A Sideways Step For The Sake Of Rebranding

Date: May 15th, 2012 by Bob Kraai

This post describes the need to roll out a partial look of the new site before it's ready due to branding and marketing needs. A sideways step...

The trials of wearing many hats in a small company come into play every waking moment of the life of a small company CEO. Since the last Blog post, I've hired a new CSO, Troy Ross, and changed the company name at his urging. I've been working full time on a project for a client and filling in on a number of other clients. I've been educating my new sales team, and somewhere in there I've been working on our web site.

My Social Community Builder went on maternity leave. She has no backup, so that means we take a break on the progress she was making as well has her own education in the market and in being a Community Builder.

I could not wait on the rolling out the basic look of the site. With merging in AceCP and ApplicationONE, and hiring an influential CSO, the site has to have some of the updates before they are ready to roll out. That meant that without building all the necessary templates, without finishing the integration of the WEM and Portal, the raw HTML needs to be massaged around the existing site information. This is not an ideal step, and does not move the project forward. However, it does have the appearance of progress, and that is what counts today.

The installation and configuration of the software requires a nice article explaining some of the decisions and the timeframe that went into it. As I do with customers, I made step by step notes of the configuration so that maintenance does not have to rest on the shoulders of the implementation "team". It is on my task list to write that article.

So, what you see on the site is an example of the template vision. It's NOT the complete vision, but gets us by and allows us to iterate into the rebranding and re-architecture. The active pieces that would normally be connected to the back end (like the calendar, this blog, search, login, ratings and comments, dynamic icons with channel descriptions, dynamic Highlights, the question marks, Dialog integration, and others) are there for viewing, but will not "work" like an integrated site.

So, this is a step sideways for the site projects, but a small step forward for rebranding.

Enjoy,

---Bob

About our somewhat silent name change

Date: April 4th, 2012 by Bob Kraai

We made a company name change with the State effective April 1st to take advantage of the easier to say and spell ApplicationONE name. This name was part of a partnership that was running along side AceCP and Kraai Consulting. It also is a much better representation of who we are and what we are up to now and in all our future planning.

Application One was founded in November of 2010 as an SAP consulting firm. The intention at the time was to roll Kraai Consulting up into that potentially profitable ERP business vertical. The choice of the Application One name was intended to allow for more open ended consulting (Content Management, ERP/Business Software, and others). The full name was Application Consultants, Inc originally, and the domain name search turned up aci1.com. We started to refer to it as Application Consultants One, and then we dropped the Consultants to make it Application One. ApplicationOne.com was taken, but ApplicationOne.net was not, so I reserved that along with aci1.com. Then we moved forward with the SAP consulting "arm".

During the course of 2011, the SAP consulting did not grow as expected due to a number of factors. While profitable and having a big impact on the customers we did work with, AppONE was not a success as a partnership. Thus, the partnership dissolved at the end of the calendar year 2011, and the customers rolled back under one umbrella.

Once the sales cycle for AceCP started in August of 2011, it became somewhat apparent that AceCP was hard to say or spell properly. Customers did not understand what was said over the phone. While it looked good on paper, the name was clunky and difficult and awkward in a conversation.

With the dissolution of Application One, LLC, the continued awkwardness of AceCP, and at the urging of my new CSO; I decided to bring the Application One name back in Q2 of 2012. If the partnership had dissolved over the summer, there never would have been an AceCP and it would have been ApplicationONE all along. The logos could be combined, and the new web site would come up and push the new name. I really did not know how to go through that name change without looking silly. However, the final kicker that pushed the decision to change was the hiring of Troy Ross as the new CSO. That investment into a character that could, for the first time, really take the reins in sales meant creating a corporate entity that was easy to sell. If you can't say the name of the company easily, then you should probably look to changing it. Application One already had the benefit of having some market exposure, so the awkwardness of making a name change was easier to swallow.

Bringing the logos together was relatively simple. We already had the A from AceCP, and a new recruiter and sales associated, Kim Martinique, had the graphics talent and vision to put together what will be on the new rebranded site.

Cheers,

---Bob

Catching Up On The Weekend

Date: February 19th, 2012 by Bob Kraai

There is so much to do today, and the day is moving past too fast!

Redirecting web visitors from an old URL or from a page that no longer exists to a relevant page is something that every company has to do at some point or another. Today, I redirected all the old Kraai pages to the new AceCP pages that correspond to them. That action was long overdue.

