Unified Code And Content Management For e-business: An Overview Of Rational Suite ContentStudio A Rational Software White Paper
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Unified Code And Content Management For e-business: An Overview Of Rational Suite ContentStudio
Introduction............................................................................................................................................................... 1 Market Drivers.......................................................................................................................................................... 1 Stages of Web Evolution ........................................................................................................................................... 1 e-business Development............................................................................................................................................ 2 Traditional Vendor Offerings for e-business Development....................................................................................... 3 Rational Software and Vignette – The Alliance.................................................................................................... 3 Rational Suite ContentStudio ................................................................................................................................ 3 Development and Delivery ................................................................................................................................... 4 e-business Development with Rational Suite ContentStudio..................................................................................... 5 Code and Content...................................................................................................................................................... 5 Code Artifacts ....................................................................................................................................................... 5 Content Artifacts ................................................................................................................................................... 6 Integrated Code and Content Management ........................................................................................................... 6 Deployment........................................................................................................................................................... 6 The e-business Development Team ........................................................................................................................... 9 Templating – Solution to Webmaster Bottleneck ................................................................................................. 9 The e-business Development Process ................................................................................................................. 10 Rational Suite ContentStudio Process Management ........................................................................................... 10 e-business Applications with Rational Software and Vignette ................................................................................ 12 Beyond Static Pages................................................................................................................................................ 12 Team Size and Enterprise Size ................................................................................................................................ 13 Summary ................................................................................................................................................................. 14 About Rational Software ......................................................................................................................................... 14 About Vignette Corporation.................................................................................................................................... 14
Unified Code and Content Management for e-business: An Overview of Rational Suite ContentStudio
Introduction Organizations large and small are installing tools and implementing processes to automate e-business initiatives. And the market forces driving the use of these tools and procedures have never been stronger. Yet many of the software tools on the market today are first generation and simply don’t provide the tooling infrastructure an organization needs to bet its future on. Add to this the rapid, pervasive and radical changes churning the Web application technology environment. It’s no wonder organizations are both skeptical and awestruck by the power of the Internet. This paper discusses the difficulties faced by organizations trying to develop and implement e-business initiatives. Principle among them is the need to simultaneously manage the software that runs e-business systems with the content these e-business initiatives generate. Rational Software and Vignette have joined to deliver a solution that addresses the issues organizations face in constructing and managing e-business applications driven by software and masses of content artifacts. This paper discusses the product of this alliance: Rational Suite ContentStudio.
Market Drivers Today’s organizations are increasingly dependent on the Web to drive their business. To companies large and small, the Web provides new business opportunities hand-in-hand with new competitive threats. It also opens a broader range of operational and channel opportunities. Some small companies like Amazon and Ebay have quickly become large based on new business models they can now effectively support on the Web. These companies have only scratched the surface of the Web’s potential. While a lot of press coverage is devoted to Web businesses that serve retail consumers, experts claim the real potential lies in using the Web to enable business-to-business transactions. Even conservative estimates peg the size of this market in the trillions of dollars in the next two years. In many cases, organizations use new e-business approaches to streamline and optimize their existing product and service delivery. Consider: • • •
A brokerage firm takes the lead in winning new customers by providing up to the minute financial reports and analysts coverage through their Web site. A government agency cuts operating costs and delivers better public records service by providing patent documents online. A multinational insurance company uses the Web to improve their bottom line by providing more and better insurance products to existing customers.
In some cases, e-business causes a fundamental change in the way a company does business. For example: • •
A leading independent software vendor restructures their product to provide online software updates, and builds an entirely new customer base from the additional subscription services they provide. A consumer products company learns they can allocate 90% of their customer service representatives to other areas within the company, when they provide customer support and service information via the Web.
Stages of Web Evolution The Gartner Group, a leading market research organization following computing and IT trends, has defined four stages of Web evolution: Stage Basic Presence
Process The company deploys information about the company, its products, and its services onto the Web site. Pages are static and limited in number. 1
Unified Code and Content Management for e-business: An Overview of Rational Suite ContentStudio
Prospecting
Business Integration
Business Transformation
The company adds many more pages of information about the company and its products. Visitors can interact with the site to request additional information by submitting forms to the site and can conduct keyword searches of site information. The site supports eCommerce transactions, has full-text intelligent search capability throughout, and provides services to customers, including account and delivery information, support, and communitybuilding features such as online chat, hosted Web pages, and other activities. The Web site changes nearly every aspect of the company’s business processes and becomes integral to the business. Web sites at this stage of development provide electronic document interchange with suppliers, vendor integration services, and content personalization services for visitors.
