Using open source software to answer the multi-site challenge

In an Internet age dominated by personalised content and instant information delivery, every business demands a strong and dynamic web presence.

But while web presence has never been more important to enterprises, managing it has never been more difficult – intranet, extranet and internet sites, multimedia and social media, and mobile sites are all proliferating at a phenomenal rate as enterprise web strategies fragment to deliver ever more content through ever more channels and devices, all with smaller and smaller teams.

Businesses striving for competitive advantage in the marketplace are targeting consumers and higher SEO rankings by looking to unify a customer’s web presence across any number of websites and services by rolling out microsites for products, services and campaigns.

Providing fresh content to attract and retain traffic to corporate and marketing websites demands greater content and a growing number of contributors generating such content, increasing the complexity of managing a unified content generation and approval process across departments, sites and sometimes continents.

Content everywhere

Multiple sites, wikis, blogs, intranets, extranets, web apps and RSS feeds serve the needs of departments, partnerships, customers and employee teams and the larger the enterprise, the greater the diffuse interests and resulting online destinations seem to become. And when content needs to be shared across not just one but many of these destinations, the overhead likewise increases for already under-strain IT departments.

The trend towards OSS solutions

Enterprise-level problems demand enterprise-level solutions and organisations frequently turn to Enterprise Content Management (ECM) tools from major software vendors to provide the structure and interface necessary to publish content from users across the company. However such solutions can be costly and complex to implement.

In recent times, the focus is turning to open source software to cut costs and avoid vendor lock-in (Cooter, 2007) with more than 85% of companies surveyed by respected analysts Gartner currently using open source software (OSS) in their enterprises (Gartner Newsroom, 2008). Open source CMS systems are both numerous and varied in both their capabilities and focus and many flavours have been deployed liberally by company departments and individuals as the relentless drive to quickly and inexpensively establish a web presence for an organisation’s new products and services continues. This in itself creates additional issues for IT departments, which are left with “rogue” sites to administer as they continue to play catch-up with the needs of their most important customer – the business itself.

There is a pressing need for a solution to centrally control the web presence of an organisation across multiple sites, leveraging the power of open source but within a secure and scalable environment that can be overseen by corporate IT.  Ultimately, any content management system needs to abstract away the complexity of maintaining website content to the enterprise’s key content creators, separating the creation, presentation and administration of a website so respective business functions can focus on what they do best and collaboratively produce the best result possible.

At the same time, users should be able to deploy content to where it is most relevant – independent of the constraints of server location, domains and subdomains, site structure or varied approval workflows.