Since the number of pages was manageable, I decided that I would redirect them individually to preserve any links that might be out there to the kraai.com site. Redirecting at the page level will also allow me to further redirect them from the target pages today to the actual information when the URL changes under the new WCM. I will leave the Kraai.com information on the server, since I will obviously always own that domain, and just in case there are legacy links to it still out there.

That brings me to the smattering of old Kraai Consulting press releases, and what to do with them. I have decided to move them over, and change the company description so that some continuity from the past can be maintained. What I don't like is the inconsistency of press releases going all the way back to 2004, when this corporate journey started for me. There are so many companies out there with web sites and press releases that are 2 or 3 years old. People think it's important, for a brief period, and then forget about it leaving one to wonder what they have been doing for the years in which there is no press activity.

I believe that Press Releases are important to produce. Not because the world is engaged by every little step that our company takes, but because it provides some insight into the progress of the company, what the organization is doing and has done, and - in some rare cases - there IS a press release that is interesting enough to get picked up. In 2004, when I founded the progenitor company "Wetzel and Kraai Consulting", we had not press releases. After 2006, we started to produce some, but not on any regular or frequent basis. It only came up when someone remembered at the last minute. AceCP needs to be better than that, and we have resources to assign it to. I'm not expecting great works for, but simple testimony to achievements and advancements of the company.

For a small company like ours, we need to keep track of cool and interesting things that we might be doing or important alliances we are forming, and create a press release about it. For instance, in January, we picked up two new sales people. That should be a press release so that folks searching for our company and the name of a sales person that is calling them can find something of interest to read. Likewise, the alliance we have with OpenText for software resale should be a press release. Starting new clients that have agreed to allow us to use their name in advertising should be a press release. However, is anyone writing those? Nope.

I bring this up, because it is something that needs to be done, and that means someone has to wear the hat of reporter to watch for things that are worth creating a press release for. That person has to keep that stream of information flowing and interesting enough so that it, at the very least, people looking at our press page can see that we are regularly doing something.

Cheers,

---Bob

Snowy Monday Morning

Date: February 14th, 2012 by Bob Kraai

It's Monday Morning, in case you had not noticed. Some folks work all weekend, so it's difficult to recognize a Monday Morning sometimes. I recognize it because the weatherman told us that we would have snow. He has lied to all of us before, but today he was not pulling my leg. There is a thin layer of snow covering everything except the concrete and asphalt, which have certainly retained the heat from the warmest January and February days I can remember Kansas ever having.

The interesting thing about this winter is not that we are saving so much money on our heating bills, but that the lack of snow has kept mindsets thinking in a Fall perspective. In late Fall, I think about winding down the year and making a final press to prepare for new opportunities. There are always client projects pushing to complete some goal before year end, and the activity spikes right when you'd be expecting a vacation. In fact, randomly, the person whose input is needed desperately has gone on vacation for Christmas break.

Typically, that spike is followed by new goals and priorities planned for a new year. The work eases up slightly in the beginning until things settle into the pace a new year brings. That happens around the middle or end of February. It's a strange time every year, sometimes forcing me to give up holidays, and sometimes I have too much holiday. Wait, can you have too much holiday?

This year, all of it shifted and overlapped, just like the weather has done. 2011 ended with a lot of internal work, but not a lot of pressure from clients. In fact, the project I call my "day job" was in a holding pattern until the middle of January. Client projects didn't get into the "hurry up" mode until middle January. My head thinks it's still December. Frankly, you all should be going on vacation right now, giving me time to put in a little extra work to get caught up before the new season starts... Have a great holiday! I'll be here when you get back! ... No? I guess no matter how much I lobby for it, that's probably not happening. It was worth a shot.

The snow is late and weak. The financial environment is changing, and it's too late for a lot of people, but it seems anything but weak for services. The service companies like ours are always the first ones cut during bad times, but always the first ones brought back when things start to recover. If the economy recovers, then service organizations are needed to tackle the newly released budgets and backlog of projects that move the company forward. Conversely, if the economy stays weak too long, then service companies are required to fill the gap between a tightened and overworked human resources pool and the projects that must get done in order for the organizations to more efficiently tackle the weaker times. Either way, there is a dip at the beginning, and an eventual expansion. I'm old enough to have seen this happen a few times, and each time it has twists.