According to the Gartner Group, many Web sites evolve from "skunk works" projects within IS or the marketing organization. These early Web deployments in the basic presence and prospecting stages, are simple to set up and are often low-traffic with relatively static pages. According to the needs of the business and competitive pressures, these small sites often evolve into large and costly internal development projects considered strategic to the business. Once an organization sees the strategic potential of the Internet for its business, it makes a significant investment in software, hardware and development headcount and the Web application evolves to the business integration or business transformation stage. These sites can include hundreds of separate scripts and applications. Software forms the heart of these applications whether they are Web front ends to traditional transaction systems or collaborative environments where customers can share ideas.
e-business Development e-business application development drives home the need for two key results: Speed and quality. First, the Internet forces organizations to move more quickly. It provides a tighter link between an organization and its customers, and that tighter bond leads customers to demand a more responsive organization. In addition, all competitors’ moves are immediately visible, and customers can switch from one to another with virtually no cost. The Internet blows up the traditional design, build, test, and deploy software development methodology that drove the annual delivery of new product releases. Annual schedules are history in many e-business organizations that update their Web applications much more frequently monthly, weekly and even many times over the course of one day. In addition, the Internet affects the core of how organizations operate. Five year, even one-year plans don’t apply in Internet time. Organizations must deeply integrate business process with technical development. They must implement Web site changes to respond immediately to changes in business strategy and tactics. And these are under constant re-evaluation as the competitive environment evolves, customer tastes and demands change, and technology improves. e-business applications can also expose organizations to considerable risk, making the demand for quality greater than ever. The whole world can see how changes impact e-business applications. Errors are immediately visible and often costly resulting frequently in lost business and customer loyalty. When a Web site goes down as a result of application error, customers are inclined to look elsewhere for service. Often, they don’t return. In some market segments like financial services an inoperable Web site can create huge expenses for customers. The high profile Web site failures of Ebay and Charles Schwab cost these organizations customers, and literally billions of dollars in market capitalization.
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Unified Code and Content Management for e-business: An Overview of Rational Suite ContentStudio
Traditional Vendor Offerings for e-business Development A well-established market of vendor-supplied tools has evolved to build e-business applications. These range from simple Web page and site authoring tools, such as Microsoft FrontPage, to sophisticated deployment applications, such as Inktomi’s Content Delivery Suite. To address the two main ingredients of e-business applications software and its related content two classes of vendor-supplied tools exist. Tools for software artifact management, such as Rational ClearCase, and tools for content management, such as the Vignette Content Management Server .
Content Content Management – Content owners – Fill-in templates – Incremental, ad-hoc changes
e-business application Content
Code
Deploy
Code Software Configuration Management – Software teams – Integrated with IDEs – Structured change process
Figure 1: Traditional vendor offerings for e-business application development
This categorization of tool groups requires organizations to use at least two different processes, procedures and tooling infrastructures to build their e-business applications. With these disparate processes, organizations typically delay bringing together application and content artifacts until the final deployment stage in their Web development process when applications are moved to staging servers. This dual and parallel processes approach imposes risk and often incurs error, as a result of team members taking the tedious steps to manually match code with content changes. Problems usually remain undetected until the end of the deployment cycle, which can compromise the quality of the e-business application. When quality is compromised, so is the ability of the organization to achieve the e-business milestones required to advance through Gartner’s evolutionary stages. Rational Software and Vignette – The Alliance The market leaders from each of these segments Rational Software in software configuration management (SCM) and Vignette in content management have joined to deliver solutions that can successfully address the risks inherent in integrating software and content artifacts. This alliance has produced a new product recently introduced by Rational Software: Rational Suite ContentStudio, the newest member of the Rational Suite family. Rational Suite ContentStudio Organizations need a sound and proven development infrastructure to respond to the changing needs of their ebusinesses. To build this infrastructure, e-businesses need a content management development platform that can accommodate a range of users and functions. A complete content management development platform supports distributed content contributors and fully automated change processes. It also enables the 3
Unified Code and Content Management for e-business: An Overview of Rational Suite ContentStudio
management, versioning and auditing of all code and content artifacts comprising a company’s e-business applications, as well as complete parallel and distributed development capabilities. Rational Suite ContentStudio provides such a solution. Based on three market leading products the VignetteV/5 Content Management Server1, Rational ClearCase2 and Rational ClearQuest, the scalable and flexible defect and change tracking product Rational Suite ContentStudio is the development platform of choice for e-business application development. Development and Delivery A sharp distinction often exists between an e-business organization’s development facilities and delivery platforms. While many companies use standard e-business delivery platforms, such as the MicrosoftNET and J2EE, the tooling infrastructures implemented to target these platforms vary widely.
Run-Time Environment
Development Environment
Business Requirement
End Users Analyst
Software Developer
Tester
Content Contributor
Web Server Vignette CMS
Application Services Application Server
Requirements, Models, Code, Content, Tests
Rational ClearCase ! Common Process ! Requirements Management
Deploy
MetaData
Database
! Defect and Change Tracking ! Test Management
Team Unifying Platform Figure 2: Organizations build both e-business development and delivery platforms.
