Monthly Archives: November 2006

ECM

ECM Vendor Presentations – stick to the script, guys!

The Portable Consultant’s recent RFP was whittled down to two or three vendors and this was the week they did their demo presentations, the penultimate step in the process (all that’s left is price negotiations).

Although our RFP is for a web content management (WCM) system, the client has been interested in enterprise content management (ECM) vendors from the start because:

1) they have no ECM systems currently in place and…

2) at least some of the business case for the WCM overlapped with ECM functionality.

We reinforced this thinking with a WCM RFP that also touched on document management (DM), records management (RM), and digital asset management (DAM) requirements.

As designed, the RFP scoring scheme brought to the top the WCM vendors for whom WCM was just one component of a full ECM suite. The leaders each have full-blown ECM solutions which include WCM, DM, RM (including physical records), DAM, and imaging. This minimizes integration and simplifies pricing, maintenance, and support.

The WCM project team managed to prepare a tightly scripted demo outline that the vendors were told to follow. We didn’t want them simple display their respective strong points and leave us trying to compare apples with oranges. Our script touched on most of the demonstrable features that we listed in our RFP, anyway. There was no reason to go anywhere else because all the scored points were in the script.

So, although all vendors demonstrated what amounted to full ECM functionality the one that stuck most closely to the script is the one that got the client’s full attention… no one in the audience had to worry about what feature was being demonstrated, they just followed a printed checklist.

All the shortlisted vendors’ products met the requirements, but the vendor who stuck to the script is the one that left the most positive impression.

The moral of the story: if you are using a formal RFP process to select ECM (or other) solutions, consider scripting their demonstration and sync RFP requirements. If you’re a vendor, be sure you stick to the script.

Cheers,
-pmh

New Media

The Economist nails Yahoo as “old new media”

The Economist in agreement with The Portable Consultant
Back in January of 2006 The Portable Consultant mumbled something about YouTube and wondered online why Fickr hadn’t added video, suggesting that their acquisition by Yahoo had sucked the innovation out of them. Now, many months and several video startups later, it appears that Webshots and Flickr are finally getting the (moving) picture.

The Economist agrees with this blog in an article sub headed “New media struggles to age gracefully.”

Chunky or Smooth?
Having briefly been Yahoo’s “next door neighbour” with the Open Text Index search engine back in 1995, it is also painful to read the Peanut Butter Manifesto. I feel deeply for the frustration of a cool, agile company growing up and having to please its shareholders every three months.

Chunky or smooth, there’s enough Peanut Butter to go around.

Cheers,
-pmh

Search Engines

Crawl all over me now, Baby!

XML sitemaps protocol adopted by major search engines
XML sitemaps (as opposed to the graphical or people-readable list sitemaps) are a way for search engines to index web pages more easily/efficiently… Google has been using them for a while and now Yahoo and MSN have agreed to come on board.

The assumption is that if a search engine can index you more easily then your ranking will be more “accurate.” Internet ecologists might also hope this will reduce network traffic (thereby freeing up valuable bandwidth for spam!).

The Portable Consultant is not very concerned about his blog traffic at this point, but now that some big engines are using the same protocol it seemed like a good time to look into how this might be done in WordPress.

Of course a WordPress sitemap plugin was immediately located. Written by Arne Brachhold, it provides a simple setup screen and connects to Google by default. After a quick test the plugin was installed and it immediately pinged Google to let them know important data was ready for them and, in turn, you.

Yahoo seems to require a more complex process and I had trouble finding the instructions (they’re here). MSN will, of course, be the last to implement sitemap registration.

Now some major search engines will know that this posting is ready to index so that I can tell you, dear blogger, how to increase the ease with which your blog postings will discovered by readers in London, New York, Tokyo, and One Tree Hill.

Cheers,
-pmh