2012 has kicked off with an expansion in the services I can see - but which reason is driving it? I'm not an economist, and over the last 4 years, I've learned that the most knowledgeable people seem to know squat about how to read what is going on. What I do know is that our approach to client projects doesn't and shouldn't change. We aren't in the business of spending client money. We are in the business of building ROI and making a client environment as efficient as possible through well planned content management projects. Budgets are tight, but time and money has to be spent wisely on projects to move forward. Not progress for the sake of progress, but progress for a reason.

It feels like we are just coming through the holiday season a month and a half late - just like the weather. The "hurry up" work phase of 2011 started in January, and is merging with the new work pace of 2012. Now we are getting organized for the pace of a new year. I feel like I just completed New Years, and that I need to be setting weight loss goals. If I could just be some kind of savant for reading the economy, I'd be able to predict what that means and help capitalize on it.

This brings me to progress on our marketing campaign. In my last blog, I had to admit some human error in our approach. Hopefully that is past us. If you look at the project, and the time spent so far, then we are really lagging behind in calendar time, just like the weather. We have had a great new design that has been sitting gathering dust for some time, and software that needs to be configured just sitting idle like a weak covering of snow. Maybe I'm pushing the analogy too far, or being too poetic, but looking out my office window, I feel like it represents where we are at today.

Long ago, we laid out the template design, created the new look, and cut up the home page. I created a content model, and installed the new software back in late November. Let's call it a two month break, and move forward from there. The next steps are configuration and implementation of the templates. This weekend, I tackled some configuration issues.

Let me speak a minute on a technical challenge I dealt with. I wanted to tie the search capabilities of Open Text Common Search into the new site. I have personally had some experience with this in a prior release. I know the predecesson to Common Search very well - Autonomy. Autonomy was replaced after Open Text acquired WEM. Autonomy is not only a third part product instead of an Open Text owned product, but with Autonomy's acquisition of Interwoven, they are a competitor (Well, HP is... too confusing to get into who owns what now). Naturally, Open Text would want to replace them as the primary search tool. After the acquisition of the WEM software, Open Text phased out the Autonomy software in favor of their own search tools. Not everyone is aware, but Open Text started as a search tool, so expect a solid showing against the Autonomy features.

I needed to install the Open Text Common Search product on the server, and configure it. Our server environment is 64 bit Red Hat Linux running on top of VMWare ESX. The install for Open Text Common Search specifies clearly in the release notes that it requires one of two 64 bit versions of Linux - SUSE or RedHat. However, the installer is for a 32 bit version of Linux. I must say, this threw me for a loop when I started getting errors for missing libraries that were clearly 32bit libraries. To be fair, I noticed it first because the name off the installer is setup-linux32...

I ended up opening a ticket with Open Text asking for help with the install of Open Text Common Search on the supposedly only supported 64bit platform. I thought, "Maybe, I am just not reading these release notes properly, or maybe I actually did something wrong..." It turns out that the error was in the documentation. The supported platform matrix was incorrect. This document may get fixed, because it was indicated on the ticket that it will be corrected in the future. I have faith :-)

The challenge is that I may have to add another 32 bit VM just to support Open Text Common Search. I don't know if this is the case. My last experience with it was, in fact, on a 32 bit version of RHEL5, and there were no problems.

Here is a great lesson to highlight! It does not matter what Enterprise piece of software you are installing, from which manufacturer it comes from, or from which era of computing, for that matter - you can't rely 100% on documentation. You either need Experience or Experimentation and Patience to get it right. Not to sell AceCP...ok maybe to sell our experience... It's simply because we have so many installs under our belts that we can power through the Enterprise install and configuration experience.

I'll let you know how my ticket turns out. In the mean time, I am not going to spin wheels on that issue. I need to work on templates, so there is where my time will be spent.

Cheers,

---Bob

Even when you think no one is reading, they are!

Date: February 9th, 2012 by Bob Kraai

I can't even begin to explain the frustration that Time plays in running a small business. I watch larger corporations pressed for budgets push more and more responsibility onto each player, and the culture of the organization changes. In a small business, the culture IS to wear a lot of hats. Making a decision to wear one hat and ignore other hats for a time is a part of daily life. It's a juggling act of trying to figure out the proper priorities.

