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Business Advice

alanhill

Hi,

We've got a problem in ourcompany at the moment with promoting the use of Teamsite among the business users. They have a really poor opinion of Teamsite and while this is partly down to the implementation of the solution in the first place, and the user apathy to doing any 'real' work, I believe it's also to do with the quality of the templates that have been developed. In an attempt to allow more flexibility we've ended up with a fair amount of confusing templates, which are fine for people who have been using it for ages, but not so good for new-comers to the different departments.

Can anyone suggest any best practice advice, good examples, general advice and guidance on how to structure templates and websites in order to make the easy things easy, and the hard things, well easy too for the business areas?

Any help would be appreciated - I'm worried that Teamsite will die a death in our business and we'll be left developing templates that no-one uses!

Cheers

Teamsite Template Developer

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Comments

chuckles

It sounds like your problem is poor business process and neither technical nor related to the product. It sounds like you developed a bunch of templates and are trying to sell them to users which is backwards. You need to gather information about existing business processes and tailor your templates (and workflows!) so that they will help the process. Do you guys have a business analyst on staff who can be brought up to speed on TeamSite capabilities? That would be a good start. Also, getting a user experience expert like an Information Architect or Interaction Designer to contribute to your design couldn't hurt.

smenon

I would agree.. Templates and Workflow technology in TeamSite is very flexible and so it is important that you are building them based on your end-users requirements. If you don't have a business analyst, at the very least you should interview the different business units and understand their work patterns and what they are trying to do before you design your templates and workflows. If you need outside help, I am sure you can contract any of the experienced folks on devnet here or Interwoven CSO. It seems like you are in the UK and so please reach out to Elio Gambetta in the CSO team at Ascot, UK if you need Interwoven to help.

thanks

--Sunil Menon
Sr. Product Manager
Interwoven, Inc.

nipper

From your post, I would guess that, in fact, you are likely creating
a white elephant. How to proceede is a different story.

Did you have a consultant help set things up ? Getting someone in to
define things is a key part of a successfull implementation.

When I am onsite defining templates, a significant amount of time is spent
with the end users. You must understand how they work and what they
wnat to do. TeamSite must be viewed as a net positive to their productivity.
They should also review the design of templates, workflows, etc.

Without seeing your templates and talking to the endusers a great deal more
information is tough.

Andy

Migrateduser

which version are you on? users loathed the 5.x templates, and i tended to agree. they looked like something from 1995 and consistently crashed.

feedback on the new 6.5 templates have been much more positive, especially looks and stablity wise. as the others have said, it is critical to get Business Units involved in the requirements/design phase.

i usually do several template mockups for our business units to review/pick from. it takes more time but the "heres the template we designed for you, live with it" approach has never worked well for us.

i always try to keep it simple...when the consultants set up our initial templates they were littered with buzzwords like metadata, virtualization, DCT, replicant, etc that totally lost our users.

WoW Profile
TS 6.5 SP1
OD 6.0.2

gcmartin

I'll chime in that it's very important for the business users to get training as well. We get the biggest resistance from the small departments, the ones using Front Page on an IIS server. Initially, we create a simple template using big friendly Visual Formatting Editor (VFE). Once we add in useful functionality via Form API or callouts, as well as simple Workflow deployments, they usually come around.

Best Regards,
GM

Migrateduser

You can provide all the training you can afford, but it's still not going to make a difference unless you get buy-in from upper magament and they drop the hammer down that "thou shalt use Interwoven products". Unless forced, people will not change their habits, especially the kind of people that already hate TeamSite.

Dave Smith
Sr. Software Engineer
Nike, Inc.
(503) 671-4238
DavidH.Smith@nike.com

alanhill

All,

Thanks for the very useful feedback. It's certainly true that Teamsite was forced upon business users (because the department who were maintaining the website wanted rid of the job). Again it was true that business users weren't engaged enough, and it wasn't made part of their day to day objectives, so consequently it was all too quickly abandoned and forgotten. Don't get me wrong, we average a few thousand content edits per month so there are plenty of people using the tool, a lot of them seem to grumble on though about how difficult it is to use.

What I've taken from the replies is the importance of approaching the business areas directly with workshops, concepts, choices for them to make, and then involve them in the training and testing processes. Buy-in from their management is critical, but I don't agree that laying down the law "Thou wilt use Teamsite" will work, certainly not if the solution isn't that great.

Thanks again for the replies, if I have anything world shattering come out of these new initiatives I'll share the joy with the forums.

Cheers
Alan

Teamsite Template Developer

amitjain

Alan,

I can easily relate to your problem, as I had been through similar scenario.
And as a solution approach, we started of with the UCD methodology (User Centered Design). Starting of with Usability testing of the existing system (templates). This was combined with the study of existing Content Architecture with an objective of refining it and aligning with the User Experience.
We found out that the real problem was with the hierarchical nature of the Content Framework employed. We have developed a Prototype using Content Services in developing a WIZARD like interface to make content entry more Usable.
Our hard work paid of and we are getting real good smiles from the end users Smiley Happy

If there is anything you would want me more to elaborate in solving your issues, please let me know.

Amit Jain.

alanhill

Amit,

Thanks for your reply, very udeful indeed. Going down the usability track is certainly a good idea - in fact we work closely with the Usability Team in my organisation (usually for external facing web sites) but I'm sure they'll assist with this process too.

Cheers

Alan

Teamsite Template Developer

Solito

more clues about your wizard like templates are interesting any additional tips, samples ...?

cheers

M

alanhill

Solito,

In terms of our clever templates we've just started using Form API to good effect to make the user's input of content much more intuitive. Take a graphic fro example, we would always have a browser button for the user to select the graphic, and some alt text for accessibility purposes. We also want to allow the user to, if they choose, make the graphic a hyperlink to another page.

In the past we'd have had to make the 'Link URL' textbox non-mandatory, so that if it wasn't filled in it wouldn't stop the page from saving.

What we're doing now is to put a question after the image box, asking 'Is this a link?' - we then use Event Handlers to control the visbility and validation of a container with the URL, new window options etc.

We've done this with many common elements, and even made it fairly generic by calling them as inline items in the datacapture.cfg/

The result is a template which only asks the pertinent questions depending on the answers the user is giving. It will change dynamically to provide more detail as an when required. Another bonus is that at the 'OnSave' event, we kick off our own validation routines which build a script alert box with any errors/invalid fields and display this to the user (plus highlights the invalid fields), mcuh better than the standard error which didn't actually point out what was wrong.

No samples at present, still in development at the moment, and too long for me to copy and paste. I'm hoping though to put a few guides into the Knowledge base in due course to make this a bit easier.

The bit that frustrates me is that really a lot of this should be available out of the box, and I resent slighlty paying through the nose for Teamsite then spending all this time making it usable. Also, I wouldn't buy LiveSite because that should certainly be a standard part of Teamsite, not an expensive add-on.

I've been doing a general review of other CMS providers and pretty much all I've seen have a much better usability and development score than Teamsite.

I'll get off my soapbox now!

Cheers

Alan

Teamsite Template Developer

Solito

Thanks for the answer ...really useful