Companies wish to refresh their CMS implementations from time to time, that is natural and that is the evolution of the Internet, disguised as a revolutionary organisational change. Some companies who have not followed the product versions they are on, due to varios not fully understood reasons, face a big hurdle when they try to tackle a refresh 5 years after the implementation was complete.
Companies at that stage look for the upgrade path and find that its not as simple as they might think, products have dramatically changed, API and development need to be done from scratch or minimal reuse and IT will need to redesign implementation and plugins from webservers.
These hurdles usually direct those companies to a path examining other products, which in turn makes the current product look really bad when compared to the modern competitors.
When comparing the content editing interfaces of few years back you see that Internet evolution has not ceased and the new interfaces are slick, quick and easy to use.
To change your CMS you need to go through a very elaborate process, you need to remodel your data, refresh your site, rebuild your CMS data structure and content interfaces. You will need to bring the old data through from your old CMS through some sort of migration and while your at it why not get social media integration and some internal integrations that you always wished you have done.
But just like renovating a house, the problem with projects like this are the complexity and dependency between the sub projects and the unknown factor.
Your data migration depends on your data remodeling and that requires your wireframes and content strategy to be designed first making the migration design fase delayed. You want to integrate to the companies internal SAP product availability but require the catalogues to be migrated and these are delayed from the wireframe and content remodelling activities.
You get the point.
Every change in every project carries changes in the other projects and simple changes to one project can be cumbersome to others.
So why not spread it around?
Start from your new CMS and build up, stage by stage. Solidify one and get the next on top.
You cant paint the walls before you plaster them and you cant plaster them before the frame.
So my advice will be to set your expectations as follows, expect to have the site working before you get your data migrated and before the integration points are working.
Make the work a step ladder and climb only when you feel secure the other step will hold.
But you might state that this will create problems when you identify changes that are needed in the step under you.
This is true that it could take more to fix. But there is a benefit in loosing so many management and layers to figure out the same and coordinate that Change earlier in the process.
What is Google+ for? are we just seeing another social network?
Is this well designed interface aims to be the next Facebook?
My take on it is that it might do that, it might replace our social networks, but its not aiming to do so.
The evidence i find to back this up are spread everywhere.
From the navigation bar at the top where there is a list of all the applications you are registered to use and through the rest of the user management.
It seems google is taking the project as it took buzz and wave. its an extension of your google set of tools.
Google is not introducing the business clients of theirs to Google+ is a bit of a giveaway on the long term plan, businesses have been always introduced to the products in a much later stage. Google Doc’s was not a business product prior to it been exposed to the public.
The need to have a real name and not a business entity also point to the fact that businesses will need to pay to get in and they will get a very good package i assume for that price.
I dont totally agree with Matthew Ingram’s point of view oh having hurt the google plus for business, since business will come where the users are the damage is less then minimal.
So what is this google + good for.
Everyone saw this movie about the circles
It makes allot of sense to have this Circle level of separation but that is not what G+ is good for. (yes G+ is the best shortcut we have)
The functionality i see is going to be huge in so many places.
Lets take a scenario, in australia there are home tutored kids who live in remote places and do not go to school. well now they can go to school and be in class and participate and learn how to communicate with others using the hangout. they have to answer questions infront of other kids and be capable of attending the class.
This is just one scenario that is capable of encompassing huge space of remote education.
Another scenario is a workplace scenario, this is where you have circles for groups or divisions that you get assigned to. you can hangout with the group to have meetings or just as a development team spread around the globe. you get announcements from the circles that you are associated to. and your documents are based on the ones available to the circles you are associated to.
You can still have your own circles and friends from outside work.
Startups can harness this and even start spreading across the globe due to the fact that they can all sit in the same room and work togeter, having a circle replace their email correspondence and google docs replace their document sharing software. they can have their source and bugs in clouds but these are not related to google yet.
another scenario is the family across the country/globe that has its holidays and weekly chats done in a hangout and share photos and documents through the circle. also they can announce things out to the family without the fear of leaking to other peoples stream.
I see allot of value in the G+ personal, business and communication wise. for me its been twitter on steroids and i cant wait until news agencies will start pushing news through the streams.
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