My role as CEO is to plan for and push the company in a positive direction according to my vision, be the knowledge expert, share that expertise internally and with clients, support the sales efforts, execute any active contractual work assigned to me, and generally take on any overflow of work from any area of the company at any time. The marketing role I chose for myself was to drive the innovative social marketing campaign that I devised. I mentioned when I started this campaign that "marketing has always taken a back seat to every other task", but that I was making a commitment to make sure it was in a leading seat. Then we got busy.

Hats got juggled.

Suddenly, Marketing is in the back seat again!!! It got as low as deciding to make a run to Starbucks for an extended coffee break instead of spending time on marketing. And is that bad? Work comes in. Sales happen. What does it matter if our public marketing campaign is still a little shoddy, and our web site is embarrassingly underdeveloped?

I got a call from a long standing customer yesterday. He asked me if we could help with a WCM redesign. He said, "I see your site, and is that an example of the kind of work you do these days?" Oh My Lanta!!! Is Marketing important for our small business? Absolutely!! If a customer that KNOWS us is basing opinions of our work on our site, then this needs to be a front seat activity!!

I said I'd blog the mistakes and missteps. Mistake number one on the marketing campaign - Allowing the campaign itself to fall in priority to everything else.

Kathryn, my Community Builder pressures me daily to get technical tasks done. Ben, who designed the new site look and feel, has even come back asking for next steps, since his design and cut up is clearly not visible. But on one else, other than myself, is pressing to move forward. In my head, I think that no one is really paying attention yet, because we haven't reached that critical mass of people yet. However, what do I always tell my clients about that? I tell them, "When you think no one is paying attention, your best sales opportunities are reading your marketing message to gauge how or if they want to do business with you."

Let me explain that one.

Yes, opportunities come in, and our sales people are busily communicating and building relationships. In fact, our closest partnership with Open Text has started to drive work our direction in the same way that word of mouth worked during our boom years of 2005 to 2008 - without having to market ourselves. We have enough exposure to generate interest in our contribution with both past and potential clients through word of mouth to keep us busy. Calls happen. The sales pipeline continues to grow without fixing our Marketing. We are socializing in a new Chief Sales Officer to handle all this (means we made an offer that has not been accepted yet). Aren't we doing the right things? It doesn't seem broken. Why should we care so much?

Because the message IS broken. Because, when we think no one is paying attention to our marketing, our best sales opportunities are reading our marketing message and gauging how or if they want to do business with us. Our partners are reading the message. Former employees are reading our message. Our existing clients are reading our message. I guarantee that new clients we are talking to right now are looking at our site to figure out who we are. Impressive and knowledge packed phone and email communication might be what we shoot for, but that micro blog, web, print, and related social media message is still being consumed and factored in.

It is important. It can't be priority 99. -- Ok, I got it. I'm an overworked CEO, but you only have to hit me about 5 or 10 times before I get the message that I need to change how I do things. Marketing is moving back to the top.

Mistake number two on the marketing campaign - I lost track of the community.

I hired Kathryn to be a Community builder. I promised her that I would teach and guide her in this effort, and build her confidence, knowledge, and experience. She has aspirations of one day running her own business, and I promised her that I would help her build on her college experience to fill in the gaps of just how to do that. Her business is going to be very socially oriented, and will HAVE to have the Social community aspects I hired her to manage.

Then I promptly let her down.

Yup. I admit it. I can make all the excuses of time and juggling hats, but her success is dependent on feeding off supporting efforts and information that I can provide her. I did not hire her to flounder. What do I tell my clients about community building? I tell them, "No matter how large or small your organization is, you must have dedicated people working in your community to engage customers and prospects, to constantly update and track content, to handle negative feedback immediately and publically, to keep the community fresh and growing, and generally pay attention to what you spent money to build so that you can realize an ROI for the effort."

Let me explain the mistake I made.

Kathryn started work, and I started answering her questions, writing articles, and editing existing content to get it onto the newer site (while our "new" site was in development). I had a designer create the new look and feel, and promised her it would be up and all the social pieces would be at her disposal to manage. Then other things took priority, and I allowed her to flounder. Her frustration came through clearly in the Facebook posts she has been making, but I was not paying attention. I made myself inaccessible as a resource to draw on, because I was busy. She could see I was busy. I told her I was busy. I never told her that she was a priority, and that has lead to the "outer community" - that system of micro blogs and public internet messages - getting her attention in a way that wasn't promoting our corporate message of expertise and success.