Rational Suite ContentStudio focuses on the development side of e-business applications. From a user’s perspective, a complete e-business application is more about delivery than development. Yet the two are linked, as content management is the cornerstone of any effective e-business application. Web content development delivery for early stage organizations (from Gartner’s Web stage evolution described above) is a simple process involving the loading of static files onto a Web server. As a company progresses through the Gartner stages, they adopt more sophisticated delivery vehicles, such as dynamic page generation at run time and personalization. These advanced delivery services require more advanced delivery architectures, such as IBM’s WebSphere or Microsoft’s IIS application servers. When choosing an e-business development infrastructure, organizations must also carefully consider their selection of related delivery architecture. Often, an e-business is limited to what its content management platform will support. As the market for delivery platforms continues to change and consolidate, the risk that an organization’s delivery platform will become obsolete in the not-too-distant future will escalate. With Rational Suite ContentStudio, organizations benefit from total flexibility in their choice of a delivery platform. Whether a company chooses a simplified, Web-server-only delivery vehicle, or more advanced services from an application server, it can rest assured that Rational Suite ContentStudio will be able to support its e-business application development needs well into the future.
1
Web Content Management, Strategies, Technologies and Markets, (Ovum, May 2000.)
2
Development Life-Cycle Management: 1999 Worldwide Market and Trends, (IDC, August 1999.)
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Unified Code and Content Management for e-business: An Overview of Rational Suite ContentStudio
e-business Development with Rational Suite ContentStudio Rational Suite ContentStudio is the first suite of tools available that unifies code and content management for ebusiness. ContentStudio: •
Integrates code and content. Rational Suite ContentStudio integrates the management of code artifacts with content assets in a secure, version-controlled infrastructure. This infrastructure provides parallel and distributed development of all e-business artifacts. ContentStudio includes deployment facilities to automatically and simultaneously stage these artifacts in delivery environments.
•
Unifies the e-business team. Rational Suite ContentStudio unifies the software development team (analysts, designers, developers and testers) with content contributors (artists, graphic designers, marketing and operations professionals and others contributing content to e-business applications). It accomplishes this with common tools, processes, procedures and artifact storage that help organizations quickly build effective e-business applications.
•
Extends to the full Vignette family. Rational Suite ContentStudio extends seamlessly, enabling team members to leverage the advanced content delivery capabilities offered in the Vignette V/Series platform. These include personalization, syndication, one-to-one marketing and multi-channel delivery.
Code and Content For organizations in the basic presence and prospecting stages (from Gartner’s categorization), Web site development often has little to do with software development. As these sites grow larger, so does the need to automate processes enabling contributors from across the organization to create and contribute content. These processes are necessary to remove the bottlenecks that can result when all changes are handled by the overworked and understaffed Webmaster team. As organizations move into the business integration and transformation stages, content artifacts, such as pages and documents, and the software that drives their site become deeply intertwined. Imagine an e-commerce organization preparing to run a holiday sale on its Web site. In a scenario such as this, it’s imperative that all content and software changes arrive at the site with integrated information at exactly the same time. Specifically, content changes promoting the sale (i.e., those pages that must change on the site to promote and inform about the sale as well as pages and references on syndicated sites) must update in concert with software changes affecting the sale (the changes to the transaction system so that sale items are discounted). For this to occur, the organization needs to manage their content artifacts in parallel with their software changes. Leading organizations integrate these tasks. “The lines between traditional software and web content are blurry and these cannot be effectively managed as independent artifacts.” Richard Heiman, International Data Corp Rational Suite ContentStudio offers comprehensive artifact management with Rational ClearCase. Rational ClearCase is the market-leading software configuration management system that provides the foundation for artifact versioning, and parallel and distributed development of all code and content artifacts. Code Artifacts Effective software development requires a reliable parallel development infrastructure supported by a secure repository that versions each code artifact. The foundation for code artifact management in Rational Suite ContentStudio is Rational ClearCase. Rational ClearCase goes beyond simple, secure storage and versioning to provide a parallel development infrastructure that accelerates e-development activities. With ClearCase, developers can work on the same code artifacts in parallel and effectively share code where appropriate. Software development can be a complex process, particularly when teams of analysts, developers and testers participate, which are increasingly the rule for most organizations. The Rational Suite family of products optimizes software teams by unifying their activities. Rational Suite includes team unifying products that include requirements management, defect and change tracking, configuration management and a common 5
Unified Code and Content Management for e-business: An Overview of Rational Suite ContentStudio
