Would Like to Purchase TeamSite...

Ninerfan

Hi all,

I've implemented TeamSite on Solaris a few times at different companies in the past and am quite familiar with the system, development and Admin activities. However the last version I worked on was 5.5.2. The company I work at now is in need of a new CMS and I believe TeamSite would be a good fit, we actually have a very simple web site that is now .NET based and managed using crappy MS CMS 2002. It seems TeamSite has had some nice upgrades since I last was involved with it. However I am concerned about some of the old weaknesses still existing. Could someone please confirm the following has not changed:

1. No link management between pages and resources in the backing store. In other words if I have 500 pages all pointing to home.htm and I rename it to index.htm I just broke 500 links at least, still true?

2. Similar to number one, if I need to rename or move branches or directories because of a change in our IA this will break many links, still true?

3. Deleting a file will break all links to that file. Still True? Any "Delete Workflow" available out of the box?

4. No kind of "external" search ability once pages are deployed? This is much less important than the others but I had to ask.

Please let me know if you have information or recommendations on the above concerns. I really like TeamSite but it's the only CMS I can think of these days that ignores those important aspect of content management. It makes it a little hard to sell internally here.

Also if you have a good pointer to some resources I could read regarding integraton of web application development (.NET and or JSP) with TeamSite content management I would be grateful.

Sorry for the long post,
Thanks.
-Ninerfan

nipper

I think you will see that things have not changed all that much for you.

1. No link management between pages and resources in the backing store. In other words if I have 500 pages all pointing to home.htm and I rename it to index.htm I just broke 500 links at least, still true?

Has not changed. However, good website design practices make this a fairly small issue. We use a DCR to generate the left nav, top nav, etc. SSI's for those make things much better.

You can use a link management tool within TS, but I have never seen this as a big issue.

2. Similar to number one, if I need to rename or move branches or directories because of a change in our IA this will break many links, still true?

TS provides a docroot. If you move files, things that point to those files will be incorrect. Yes a tool that doesn't use a filesystem (like VIgnette) does not have that issue (though it will have many other issues)

3. Deleting a file will break all links to that file. Still True? Any "Delete Workflow" available out of the box?

That is basically Q #1, yes. Is there a delete WF ? Sure the normal WF will allow you to delete files from the backingstore and from the web server. But I doubt that is what you wanted to know.

Can you build a reference list ? Sure. Esp if you use templates and browse to other pages for links. Then you can attach EAs with a reference count/list of everything pointing to that specific page. Not horribly difficult.

The better approach is incontext QA and workflow approvals. Nothing is better than having a human review the change. I would be surprised if foo.html is referenced from 25 different pages unless it is done view a menu.
QA should work in that case.

4. No kind of "external" search ability once pages are deployed? This is much less important than the others but I had to ask.

No, TS now ships with an embedded version of Verity, however that stays on the TS server. If you want to search TS, you have that ability, but if you want to search your external site, you need something else.

HTH

Andy