If you look at your Facebook page, you see frustration. You don't see success. It actually took a former employee sending me a message offering help in Social Media education for me to realize the mistake. It was a genuine offer of help. At first I laughed it off. I was thinking, "Really? I need help with Social media?? I AM the expert!" But apparently I have lessons to learn!

I told Kathryn to use Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, and others to blog her successes and struggles until our own site was available for her to handle it. I put her in charge of the look and feel of the new site, and coordination with the UI fellow, Ben, that did the final design. I had her do research on topics of Social Media, and pass me articles she was writing. What I did not do was pay attention to her growing frustration with our lack of progress! Her message has become a frustrated one that does not instill confidence in our ability to do this kind of work. This is almost as bad as my own lack of posting messages!

So noted. It's a misstep, and it shows that you need to keep track of your message no matter how small a post or how small you think the audience is.

I explained to Kathryn that I have posts in the usenet groups from 1995 that are still accessible. When you post to the Internet, it is forever. People will read it, and maybe not even the people you expect. The message you send needs to support your theme. The color of the posts that Kathryn has been pushing are exactly what she was hired to be monitor for and help us to overcome - Frustration in progress from a client. In this case, WE are the client. We see it! Now we must publically overcome it! We will change that by correcting the prioritization of the Marketing effort.

I promised to post lessons learned. I should probably now make a special page to post these things, how and when they were identified, how we addressed them, and what the result was of correcting the issue. Honestly, I expected to be posting lesson's in the technology, and not the management off the campaign itself.

In any size of business, the mistakes that you make in prioritization can affect more than you anticipate. In Social Media, the audience may not be forgiving and can potentially be brutal beyond expectation. Correcting our missteps now, while the community is small, is going to help us and our customers get the right message about what we do. Time is a luxury, and every allocation of it must be done carefully to assure you are applying it properly to support your goal. Our goal is to spread Knowledge and Services throughout the greater community, and this post serves that purposes by telling everyone what not to do!

Cheers,

---Bob

Progress Report - 4 months from conception

Date: January 7th, 2012 by Bob Kraai

We are four months into the new marketing initiative. I'm going to make a run through where we are, what has been accomplished, what is working, and what is not. Each of the paragraphs below talks about one point of the campaign and what the status is.

The site is the primary object around which all other activities circle. We have created the wireframe mockups and requirements, we have chosen the WCM, we have made some small modifications to the existing site to allow for new content. We have created the visual mockups, and reviewed and accepted the basic look and feel. With the new WCM, we have started down one road, pulled back, chosen another road, and are now starting down that one. In the process, we have provisioned two different environments for the hardware and completed all the installs. In the new WCM, the cut up of the home page has dragged out a little longer than expected due to availability. We are turning to a new employee to bring the pages together and there is an education gap to bridge, however, the result should meet the vision nicely. The templates are designed but coding has not begun yet. In this respect, we are behind by about a month and a half from where we expected to be, mainly due to changing directions.

For the case study portion, the network is set up to allow us to show the site, the software, the templates, and the "daily effort" of authoring and maintenance. These will show best-case in all around content creation and management. It will also show the Open Text WEM software and how it compares to others. Once the site is up, anyone interested in seeing how it works behind the scenes can schedule time for us to review it with them.

Our company goal for articles, blog entries, and other content completed and posted to our site was a super aggressive 500 after 1 year. That means there are only 8 months left with which to compile, edit, and post something like 478 pieces of authored content. The expectation was for the whole company to make write ups, but it turns out that people don't want to do it. That was an expected barrier, but it was thought that some input would trickle in. In process is a series of question/answer articles that are being edited for content, and an article from our community builder, Kathryn, on the social networks and what to pay attention to for business networking. January will most likely add 15 more pieces of content from the CEO and Community builder. The big article on comparisons of content systems has not made much progress due to workload on everything else and day to day company demands. All this means that we won't make the 500 piece goal. We have to pull back and focus on making a targeted goal of the most potentially readable content. 200 is fairly realistic.