process. All of these capabilities are necessary for successful team development. Rational Suite delivers them to e-business teams in a unique team unifying platform so that all members of the team have access to a defined process, current requirements, all change requests and relevant artifacts. Content Artifacts Most organizations today don’t version or provide parallel development facilities for content artifacts. One reason is that many of the tools available don’t provide these services. And often times, Web teams don’t understand the advantages these services offer and how they offset the operational overhead required to install them. This can create a barrier to implementing a parallel development system for content artifacts, as effective versioning depends on the correct use of versioning by content contributors. Rational Suite ContentStudio makes content artifact versioning automatic and transparent. A content contributor, such as a marketing manager changing a product description, interacts with ContentStudio through his preferred desktop tools typically Microsoft Word or browser-based templates. Rational Suite ContentStudio automatically and transparently stores incremental versions of the marketing manager’s changes. Rational Suite ContentStudio maintains all revision histories of digital artifacts, regardless of whether they’re code or content. Revision histories are especially useful when a quick rollback is necessary, such as when a seemingly simple change corrupts parts of a site. Revision histories also fulfill the important function of providing audit trails. Some organizations require complete audit trails of all site revisions, such as those operating in regulated industries. In many cases, a complete Web site change history can be a viable defense in litigation. Organizations with Rational Suite ContentStudio can use it to do much more than just version artifacts. Rational ClearCase provides a complete parallel development infrastructure to manage artifacts. For the management of a single artifact, parallel development is not necessary, as multiple contributors would not likely make simultaneous changes to the same content artifact. However, most Web teams have been involved in a revamping of an entire Web site. This is where parallel development is critical. These projects can be extremely complex, as they require making changes to existing content that is constantly changing, even during reconstruction. The ability to work in parallel is invaluable in these instances as it enables some Web team members to work on reconstructing the Web site with content artifacts that are constantly being changed by other team members. Integrated Code and Content Management e-business applications are built from code and content. While organizations use a variety of processes, techniques, tools and skills to develop these artifacts, leading organizations view these different artifacts as integrated components of their e-business systems. Rational Suite ContentStudio integrates different artifacts in a common repository provided by Rational ClearCase. A common repository coupled with an effective change management process enables code changes to arrive to a site in tandem with all related content changes. Rational Suite ContentStudio provides full traceability, audit trail and site versioningin addition to a common administration system—to help e-business teams deliver high quality synchronized releases and updates. Deployment Web application development differs from the traditional software development processes many organizations are familiar with in a significant area: Application deployment. In traditional software development, the emphasis is on collecting all artifacts together for a release (which happens infrequently) and packaging them in one place. In contrast, deployment of e-business applications requires a much more extensive and complicated process. First, Web site updates are performed much more frequently than typical software releases. Second, Web sites are updated incrementally, whereas most traditional software applications are updated wholesale. Third, ebusiness application deployment is often performed though a mix of different servers located in different locations. This contrasts with most traditional software applications that are packaged in one place and delivered to one central server or the user community, both of which get exactly the same application.
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Unified Code and Content Management for e-business: An Overview of Rational Suite ContentStudio
Finally, many Web sites use replication technology to accelerate response in different geographic areas—a function rarely required in most traditional software applications.
Web server Staging server
Internet
Mainframe Internal Network
Firewall
Firewall
Development Deployment server servers
Figure 2: Most organizations employ a multi-stage deployment model, moving artifacts from development servers to staging server, testing the staging server application, then moving to the deployment server.
In addition, most organizations employ a multi-phase deployment cycle (see Figure 2). The first phase involves deploying from development servers to a staging platform, often in a firewall-isolated “demilitarized zone.” Then a second deployment is made to the public Web servers. This two phase approach is necessary to uncover accidental hardwired links to artifacts inside the organization’s firewall that are not accessible outside the firewall. Rational Suite ContentStudio includes integrated deployment functions to stage all changes to the live site in unison. Webmasters need not select individual files for copying, because ContentStudio is involved with every change during the site development process. Rational Suite ContentStudio automatically knows which file versions require updates. And it automatically deploys the right artifact versions to all the right places. In addition, Rational Suite ContentStudio automates scheduled launch and expiration requirements, meaning that content and applications launch and expire at prescribed times, without manual intervention.
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Unified Code and Content Management for e-business: An Overview of Rational Suite ContentStudio
Deployment with Rational Suite ContentStudio usually progresses through these stages: •
Identifying the completed activities appropriate to staging at a particular time. Most organizations will use ContentStudio’s automatic deployment capabilities to detect the correct artifacts, where the approval workflow automatically posts the artifacts associated with completed activities for the next staged deployment. Web teams have complete control over the activities and individual artifacts that are ultimately staged to the site.
•
Selecting a deployment option and vehicle, indicating when and how the site update should occur
•
Deploying to the staging site.
