Anthony Milner

After months of brainstorming, soul searching, creating and refining we have launched our beloved new logo.

Its got colour, its got transparency, its got a dose of web 2.0. It will predominantly be displayed with its strapline “Enterprise Content Management”

 So what is that colourful symbol thingy in the logo?

The motif is 6 overlapping transparent blocks each with its own colour. Each block represents a system, component or module which is integrated to provide a complete end solution. Its also quite artisitc and conveys a sense of our creative design capability. Deep and meaningful interpretations aside it can also be said that this is simply a clean and fresh look. The logo was designed by our Creative Director, Penny Bristow. She is one creative lady and we’re fortunate to have such talent on board.

When I squint at the blocks I see a flower – I guess that’s OK because essentially the blossoming of a flower is akin to the blossoming of thoughtful and intelligent software.

What do you see? Leave a comment…

Ok this has turned my world of images on its head. It’s like someone just discovered that the world is round or that humans can fly, ok that’s an exaggeration but it still knocked my socks off. In the world of web development images are fixed. Page layout can be dynamically resized, but images once cropped and optimised remain fixed. Well actually not anymore, as Ohgizmo reported a couple of days ago…

Ariel Shamir of the Efi Arazi School of Computer Science in Israel has developed some software to automatically [resize images], in realtime no less. Watch and be amazed :

If you’re looking for the best TV drama around look no further than Channel Nine. I don’t mean CSI, CSI NY or CSI Miami, I’m talking about Channel 9, the company previously owned by PBL. The former 60 Minutes Executive Producer and Bulletin Editor-in-Chief, Gerald Stone recently published a tell all of how “they stuffed the place up”. It’s called “Who killed Channel 9?” and it’s quite a revealing insight into the nepotism, management decay and breakdown of trust which has left Nine a shadow of its former self. The “Missing Magic: Then and Now” chapter attempted to explain the reason for the creative vacuum.

“The creative flame burns best when given plenty of air to breathe. In suffocating surroundings, hemmed in by over-supervision and second guessing, with constant emphasis on the price rather than the merit of the proposition, there’s soon likely to be nothing left but ash.” Page 155

This creative suffocation if often caused by well intentioned managers trying to cut costs and speed up delivery but sometimes we need to remember that with appropriate time, space and physical surroundings, creativity will flourish, resulting in solutions we never dreamed possible.

The success of blogging is in large part due to its simplicity. Most blog software requires you to do very little in terms of setup, just add content and your thoughts are elegantly displayed in a consistent and easy to navigate format. 

Another product that has experienced great success as a result of its simplicity is Basecamp, developed by 37 Signals. As the 37 Signals mantra suggests, Basecamp is an, “Elegant, thoughtful [project management] product that just does what you need and nothing you don’t”. At work we use Basecamp to manage multiple projects and I am yet to find a team member that doesn’t use it. I’ve used complex project management software that makes you coffee and takes the dog for a walk but isn’t touched by anyone working on the project except for the Project Manager. Basecamp has distilled the most important components of project management; communication of ideas, tasks, milestones and documents and made it child’s play to use.

MS Office is probably considered one of the biggest culprits in terms of featuretitis but Office 2007 has made a massive leap with the introduction of the “Ribbon”, a dynamic strip which endeavours to present only what you need (and what you didn’t know existed). Additionally Word 2007 has introduced the Blog Post feature which means I can use Word to create, edit and post blog entries without going near the WordPress editor.

This trend can also be seen in the number of companies approaching us to build web based applications. Besides the obvious benefits of “use it anywhere”, the browser environment is understood by the end user and can be easily modified/adapted to meet the needs of respective audiences.

We’ve probably all had enough of the “What is Web 2.0?” debate but elegant and thoughtful design is certainly a part of it.

Roger Johansson asks a question my team and I have been grappling for a while now.

“If you do not do graphic design, but work with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and accessibility, are you a designer or a developer?”

Are we designers or developers?

Here’s a couple of clever search mashups. Searchboth and GahooYoogle. Both let you do a simultaneous search on Yahoo and Google with the result sets layed out side by side. Great for comparing the impact of your SEO campaign. Interestingly GahooYoogle suggests that “70% of the first 100 results are different, on average.”

Falkayn pointed me at a Jeffrey Veen article titled “Why Content Management Fails“. Thanks Angus, it’s a thoughtful article and Jeffrey definitely has some serious web 2.0 clout so I had to listen and to be honest I nodded and smiled a lot. Jeffrey argues that the holy grail of decentralised content management is a pipe dream. He suggests that people are creatures of habit and changing their processes to adapt to a CMS seldom happens and in any event the average office worker has no idea about what is essentially an editorial process. It should be noted however that the article was published waaaay baack in 2004. Now this may sound a tad clichéd but 3 years in Internet time is a long, long time. CMS technology has matured markedly and this combined with significant social change has shifted the playing field.

Social change

Gen X and Gen Y have caused a social tipping point. Gen Y is comprised of highly educated internet natives and Gen X are slackers no more. Both groups have serious day jobs, the X-ers have big mortgages and young families and the Y-ers choose who they work for and how long (not the other way round). These young guns understand the web intimately; they grew up with it evolving around them. In fact you could argue that Gen X built the web and Gen Y generates the content. These cohorts will not only expect their workplace to have a CMS they will be extensive users of it.

Technology

Another big improvement since 2004 has been the widespread enterprise adoption of informal content management such as blogging and wikis. The runaway success of these technologies has a lot to do with the ease in which they enable informal information capture and dissemination. Historically the adoption of knowledge management systems in the enterprise has been low and slow because they were just too hard, a simple entry sapped considerable time and to extract info you needed a science degree. The blog is an imperfect solution which works seamlessly with our imperfect human minds. Random ideas, thoughts and processes can be captured and extracted quickly. Folksonomies and tag clouds just make sense and help to highlight at a glance what content exists and what may be important.

Making Good on the Promise

Failed CMS implementations are no longer an option, the success of your business depends on it. As practitioners we need to ensure that our customers are aware of the pitfalls and to help them to navigate their way through to successful CMS implementations. I’d love to hear about your CMS implementation experiences. Whether you’re a developer, project manager, usability consultant or end user drop me note and let me know if your CMS is making good on the promise.