On the community building side, we have hired a new Community Builder position. She has had mixed luck in starting the process of bringing people in. Some of the problem is a complete lack of compelling information and the fact that our "community" is not actually up and running. We are using Facebook and Linked In to connect with people, but it is a shadow of what needs to happen. The main audience today is made up of current and former customers and our closest vendor relationships. There is also a smattering of friends and family rounding it out. The biggest issues have been in the response to seeking people to join. It seems, if you don't HAVE a login and social media driven site yet, then folks are pretty much not interested. Go figure.

On the sales side of marketing, we had a great relationship building sales associate that we talked with for weeks and who finally accepted a position back in the beginning of November/last week of October. Then we lost her the first week of real work. For this campaign, we need a true relationship builder and not a hard sales person. This position is someone that helps in the community building side and helps guide customers from the general public and community into finding the services and products they are looking for. Since our first misstep, we have talked with a few people, but thought about waiting until the marketing campaign was more mature before hiring someone. Instead, we may be looking at a couple of new folks to take that role and also assist in the building off the community. These roles are drastically important to an organization that is building their market presence with social media. In our case, as a smaller company, we looked to the ROI of now versus later, and essentially said, "What the heck! It can only help!"

In all, there is some measurable progress. We have gone from 0 to 50 in followers within the last 2.5 months. Our hope is to trend that up. The number of people talking about our company either #acecp or on Facebook is around 10% of the total. I can't say this is good or bad, since we are so close to the beginning of the study. We don't know the impact yet.

Help us out! Tell your friends and colleagues that they can get a chance to see a web site redesign into social media happening live. Forget the fact that it isn't up yet, and focus on the story of how it is getting made. Ask us questions. Give us feedback. We will use it to drive what you see on our site.

Cheers,

---Bob

Catching Up

Date: December 9th, 2011 by Bob Kraai

Open Text has become our new platform of choice to showcase best case Social Media and Social marketing! Since my last blog entry, we have gone through a number of changes, and have made a lot more progress on the web site and on our marketing campaign. Obviously my opening sentence highlights a big change, but I will try to detail the trials and success of the last month to get us caught up in this blog entry.

Going a month between entries was not my intent. In fact, it should not be more than a week, period. It is true that we are just getting started with this marketing campaign (even after four months of work). The campaign can't work, if it does not get constant attention. This is why we have a dedicated Community Builder, who is responsible for bring people in, and making sure the site gets attention from contributors, technical people, and the general public.

Our Community Builder is a new title for an inside sales associate named Kathryn Kraai. She's making progress on coming up to speed in the marketing aspects of the site, and brings a great injection of modern community and youthful exuberance to the table. The fact that she is my daughter of course means she is also brilliant and talented! (yes, she is responsible for approval of this BLOG, so I have to give her props!). Kathryn is starting to learn the technical side of managing the community and working with the software. Under normal circumstances, a Community Builder would not need to have that kind of skill set, but she is interested in it, and I love to teach.

Any organization, no matter how big or small, needs to have the role of Community Building assigned to someone. In our case, it is a full time position because we are dedicating all our future marketing efforts to this process. In a larger organization it might be the same, due to the size of the activity. However, in smaller organizations this might be a part time position for someone with the personality and skills to keep it running. The reason for this role in the company is that you cannot afford to allow your community to grow stale. It has to have traffic and in the beginning there is no organic community traffic. I tell my customers that they need to be dedicated to answering questions and encouraging people to utilize the site for knowledge, community, applications, or whatever the draw is; and that requires someone or a group of people starting things off. Selling the site like you sell your products may seem counter intuitive, but the premise we are building from is that providing a service or content on the site that showcases your products, and is a lower barrier to entry, broadens the circle of people you can reach to make the sales that keep your company alive. This whole case study is about proving that to be true or false!

The biggest challenge we've had in the last month is in sales personnel. We gained a great sales associate with the skills to bring the marketing and sales together, and then lost that associate almost at the same time we started to press the process all together. This position is also in direct support of the social marketing campaign. We are not looking for a typical IT sales jaggurnaut or hard core sales personalities (no offence to our hard code sales personalities), but someone with more of a focus on working with our community and helping to smooth clients in from seeking answers and information to services and products that make sense. This position may not seem necessary, but I feel it is essential to our goals. Thus, we still lack that sales leadership to guide this process, but we have a number of candidates.