•
Testing the staging site to ensure changes are correct
•
Deployment to the live site based on the deployment option and vehicle
•
Testing the live site to ensure changes are correct
Implicit in these steps is the ability to roll back to any previous version, as well as the ability to access an integrated audit trail. Organizations using Rational Suite ContentStudio can quickly roll back from any change and examine complete change histories and approval cycles. Directly related to deployment is the choice of a service delivery architecture, defined as a set of platforms, standards and tools used to run a Web site and e-business infrastructure. This is an area of information technology where technology churn is most evident, pervasive and pressing. Organizations must carefully choose architectures and systems for implementing specific solutions based on a wide range of factors including tools used to deliver services, legacy system integration needs and available technical expertise. In the Internet’s short history, standard architectures and tool categories have already emerged for e-business applications, such as the MicrosoftNET and J2EE initiatives. Yet the tools, techniques, categories and services available to manage content and code, and deliver personalized content, continue to change rapidly. Keeping up with these changes, while implementing systems for deployment and service delivery, present challenges for e-business organizations today. The fast pace of today’s technology environment requires organizations to implement flexible delivery platforms that can segment application services with the utmost precision. These platforms must be able to swap specific application services as the market matures. And organizations must pay careful attention to the interfaces between components. Critical questions to consider include: Are they open and public? Are they based on industry standards? Are they flexible enough so that when the (inevitable) need to change components emerges, we can do so cost effectively? Rational Suite ContentStudio delivers content to standards-based delivery platforms. Rational has optimized the application development process around two broad delivery platforms, Microsoft.NET and J2EE. With a set of ‘e-development accelerators’ process, tool guidance and proven design patterns ContentStudio enables organizations to quickly build the highest-quality applications on these delivery platforms. To organizations using these advanced service delivery platforms, ContentStudio delivers dynamic content to support them. At the other end of the spectrum, organizations in Gartner’s basic presence or prospecting stages can use ContentStudio to deliver static content as files on a Web server. Advanced stage organizations require significantly more services to support their e-business delivery systems, particularly around personalization. These organizations can then step up to the advanced services delivered by the Vignette V/Service delivery platform. They continue to use Rational Suite ContentStudio for application development (including content management), but now deliver these applications via the advanced services from the V/Series platform (see Deployment below). 8
Unified Code and Content Management for e-business: An Overview of Rational Suite ContentStudio
The e-business Development Team A significant change takes place in organizations that move from prospecting to the business integration and transformation stages: The e-business applications become the focal interaction point for internal and external users. Product managers no longer rely on focus groups for strategic input, as they can get immediate and direct access to a community of active product users. Users rely less on telephone support and more on the selfservice applications they can find on the Web site. In short, the organization’s employees, customers, prospects and partners all come to rely on the Web site as the most effective, efficient and up to date communication medium. When this happens, the universe of potential content contributors within the organization expands dramatically. Most Web sites contain information from various sources around the company, regardless of the stage of the organization. For early-stage companies (i.e., those in the basic presence and prospecting stages), the Webmaster is the gatekeeper. Webmasters in these organizations touch all site content and often create much of it from other materials. Companies using this type of model manage their revision and workflow processes with people, who get information on who’s authorized to change what from the Webmaster. Webmasters are the only team members who interact with the content management system, and they have intimate knowledge of how it operates. As organizations progress to the business integration and transformation stages, they must transition their model to systems that can automate their revision, review and approval processes. In these organizations, potentially every employee is a content contributor, and all must interact directly with the content management system if it is to provide appropriate artifact security, auditing and automated workflow capabilities. These ‘casual’ users know desktop tools editors, graphics packages and email and overburdened Webmasters cannot take on the responsibility of training them on yet another desktop application. Successful content management tools integrate directly with user’s desktop applications, often operating transparently behind the scenes, and provide necessary content management with little or no direct interaction with users. Templating – Solution to Webmaster Bottleneck The first, and possibly most important bottleneck organizations need to break as they move through Gartner’s stages, is the practice of giving the Webmaster primary responsibility for content creation. As organizations grow, Webmasters must refocus their activities on process control. Many Webmasters today perform the involuntary role of content manager performing copyediting and graphic design work on all content. These organizations experience Webmaster gridlock, because all necessary content changes must go through a small team with limited resources. As a result, the organization can’t respond fast enough to the changes they must implement to remain competitive. Rational Suite ContentStudio directly addresses this Webmaster bottleneck with templating. Templating separates the content of a page from its formatting, for the purposes of site development. With templating solutions, the Web team designs templates for common site elements, such as the form and format of all product information