Category Archives: ECM

Enterprise Content Management (ECM): Web Content Management Systems (CMS or WCM), Document Management, E-Mail, Collaboration Systems, Groupware, and more.

ECM, Ramblings

Simple personalization would save bank cash

ThePortableConsultant’s bank has just altered his service plan to get rid of returned paper cheques. Such progress!

For a $2 fee, however, they will send the cheque images, unless you have premium service in which case there is no fee.

This is clearly spelled out on the statement. You can phone their call centre to ask for this service or select the cheque image service in your online profile.

However, if you go to set the online profile you’re told there is a $2 fee. The page where you select the option is not personalized and there is no mention that with the premium plan there would be no charge.

Although any consultant would know that the bank would eventually straighten out any billing errors, this Portable Consultant chose to use the call centre instead. This is a cost that the bank could have avoided if they had simply personalized the option selection page OR if they had reiterated on the page that premium plans would not be charged the fee.

Thousands of other customers must have seen that charge and phoned the call centre for an explanation. Since this consultant was told the call was being recorded it’s possible, though not probable I suppose, that the issue will be noted.

This is particularly ironic because the Portable Consultant in question had once applied for a position managing this particular bank’s online services’ CMS team. 🙂

-pmh at ThePortableConsultant.com

ECM, Open Source

A collaborative open source CMS – Part 1: Early Considerations

2 Comments

OSCOM3 banner

memories of OSCOM3
It has been almost two and a half years since my visit to OSCOM3, the open source content management conference held at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. OSCOM3 introduced me to some great open source CMS solutions. Since then I’ve used the OSS CMS Plone as a platform for my (now out of date) OSS repository and run Xoops, a decendent of the popular PHPnuke, under VMware on my home PC for fun and amusement.

Now that I’ve got some cycles to go a bit further I want explore some open source CMS solutions for a pet project of mine.

some prerequisites
This project involves setting up a closed (not public) community for a private event. I am looking for the following features:

    o Open source – for cost reasons, but also because of the large number of solutions available driven by active and dedicated developers working with current technologies and able to provide online support.

    o LAMP platform – because Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP are so popular and widespread that good shared hosting services are available and inexpensive. The entry level costs are low and the quality high.

    o Focus on collaboration & community features – there are lots of open source CMSs out there. One list has 95 of them. Each OS CMS development team has their own take on features and priorities. I’m specifically interested in those that stress collaborative features and have good calendars.

    o Easy – to deploy, administer, install additional feature modules, backup, and explain & train.

The last requirement, easy to explain & train, is important because I will need to promote the service in general and I expect these communities will not have experience of whichever open source CMS I select and will need an intuitive interface for basic users and group administrators.

As of today, I have a hosting provider with the preferred LAMP platform (they host this blog, if you hadn’t guessed) and I’ve used the handy-dandy Fantastico installation wizard to install three test sites.

a roadmap
I plan to use this project to discuss open source, content management, and some related best practices in the area of collaboration and perhaps document management. Although this is a small project, I expect it will touch on many points that might be of interest to those who may be selecting and deploying similar sorts of solutions, especially open source.

Oh, which CMSs have I installed? At this point I’m working with Drupal, Joomla, and Xoops. (You’ll notice that open source has a tendency to creative names!). If none of these are on your own CMS of choice, that’s ok. The selection considerations and issues will be of interest to almost anyone working with similar collaboration solutions, whether open source or not.

a point or two
One point: this will not be a How-To of OSS CMS deployment. I’m more interested in the Why. There are lots of technical resources that discuss the plumbing – as a consultant and architect I prefer to stand back from the details in order to look at the bigger picture. I’ll be working on these sites, hands-on… but I’ll only go into the messy details in order to make a point.

A second point: I would have liked to consider Plone, the extremely popular open source portal that runs on top of the Zope Framework. In my case that wasn’t an option because Zope/Plone hosting is significantly more expensive than the hosting services that cater to PHP-based applications. This is because of the higher system requirements necessary to host an application server based on the Python language. In the case of Zope, the database is also likely more demanding than MySQL or PostgreSQL (an OSS alternative to MySQL). I would love to hear from anyone who has done capacity planning for Plone versus PHP-based solutions.

Cheers,
-pmh

ECM, Infrastructure Architecture

Should Adam Curry be excited about his Gmail account quota?

“08:20 Adam loves Gmail. Great because of the large storage space available. Works well for receiving audio comments. Also loves search based e-mail. As of today, Adam’s quota is 4GB.” – Adam Curry’s show notes for The Daily Source Code podcast, Daily Source Code 248

$3.42 worth of excitement?
Hey, I think that Gmail is great too! But I thought it would be interesting to put this in perspective in terms of IT economics.

Google has given Adam Curry, Podcaster Extrordinaire, 4Gb of storage. Around here you can buy a 200Gb external USB drive for about $0.85 USD per Gb. Just how excited should you be about a $3.42 service?

Now, Gmail must be using a fault-tolerant storage architecture that likely involves mirroring (2x the number of disks required for a given amount of data) and/or RAID-3 or RAID-5 (roughly an additional 30% space required for the parity data necessary to recover from a failed disk).

So, the 4Gb of storage may require as much as 6Gb x 2 = 12Gb and these large arrays are made up of individual disks that are significantly more expensive per unit than the disk in my local computer store (faster spindle speed of 15K versus 7K, larger buffer, faster interface). But an efficient storage area network (SAN) based on serial ATA disks (SATA) or even a directly attached storage array (DAS) brings costs down a lot – even after software and management costs are considered.

This is not a rigorous analysis, but my guess is that Adam’s 4Gb. is costing Gmail less than $6 USD per Gb per year on an efficiently utilized SAN. Ok… that’s $24 or $2 per month. Add bandwidth and overhead costs to get the full picture.

Alternatives to Gmail for the enterprise.
For business, there are commercial alternatives to Gmail. An enterprise may chose to dispense go to a private online mail service. Such services carry no advertising and can offer the same storage and search capabilities. To maintain the organization’s brand they will use your organization’s Internet domain name.

Another alternative, if your organization is large enough, is to run your own web-based mail server (and I’m not referring to Microsoft’s Outlook Web Access, OWA).

But even for large businesses, there are good reasons to outsource mail to a service that will not only provide superior search capabilities, but also will provide records management and archiving that will comply with government and other legal requirements for data retention and retrieval.

I’ll have more to say on the requirements of enterprise e-mail another time.

What is Adam worth to Gmail, anyway?
Getting back to Gmail: For Adam, the search facility is worth a lot. That’s really Gmail’s added value for him. Of course Google expects to make money on Gmail accounts through advertising. That’s not my area of expertise, but I’d be interested to hear how much a power user like Adam is actually worth to Gmail… not counting the promotional factor of regular mentions of the Gmail brand in The Daily Source Code podcast.

Cheers!
-pmh