Now to Open Text:

Our next biggest challenge is unraveling the current implementation that has already taken some steps down the road, and changing direction to utilize the far superior Open Text platforms for WCM, Portal, and Social Media. This falls mainly on my shoulders from a technical standpoint. Being the driving technology in how this campaign and program is going to work, It makes sense for me to spend a little bit more time in getting it up and running in software that can support it. The different between the LifeRay/Alfresco implementation that was about to launch, and the Open Text Web Experience Management (WEM) implementation that is our new direction is in time to market. OT WEM can be installed and up and running with working templates in a couple of weeks, where best case Alfresco requires a lot more finagling and tweaking to get a net new site up and out the door with the features I want. Yes, almost any WCM can launch a site quickly (including Alfresco). However, to launch and have the desired features ready to go is much easier for us to accomplish with OT WEM. This by no means provides us with a completed site. We just buy time in an iterative process for providing a working model that we can grow, and we get it there quicker than by other means.

Most larger organizations would not launch a site in this way. They would build around their requirements, redesign, product selection, do installs, perform testing/QA, and stake holder approvals with an implementation of 3 to 6 months or more (regardless of platform). In our case, I am the designer and lead technical resource and the final approval. Our organization is small and agile. This is our first attempt at spending time and energy on our own marketing in this way and almost ANYTHING is better than the site we have today. For us, a win is just having the content publish automatically without finagling. A win is having the blog running in actual blog software. So deployment of a WCM solution is quick. We have already spent months getting the look and feel where we want it and now it's a matter of applying that to a working WCM solution. The gracious offer from Open Text means that they get the exposure of a nifty case study in a pure social marketing solution, and we get a platform we know and love and are intimately familiar with that can do everything we want. The combination of all the prep work in design, the capabilities of WEM, and our knowledge of the platform mean quick iterative wins that we can't get with open source.

Coming up within the next week, we will lay out the steps we go through to bring the new platform online. Keep watching, and soon there will be an actual community login (and Kathryn will certainly be giving you a call to register!)

Stay Classy, San Diego

---Bob

Finding Time

Date: November 3rd, 2011 by Bob Kraai

It's funny how the daily business of a small company gets in the way of moving a marketing campaign forward. I read articles in magazines and on web sites for small businesses about the balancing act of priorities - and there is never a real solution except to either spend more money to handle it (meaning more people and time) or just bury the folks you have in tasks. Most of our clients are very large corporate entities. They have marketing departments and Chief Marketing Officers and pools of graphic artists and copy writers. They also have Chief Sales Officers as well as sales and sales support staff. My observation is that much of the time these organizations have so many different products and messages to get out that they too are struggling with tasks. Large operation or small, anything that can reduce time is a winner!

Let's take a look again at the WCM choice. I have not heard back on using other options as example sites, so we have continued with the Alfresco platform. We know that there is a lot that will have to be coded in order to make the system as rich as we want. This is not a time saver for roll out. The framework for Alfresco WCM is called Surf, and comes as an open source piece of the Spring framework (supported by VMWare). Spring is a great application development platform, but that is the problem. It is an application development platform. The time saving in hooking things up with Alfresco is only partially there. The out of the box demo site has some good features to build from, but to get the real flexibility that is needed, a lot of coding has to take place.

This in and of itself is ok with us. I listed our drivers for choosing this platform before, but the time cost is high. It goes towards the argument I make to my own clients when they ask after Open Source. Yes, you can get a package that has all kinds of nifty features that you don't have to lay out money for, but that package is going to require a lot of time and the cost will equal itself out. Other packages (unlike Alfresco) don't have a corporation supporting them with updates and a roadmap. The community drives this and it becomes a fractured road to new features. I'm not saying they don't eventually get there, but if you have the dollars to spend, then I'd rather spend it on assurance that the platform I'm running has a future I can grab on to. You also have to factor in that a poorly architected web site is bad no matter what WCM it is on. If you don't have the experience in the platform, then you are stuck with paying for an out of control project.

With Alfresco, we know what we are up against going in. It's not a fully baked WCM, and works much better as a Collaboration package or document management solution. In that respect, it is much like Documentum. Funny the similarities, since it was ex-Documentum folks that drove the Alfresco revolution. But it can get us there. Unlike many of our clients, we have the brain power to spend on this development. We are the ones they hire to put things like this in place. I can theoretically afford to spend the mindshare and time to get this in place.