pages, and supplies these templates to content contributors. Content contributors simply fill in browser-based Web forms with the appropriate information. Rational Suite ContentStudio then automatically applies appropriate formatting to this information for Web site posting, based on the design of the template. The Web team can use flexible capabilities in ContentStudio to design templates. These provide a common look and feel to the entire Web site helping to maintain design and corporate layout standards while content contributors make changes via an easy-to-use template. With Rational Suite ContentStudio, Web teams can also establish automatic approval workflows for content from content owner-supplied templates to the live e-business application. The Web team moves from serving as content manager to workflow process and infrastructure designer. This enables the team to retain control of Web site ‘look and feel’, without ‘touching’ each and every page posted to the site. Rational Suite ContentStudio provides template design capabilities that no other solution offers. Many template-based content management systems use static elements for template design, usually based on HTML 9
Unified Code and Content Management for e-business: An Overview of Rational Suite ContentStudio
or XML. This approach provides limited benefits. Experienced template designers understand the value of rich conventions and controls for effective template design, which require a scripting-based templating facility. Rational Suite ContentStudio provides script-based templating, enabling designers to create rich and effective content templates that address the full spectrum of content design needs. Alternative templating systems, based on HTML or XML, limit the choices and options a template designer can use in site design. With systems such as these, designers must choose between settling for templates that limit the level of design elements they can incorporate, and bypassing the template solution when design requirements cannot be compromised. When templates are not used, Webmasters are forced back into the ‘bottleneck’ position the templates were intended to eliminate. The e-business Development Process Organizations today can assemble the required parts to a successful site in very short times. As organizations increase the content on their sites, more members of the organization become actively involved with the Web application. Content can be contributed from everywhere within – marketing, sales, manufacturing, R&D and legal and even from new syndication sources, such as partners, customers and consortiums. As these organizations move to the business integration stage, their Web sites become merely a front end powered by sophisticated e-business software applications—from automatically generated content, to transaction and personalization services, to Web-based customer self-service applications. These dynamics require an organization to reconsider their processes for managing the changes they perform daily. While a small business could implement a price change simply by having the product manager email the information to the Webmaster, a process such as this cannot scale with organizational growth. Organizations in the business integration stage must establish workflows for permission, approval, test cycles, Web site staging and audit trails. In Internet time, these processes need to be automated. Change happens too fast and too often for a manual process to support. In addition, the legal implications some Web content carries requires the maintenance of accurate and complete records, which need to keep pace with constant updates. Software development organizations have experienced similar needs for years. The driving force in software development change management is the need to control, manage, synchronize and integrate the work process. As Web sites grow and organizations move towards business integration and business transformation, similar change management processes and techniques become increasingly necessary. The extended e-business development team including developers, testers, content contributors, designers, artists, analysts and business managers must coordinate their activities. In addition, it must implement a common artifact storage infrastructure to effectively integrate the activities of this extended team with the artifacts they produce. Rational Suite ContentStudio Process Management Rational Suite ContentStudio provides comprehensive workflow management to support the approval processes necessary for producing accurate content and code across the software development lifecycle. Most products on the market today do not serve synchronized content and code management requirements. Vendors with a content-oriented view of the world provide tools that cannot serve software development teams requiring rich functionality for triage, multi-state operations and version deferrals. Vendors with a software developmentoriented view offer products that are usually too complex for content contributors to use. Rational Suite ContentStudio accommodates both these audiences with content approval workflows expressed as sub-activities of overall campaign workflows. In ContentStudio, a project manager designs a campaign workflow, for example a holiday promotion on an e-commerce site. That campaign workflow includes activities for analysts, who determine the overall system impact and define specific requirements. Those requirements map directly to software designer, developer and tester activities, as well as initiating a separate change and approval workflow for the related content changes. A simple workflow example is shown in Figure 3. In this example, a content contributor such as a product manager needs to change the product description on the site. In this organization, changes to the product areas require one approval the marketing organization. Because the product manager has appropriate permissions, she can check out the promotion page and edit it appropriately. After completing her edits and reviewing them in the context of the whole Web site, she submits them for approval. She performed all her changes in her private workspace, so none of her changes is yet public. 10
Unified Code and Content Management for e-business: An Overview of Rational Suite ContentStudio
Product Manager: 1. Checks out file 2. Changes as appropriate 3. Reviews changes 4. Submits for approval
Rejected
Submit
Pending
Approved
Approved
Posting
Live
Marketing Manager: 1. Reviews changes in context of the Web site 2. Approves or rejects
Figure 3. A simple workflow involving one approval cycle and automatic deployment.
