Plenary talk on “Portals and CMS:" Why You Need Them Both” given by Paul Browning at the IWMW 2002 event. See http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2002/sessions.html#talk-browning

1. Portals and CMS –
Why You Need Them Both
paul.browning@bristol.ac.uk

2. Route map
• Environmental scan
• What is a CMS?
• What is a Portal?
• How does the CMS relate to the Portal?
• Demo (maybe some magic, if there’s time)
• Some reflections

3. True confessions …
• We don’t (yet) have a centrally supported
CMS
• We don’t have an institutional portal
• We plan to have made decisions on both by
August 2002
• What follows is a mix of vaporware,
prototypes and incomplete understanding

4. Environmental scan I
• From the viewpoint of a research-led University
say five years ago:
– The Web is not life threatening
– The Web is another hassle – what is it replacing?
– We’re over-subscribed with well qualified
candidates
• “It’ll be very expensive to put a server in
Mexico”

5. The pre-millennial Web
• A hobby for someone
• Apache on a file system
• Highly manual methods of content creation and
maintenance
• In effect a read-only medium
• A spot of Perl
• A Webmaster
• Let the “professionals” get back to serious computing
• “Three clicks away from crap”

6. Environmental scan II
• From the viewpoint of a research-led University
today:
– DDA 1995 & SENDA 2001
– September 2002
– Perhaps the Web is career threatening?
• Let’s re-do the Web to make it accessible
• Let’s re-paint the Forth Road Bridge again and again and
again
• Let’s work harder rather than smarter

7. The pre-millennial Web can’t scale
• The pre-millennial Web is broken
• We need a Web Content Management
System:
– A web site is like a dog – it’s for life
– We need to move beyond the “Freds in the
Shed”
– We need a dynamic, automated, write-enabled,
de-skilled Web …..
– ….. supported by a multi-skilled Web Team
(who never touch the content)

8. The content life cycle

9. The defining features of a CMS
• A CMS has substantial overlaps with DMS,
VLEs, Groupware, Weblogs, Portals ….
• Browning & Lowndes (2001)
– Versioning (checkout/in, rollback)
– Workflow
– Integration (“joinupability”)
• Not a finished product; a concept, a set of
processes, a framework
CMS Portal
√ x
√ x
√ √

10. The most desirable features of a CMS
1. Template-based self-service authoring for non-technical
content providers (‘frictionless publishing’)
2. Roles-based security
3. Workflow management - submit, review, approve, archive
4. Integration with existing data/databases and user
authentication systems
5. Metadata management
6. Flexible output - write once, publish many times
(IWMW, 2000)

11. The Prospectus in 5 BC
(Before Cms)
E-mail
Fax
Fag packet
Annotated copy
of last year’s
Word
Departments
Word
Admissions
Page
Maker
Marketing
Printer
Third party Webmaster
Web pages
Fourth party

12. The Prospectus in 5 AC
(After Cms)
Browser Web pages
Printer
Departments Admissions Marketing Web Team
Browser
Browser
Browser
Browser
Standard
Text-to-
speech
CD-ROM
CMS Robot

13. CMS in 2002
• If you haven’t got one or aren’t thinking
about getting one then you either:
– Have a web site of less than 100 pages or
– Have a web site with less than three authors or
– Are probably dead meat

14. Portal
Managed Learning Environment (MLE)
Portal = MLE = VLE + CMS
Virtual Learning
Environment (VLE)
eTools
Student Information System
Digital
Library
Content Management System (CMS)
eStrategy = an institutional understanding of these relationships?

15. What is a portal?
• Aggregates information and applications one stop
shop
• Is personalised or ‘groupilised’ one size does not
fit all
• Aspires to be your desktop on the Web Webtop
A portal:

16. Examples of portals
• Law Intranet
• Blackboard
• Amazon
• Tesco
• LSE for You
TABS
CHANNELS or PORTLETS

17. The benchmark? LSE For You
Room Booking Student Photo Boards Tuition Fees
Address Maintenance Emergency Contacts Private Accommodation
Exam Results Reprographics Usage Reprographics Jobs
Mailing Lists Teaching Timetable Payslips
Examination Details Class Mailer Locate a Study Room
Transcripts DPA Consent LSE Experts
Application Progress Collect Network Account Alumni Employment
Modules (=“channels”) already implemented

18. The benchmark? LSE For You
Room Booking Teaching Timetable

19. The benchmark? LSE For You
Address Maintenance Tuition Fees

20. What is a portal architecture?
Why bother?
Webified
PIMS
IRIS
BOFINS
BORIS
Coda
Dolphin
Before (i.e. now) …..
Pseudo-
webified
Desk-
toppedInvisible
Lots of stovepipes of
variable length …
Userconfusion?

21. What is a portal architecture?
Aggregation
Webified
PIMS
IRIS
BOFINS
BORIS
Coda
Dolphin
After …..
Pseudo-
webified
Desk-
topped
Extending, bending
and merging the
stovepipes …
PORTALISED
Portal
framework Portal
?
?
Happy User

22. What is a portal architecture?
Personalisation
= “stickiness”After …..
Portal
framework Portal
Casual visitor
Prospective student
HoD
Staff
Student
Show Room http://www.bris.ac.uk
Back Office https://www.bris.ac.uk
Multiple views depending
on user and/or device
Prospective employee

23. Ahem …. don’t some CMS do …
• Aggregation (a.k.a. syndication)?
• Personalisation?
• And other bits of a portal framework?
• Conversant, Frontier (News/magazine type)
• Vignette, Broadvision (E-business/e-commerce type)
• Zope + CMF (Framework type)
Yes ….
Which is why you need to be clear about
the join between the CMS and the portal

24. Dog’s dinner alert I ….
• what follows are just sketches
• by someone with a poor sense of screen design
• aimed at demonstrating some concepts
• a future portal will not look like this!

