing, secure intranet, and extranet sites — and the ongoing management of multiple Web sites is now a reality for most medium to large organizations. New sites going up daily include "micro-sites" for new product launches; separate, localized Internet sites for geographic locations; intranets to circulate internal corporate information; and extranets to support partner relationships.
Each of these types of sites has its own set of business drivers and requirements, but virtually all company Web sites face one common challenge: how to balance the need for centralized, consistent architecture; security; messaging; and branding guidelines with the flexibility to manage and respond locally to line-of-business needs. Few Web content management systems on the market can support these requirements, nor do they have a methodology to promote reuse, collaboration, customization, and decentralization within a controlled, managed environment.
Companies must find a balance between maintaining central control of major site aspects to ensure a consistent message is delivered and giving business units, geographic locations, and franchises the freedom necessary to develop and manage their own Web sites to best support their business functions. Without a multi-site content management solution, conquering this challenge can be a monumental and expensive task.
Multi-Site Content Management Best Practices
There are three key design elements that drive the success of multi-site implementations. Content management solutions that automate these best practices are most fully equipped to expedite Web site deployments and ease the process of maintaining Web sites. These elements include:
In addition to the automation of the above best practices, companies should consider the following key requirements and functionality when evaluating multi-site content management offerings.
A multi-site system should include a common repository that houses brand-sensitive digital assets (such as logos) and easily enforces brand consistency through template technology that separates content from its presentation. In addition, the solution should promote content re-use, allowing organizations to make changes to content and designs once — in the native document saved in the content repository — with the revisions reflected across all Web sites.
A template-based approach to site development not only enforces brand consistency, it also provides non-technical business users with an easy, point-and-click method for designing layouts and editing content. This functionality often can shorten development schedules by weeks.
Like templates, a WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) design interface can ease the process of developing Web sites for non-technical users. This interface enables users to create pages and drop in placeholders, standing elements, and pre-built components, while viewing exactly how these elements will be displayed on the site.
In order to decentralize the process of creating and managing Web sites, business units must be empowered to administer the users and roles of its own sites. As a result, multi-site systems must allow business units to easily assign and change roles and set permissions at a granular level, so individuals, groups, and departments obtain access rights that match their responsibilities and roles for operating the site.
Many business units often circumvent corporate standards and implement rogue sites due to the inflexibility of corporate Web sites and their underlying content management solutions. Effective multi-site management systems must allow some unique functionality, such as derivative page designs, and facilitate the management of these variations so the Web sites can still leverage other aspects of the system and other components created elsewhere in the organization.
To minimize the labor involved in creating and updating site content, multi-site content management systems should automate routine and repetitive tasks, such as document conversion, categorization, and routing for review and approval. The system also should dynamically manage page navigation and in-site links, so content authors do not need to maintain them manually.
As multi-site content management systems prove they can reduce Web site development time and costs, their use can quickly grow throughout an organization, from dozens of sites to potentially hundreds. Systems must have the ability to scale to handle an unlimited number of micro-sites, the administration of a growing user base and the management of tremendous amounts of content.
Corporate staff must be able to lock Web components that should not be edited at the business-unit level, while still allowing for editing of other components that may appear on the same Web page. Consequently, multi-site systems must have a security model that selectively authorizes groups and individuals to edit, review, approve and view content, not only at the site level but down to specific folders and files.
In order to fully leverage an organization's technology investments, a multi-site content management system should easily integrate with existing infrastructure and architecture, both at the application server and Web server levels. The system should provide a unified database architecture that enables content and components to be easily shared across sites and business units.
Reaping the Benefits of Multi-Site Management
Successful multi-site content management implementations can generate numerous, substantial benefits for companies. Organizations who have adopted this type of system report shortened development times for new Web sites, often shaving weeks, if not months, off their former schedules. They are cutting the costs of launching new sites and of maintaining existing sites, and seeing expenses drop by 50 percent or more.
Companies also are experiencing boosts in productivity, improved consistency in branding across sites, better quality of Web content and higher volumes of material they're able to publish — without increasing head count. In addition, organizations are able to reduce time to market, redirect staff resources to other critical business initiatives, and more easily maintain their worldwide Web presences.
Since the advent of the Internet, companies have been challenged to find the most effective ways to leverage the Web to support business objectives. For many organizations, this means building and deploying multiple Web sites to support specific business needs (e.g., new product launches, partner/supplier communications, and internal policy distribution).
Multi-site content management systems provide an effective means for overcoming the challenges of managing numerous Web sites and generate significant business benefits in a relatively short period of time. But, as impressive as the short-term results of multi-site systems can be, of equal significance are the long-term implications — these solutions can create a unified platform that enables businesses to sustain the growth of their Web sites well into the future.