Yes! Now enter in the woes of taking on those tasks. I am personally one heck of a Java developer. Other folks around me have skills too, but I'd rather they were helping customers. I mentioned before that the balance of time would have to be on my shoulders simply because there isn't available talent to do all that I have laid out for our campaign. That means a lot of late nights and weekend work for me, because I also have clients I need to help in addition to sales calls, and time taken to just sit and stare at my desk wondering how I can increase the amount of hours in a day to get it all done. The excitement of building out the dream community site and being able to finally write down publically all my thoughts and guidance overcomes the woes.

Last night I spent several hours working on the login. I came up with a great solution that merges in the site with alfresco content and Open Text Dialog (a product I do actually have a license for). (I'll have to write about that separately because I'm excited by the solution!) What I wanted to address was the time reducers. Alfresco will reduce the maintenance time on the site eventually (once developed). Good design and architecture of the templates I have to write and integration points I have to code by hand will also reduce the time to maintain the site later...

What will reduce the time to get the communities and information to the main stage?

I'm probably going to spend a lot of Blog cycles complaining about how much time I have to spend when I know other products could just overcome this for me out-of-the-box. However, for our Alfresco customers that want these feature and a reusable set of code to maintain them, it's a win.

---Bob

Contextual Navigation

Date: October 24th, 2011 by Bob Kraai

On the look and feel design of our new site, we completed the basic layout of the look and feel as a concept a while back. This came as part of the specifications we created for the new site and show how we want the user to work within our pages. I will try to explain some of the decisions and the design process as it flows from there. This blog is about the navigation of the site.

The initial design is done in Visio as an exercise of dragging boxes and text around until it meets the general intention and vision for the site. We are making the choice to minimize the header region of the pages. Up top, the user will have the logo and links to login as well as a prominent search bar. If a user logs in, then their badges and features will be available there as well. However, there will be no navigation or drop downs to move around the site. All links are provided within the body of the page, and flow in a more application like feel.

On the header, the main feature is the search bar. The main tool for finding things on the site will be in a standard place and advanced search options can be expanded and used. We can speak more on that later.

Below the header, is a breadcrumb that allows the user to move easily back up the pages that they have navigated down into. The challenge here is that most of the navigation is done contextually, meaning you might get to the same article because it is tagged as with the industry you are interested in, or you might get to the article if it is tagged with the product you are interested in. The breadcrumb has to have some smarts to determine where you are coming from and make it easy to navigate back up the tree. We think of the topology of our site as a spaghetti works of related information, and not a simple tree of navigation. In fact, things are laid out in that typical tree, and then the spaghetti is laid over it, if you really must think of it that way. Another way to think of it is dynamic navigation based on the Taxonomy.

Let me speak briefly about the navigation scheme. A user comes to our site looking for something (services or knowledge). Or perhaps they found the site by clicking a result in Google or Bing. Right now there are 5 articles. A year from now, there could be 500 from me and other consultants. As the knowledge we provide grows, each article might be related to other articles by product, subject, industry, solution, author, and many other classifications. When a user finds an article they find interesting, they may want to read related articles based on how they found the first one (or they may need more detailed or slightly different information). We are creating the interaction between articles to help facilitate the user in making connections to related information.

Under the breadcrumb are a number of buttons. This is where the top nav has fallen to, and these buttons may appear on the site wherever they are contextually relevant. Each button leads to a top level context such as Services, Knowledge, or Careers. Now the concept of the tree topology raises its head, because each button represents a silo of information. In the tree topology, each button would be a top nav item. However, the information within each silo or substructure may be relevant to information in other structures, so the user might be lead across. The initial clicking of the top level will steer more pages related to that type of information, so the navigation results will be geared to "Services" for instance. You might get a stray Knowledge article, but you're more likely to get Service related information.

As the user navigates off the home page, the Header collapses to a small footprint. The search remains prominent, and the buttons are available for jumping sections. Subsections or Subsilos of the site have their own buttons to give the user an anchor to look for when they want to drill down by context. Within the body the user is presented with Content and related links to articles that are dynamically listed based on the context of the current article. This is sort of like search results based on the taxonomy of the current article. These results can be sorted by rank or number of visits to make it more relevant.

Now, what tool provides all this out of the box? Well, there are some commercial tools available to help with this. However, not in our current choice of WCM. Since this is the backbone of the new site, this is where our time is going towards the infrastructure build. Perhaps that should be commercial tool, when finished :-)

---Bob

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