25. The “back office” – student1
University of Bristol
Search MyBristol Library Tools Publish
News and Events
Timetable
Progress File
Transcript
Filestore
Courses
Exams
Bookmarks
STUDENT
ph0044
My debt
My home
address
My term
address
EDIT
EDIT
PAY

26. The “back office” - staff
University of Bristol
Search MyBristol Library Tools Publish
News and Events
Timetable
Filestore
Courses
BOFINS
Bookmarks
STAFF
My parking
My home
address
My next
of kin
EDIT
EDIT
PAY
Porpoise

27. The “back office” – student2
University of Bristol
Search MyBristol Library Tools Publish

28. The “back office” – a customisable Webtop
University of Bristol
Search MyBristol Library Tools Publish
Publish Office file:
We got 15 five-stars!
wyziwyg
zlave
View of CMS and other
content repositories to which
you have write access TTW editing into CMS
Tools to automagically
upload, convert and publish
Office files
The portal is
fundamentally
content-free – the
CMS holds the
content

29. What makes a good portal
framework?
• Interoperable (open standards)
• Agnostic
• Secure
• Flexible (incl. “skins”)
• Stable, scaleable, supportable
• Future proof

30. Candidate portal frameworks?
• Blackboard Level 2 
• Blackboard Level 3 - Now BB Learning System
£32k/annum + <= £60k consultancy for set-up?
• Zope 
• Long list of payware options 
• Short list
– Oracle Portal ?
– uPortal ?

31. Demo
• Is there time?
• If not, and you’d like see it,
then back here @ 17:30

32. Oracle Portal demo
• Glasgow Caledonian

33. uPortal demo
• Delaware

34. Dog’s dinner alert II ….
• what follows is a proto-prototype
• constructed by staff with other day jobs and some students
• no concessions made w.r.t. usability or presentation
• running on a desktop PC
• aimed at demonstrating some concepts:
• Aggregation
• Integration
• Personalisation
• Customisation
• a future portal will not look or work like this!

35. uPortal demo
• Bristol out of the box
• Bristol prototype

36. What is a portal architecture?
Servlet container
Portal framework
XML/XSLT
Content Application
server
“Browsers”
Authentication
service
PIMS, etc
Database
File system
Message store
News store
RSS feeds
Anything XML
CMS
(Zope)
Views depending on
user and/or device
WAP
PDF
Disabled
Applicant
Portal channel
The portal is
fundamentally
content-free – the
CMS holds the
content

37. LoadsaX’s to get our heads round
• XML
• XSLT
• XHTML
XML
XSLT
Application
or Data XHTML
Browser
Printer
WAP
uPortal
We all need a Sebastian Rahtz!

38. Some reflections
• CMSPortal
• Siloware vs. Glueware
• Senior managers
• Who’s the CTO?
• IWMW 2003
• Putting lipstick on bulldogs

39. CMSPortal

40. How we’d like things to be ….
SIS
Portal
frameworkDigital
Library
CMS
DNER
Agnostic, open
standards compliant
– plugs and sockets

41. … but how it often is
SIS
Portal
framework
Digital
Library
CMS
DNER
Siloware
just sockets –
“do it our
way”

42. Doncha love Senior Managers?
• Why can’t we just use Google?
• We don’t need a portal – we just need a
well-designed Web site
• Our SIS is ‘Best of Breed’ so it must be
good
• Why can’t we just use Outlook and
Exchange?

43. Who’s the CTO?
• Your Director of IT Services?
• UCISA? Siloware is often golfcourseware
– “It gets sold to senior executives by smooth-talking
sales executives who claim their products solve every
conceivable business problem, is a doddle to install,
standards compliant, holographic user interfaces,
everything.”
• SCONUL?
• ALT?
• JISC?
• eEnvoy?
• Who’s the CIO?
We need to be investing in
glueware and the people
who can use it

44. The Scaleable Web
(IWMW 2003)
• Making it easy for the end-user means more
complexity behind the scenes
• The increasing dynamic Web will start to fail
as sites get busier
• Who in your institution is looking at:
– Load balancing
– Clustering
– Cacheing
• Amazon & Tesco have
• Overlaps with the GRID?

45. The technology is the easier bit
"The worst thing you can do is to Web-
enable a bad process," said
Friedlein. "As a client once put it:
'There's no point in putting lipstick
on a bulldog,'" he added.
Getting content management strategy right, ZD Net UK,
Dec 12th, 2001, Geoff Choo
From Information Strategy to eStrategy?
Future performance target:
Four clicks away from 7x24 crap

47. From Desktop to Webtop
An Information Systems Strategy?
Operational
processing
Maintrix
CARB
PIMS
Dolphin
Coda
User
Aleph
Envision
Sports
stellar
DataHub
Corporate
information
eclipse
DataHaven
Information
deployment
fsb
Web
Application
server
IRIS
VIOLET
Many readers,
some writers
Multiple views,
depending on role
Show Room http://www.bris.ac.uk
Back Office https://www.bris.ac.uk
HERO
Prospective employee
The Portal
Prospective student
Casual visitor
HESA
HoD
Staff
Student