This organization has established a Rational Suite ContentStudio workflow that automatically creates an approval item on the marketing manager’s to-do list. The marketing manager reviews the changes and approves them for posting. This organization has also established automatic deployment steps for their content. By simply approving the change, ContentStudio completes the workflow by automatically deploying it to the site in the next deployment cycle. Figure 4 shows a more complex workflow from an e-commerce organization. In this example, a product manager is charged with running a holiday promotion. This requires changes to both the pages that promote products and to the commerce software that prices products and fulfills orders. In addition, this organization uses dynamically generated pages, meaning the pages that promote products contain both static content in templates and dynamic content. In this organization, page changes require two approvals: One for content accuracy and another for look and feel. Software changes follow a defined software development life cycle, which is iterative and includes analysis, definition, implementation, deployment and maintenance. (For simplicity, this is not shown in the diagram.) Rational Suite ContentStudio is at the heart of this change process solution. The integration of content changes and software configuration management into activities means that this organization can plan and stage their approvals. The company knows that changes will go live only after all code and content requirements are complete and approved.
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Unified Code and Content Management for e-business: An Overview of Rational Suite ContentStudio
Software Team: 1. Analyzes 2. Designs a solution 3. Implements 4. Releases for live site
Analysis
Design
Implement
Rejected
Rejected Content Manager: 1. Checks out template 2. Changes as appropriate 3. Reviews changes 4. Submits for approval
Pending
Submit
Approved
Approved
Approved
Staging
Stage Approved
Live
Pending
Accuracy: 1. Reviews changes in context of the Web site 2. Approves or rejects Look and feel: Reviews changes in context of the Web site 2. Approves or rejects
Integrator (Webmaster): 1. Posts changes to staging site
Testers: 1. Review changes in staging site 2. Approve or reject
Integrator (Webmaster): 1. Posts changes to Live site after staging approval
Figure 4: A more complex workflow with two stage approvals on content and software changes incorporated in the workflow
e-business Applications with Rational Software and Vignette As organizations move to the more advanced stages of Gartner’s evolution, their e-business applications become the focus of how they interact with customers. For these organizations, the driving need then becomes the ability to personalize visitors’ experience with their applications. Metadata is key to personalization. Used to manage digital artifacts, metadata is vital to the proper control of an e-business application. Metadata is the data about artifacts including owner, relevant dates (creation, update, expiration), stage and audience profiles. Metadata tells the automation tools how, when and where specific artifacts progress through the workflow and when and where the related content goes live on the site. End users of the Web site do not see metadata but they see its effects in new, approved and personalized content. Rational Suite ContentStudio automatically stores default metadata with each version, such as creator, last changed date and version. An integrated meta-data catalog lets content owners associate category and keyword information with any asset. In addition, users attach any organization-specific metadata to artifacts as required. •
Live and expiration dates
•
Personalization and audience profile attributes
•
Security attributes
Metadata is attached to each artifact version and can specify a wide range of associated data, such as: For example, a marketing manager might compose two versions of a product information page. One contains the product details, while the second contains these details, as well as the terms of a special pricing promotion for distributors. This organization then uses metadata to describe the personalization attributes of these pages one page for all customers, another (containing pricing information) for distributors.
Beyond Static Pages Four advanced capabilities are now emerging as necessary for a rich Web site experience and successful ebusiness application:
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Unified Code and Content Management for e-business: An Overview of Rational Suite ContentStudio
1.
Personalization customizing the content and user experience according to customer needs, experience and buying patterns.
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Syndication delivering, receiving and integrating content to/from other affiliated sites. This is different than legacy or ‘back office’ integration, where the product delivery channel involves affiliated businesses (which might also be required). Leading organizations will build a rich network of content including channel-specific information from multiple sources outside their specific organizations and integrate it in their sites. They will also provide content for integration in affiliate sites.
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One-to-one marketing the ultimate realization of personalization is developing deep relationships with customers to the extent that sites tailor their marketing to individuals.
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Multiple delivery channels the ‘browser on a desktop’ usage model is rapidly expanding to include access to the Web through multiple channels, such as TV and wireless devices. These devices both constrain and expand the options for information delivery. They are often lower resolution than a browser on a desktop, but they provide the added benefit of location information for personalization. These devices offer both challenges and opportunities for extending an organization’s e-business.
