Ray Schauer is Bridgeline Digital's Senior Director of Architecture for the Chicago Region. At Bridgeline, Ray is responsible for managing Chicago's development team and takes a leading role in both the technical and informational architecture of all Chicago projects. Previously, Ray was Director of Technology at Purple Monkey Studios, Inc., a company that merged into Bridgeline Digital in September, 2007. Ray joined Purple Monkey in 2000 and has 8 years experience in project development, infrastructure design and maintenance, and project management. Ray has extensive experience with a variety of content management systems including iAPPS (first and foremost!), OpenCms, RedDot CMS, RedDot LiveServer, Ektron, WordPress, and Stellent. Ray received a Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign.
More sites are lining up in their support of Google’s first move to drop Internet Explorer 6 from the internet. This past week saw notices from Salesforce.com, Atlassian, and even Facebook. Whether we credit Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 Campaign, or more savvy users, IE8 is currently the market share leader within the IE family. That being said, IE6 still equates to about 15% of global browser use (average of sources @ Wikipedia).
About two months ago I was sitting in a hotel conference room being trained on a new piece of software here at Bridgeline when an interesting philosophical question was raised. When something is not true, is it necessarily false? I suppose I should provide a little more background information for this question before getting into why this question is important.
Summary Analysis for search on "Jay Cutler" using Social Mention
I like to think of myself as someone who is always up to speed with the latest and greatest technologies. If it’s new, I’m interested. If it’s cool, I have to have it. I’m an early adopter so to speak. With this in mind, it may come as a surprise that I was among the few to resist the call to Web 2.0. As communication became more casual, less formal, I understood each step along the way: bulletin boards (BBS for you old timers), chat rooms, forums, email, instant messaging and text messaging. I even understood blogging. Try as I might, I just couldn’t understand Web 2.0.
Limitations
Twitter posts are limited to 140 characters. Even text messages have a 160 character limit. I was being told I couldn’t do more with a QWERTY keyboard than I could with a standard phone dial pad! It was maddening!
Facebook was a completely different animal. Suddenly everyone had an account. 300+ million of them now. Friend requests were being made and it was a race to see who had more friends. What was the social etiquette for turning down unwanted friend requests? Is it OK to de-friend someone? Why am I getting all of these pointless comments?
Reality
I was looking at it all wrong. 300+ million. Think about that number for a minute. What I wasn’t seeing was right in front of me. Facebook, Twitter, and their counterparts had become a virtual water cooler. Friends were keeping up with each other from across the world in quick, easily digestible tidbits. And all of it is publicly available.
Personalization is a topic often discussed when it’s time to rebuild a website. What is it? What does it do? Should our website do it? How can we be like Amazon? That last one is a good one. I hear it frequently.
Historically, personalization has been divided into two categories: explicit and implicit. I say historically because this is shifting. I don’t know what to call the new category just yet, but more on that later. First, let me start by giving you a quick overview of personalization to date.
I’ve previously written about adoption as a primary key to CMS implementation success. The KISS method was highlighted as a central point in user adoption. If the system is easy to use, your user base will readily learn how to use it, one step at a time. If its difficult, many will throw their hands up in frustration. This happens because they feel more work is now required to complete the same task. In effect, they are working for the CMS, not the other way around.
I normally focus on the technical aspect of things, but I’ve been doing CMS implementations long enough to learn one very important non-technical thing. There is only one key to success in a CMS implementation. Yes, just one. Adoption. If your user base does not find your new CMS to be easy to use, simple, intuitive, and not a time waster, it has no chance of success. It doesn’t matter how technically advanced it is or what it can do for you. If it can’t make managing your website a simple thing for your users, it just isn’t worth it for them.
Bridgeline Digital is the developer of the iAPPS Web Experience Management Platform and award-winning interactive business technology solutions that help organizations optimize business processes.