Very few organizations move from the basic presence stage to providing personalization services in one step, but the market leaders are already providing these services and more to their prospect communities. The tight integration between Rational Suite ContentStudio with the Vignette V/Series platform means organizations that choose ContentStudio for e-business development can seamlessly offer advanced services in the Vignette platform. These include personalization, syndication, one-to-one marketing and multi-channel delivery. The V/Series architecture provides a comprehensive set of e-business application services, pre-integrated as a platform. The V/Series helps you leverage the Internet as a first-class business channel for reaching customers, trading partners, marketplaces, and employees anytime, anyplace and through any device. The V/Series platform includes: •
eSyndicate – enables real-time content syndication to a community of subscribers, using a powerful, rules-based publish-and-subscribe paradigm
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eIntegrate – empowers businesses to create seamless integration between their e-business and their internal enterprise applications and the applications of their trading partners
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eNotify – delivers relevant, time sensitive, personalized content to customers, trading partners and employees via multiple electronic touchpoints
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EContent – the industry-leading content aggregation application for gathering and preparing disparate content from heterogeneous sources
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EBizXchange – the industry-leading business-to-business (B2B) transactional exchange application that enables the rapid and transparent exchange of business transactions across a web of trading partners
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XML Connect – an industrial-strength, business-to-business XML-based server. XML Connect enables rapid deployment and adoption of XML-based business communications
Team Size and Enterprise Size Organizations in Gartner’s business integration and transformation stages have already identified their needs for scalable solutions in their development and delivery infrastructures. Earlier stage organizations can simplify their development and delivery architectures by constraining their scalability. These organizations may also choose architectures and tooling infrastructures that provide more out-of-the-box services at the expense of their 13
Unified Code and Content Management for e-business: An Overview of Rational Suite ContentStudio
ability to scale. Regardless, most organizations will eventually need to scale up on one or multiple dimensions to more robust platforms and significantly more users of the development and delivery systems. (i.e., the ebusiness development team and end users, respectively.) Rational Suite ContentStudio is a completely scalable solution. Based on Rational ClearCase, the artifact storage subsystem has proven robust in even the largest artifact stores. The solution runs on enterprise platforms of choice including leading UNIX and Windows platforms. It’s also infinitely scalable to multiple users and locations through Rational ClearCase MultiSite. The Vignette V/Series platform is similarly proven scalable, driving the largest content sites today including C|NET, Travelosity.com, Merrill Lynch and United Airlines. Rational Suite ContentStudio is an e-business development solution that a small team can install and use to produce compelling applications immediately. Better yet, it scales to the needs of a distributed enterprise on the dimensions of operating platforms, development users and distributed users.
Summary e-business applications define the new competitive landscape for many organizations today. Yet, most use firstgeneration tools to manage their sites and manual steps to establish workflows for site content. Rational Suite ContentStudio helps these organizations deliver higher-quality, content-rich applications in shorter development time. ContentStudio provides enabling technology for organizations that require a flexible, established and resilient platform for e-business development. Based on market-leading products from Rational Software and Vignette, Rational Suite ContentStudio integrates code and content, unifies the e-business team and extends seamlessly to the full Vignette family for advanced delivery capabilities such as personalization, syndication, one-to-one marketing and multi-channel delivery. As a new member of the Rational Suite product family, Rational Suite ContentStudio lowers an organization’s total cost of ownership by integrating the tools they employ daily in e-business development. Because ContentStudio is part of an integrated development and delivery solution from Rational and Vignette, ebusiness organizations can focus their efforts on building market-winning applications, rather than integrating disparate products from multiple vendors.
About Rational Software Rational Software Corporation (Nasdaq: RATL), the e-development company, helps organizations develop and deploy software for e-business, e-infrastructure, and e-devices through a combination of tools, services and software engineering best practices. Rational's e-development solution helps organizations overcome the esoftware paradox by accelerating time to market while improving quality. Rational's integrated solution simplifies the process of acquiring, deploying and supporting a comprehensive software development platform, reducing total cost of ownership. International Data Corporation (IDC) has recognized Rational as the leader in multiple segments of the software development life-cycle management market for three years in a row. Founded in 1981, Rational, one of the world's largest Internet software companies, had revenues of $572 million in its fiscal year that ended in March, 2000 and employs more than 3,000 people around the world.
About Vignette Corporation Vignette Corporation (Nasdaq: VIGN) is the leading supplier of e-business applications. Vignette’s products enable businesses to create and extend relationships with prospects and customers and facilitate high-volume transaction exchanges with suppliers and partners, all of which enhances customer satisfaction. Vignette powers more than 1,000 leading e-businesses. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, Vignette Corporation has offices located throughout Europe, Asia, and in Australia and can be found on the Web at http://www.vignette.com.
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[email protected] Web: www.rational.com For International Locations: www.rational.com/worldwide Rational, the Rational logo, Rational the e-development company, ClearCase, ClearQuest, Rational Suite, are registered trademarks of Rational Software Corporation in the United States and in other countries. Microsoft is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation. All other names are used for identification purposes only and are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies Vignette, the V Logo, www.vignette.com, V/5 e-business Platform, V/5 Content Management Server, V/5 Lifecycle Personalization Server, V/5 Communication Server, V/5 Relationship Marketing Server, V/5 Syndication Server, V/5 Advanced Deployment Server, V/5 Development Center, V/5 Tools, Vignette Syndication Agent, Vignette Application Foundation, Vignette Application Power Pack, Vignette Professional Services, VPS, StoryServer, and netCustomer are trademarks or registered trademarks of Vignette Corporation in the United States and foreign countries. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Made in the USA. © Copyright 2000 by Rational Software Corporation. TP– 711 11/00. Subject to change without notice.
