SharePoint Content Structure – Let a thousand content types bloom?

Source: http://www.earley.com/blog/sharepoint-content-structure-let-thousand-content-types-bloom

“How many content types should you have?”

This is the question that came up in a conference call last week on SharePoint architecture. This organization had implemented their corporate portal on SharePoint 2007 and was interested in going forward with more portal sites but had some concerns about the approach to information architecture they had undertaken.

I answered what I would answer no matter what technology it was – “Only as many as you really need to implement the appropriate level of metadata, workflow and templates.” Which is of course vague, as most good consultant-ese is. So I followed up with the notion that when we work on web content management implementations, we typically end up with 10-15 content types for a site of medium complexity. We always try to keep the structure simple and number of content types few for many good reasons, ranging from ease of content structure management to content publisher user experience.

The folks on the phone were quiet for a minute… You see, the previous consultant they had worked with had a bit of a different (read opposite) approach. The philosophy they described was that SharePoint content types should be created to the maximum degree of granularity (e.g. one content type per library) so as to reduce the need for content publishers to select a content type and tag metadata values. For example, if you had a site for human resources forms, you would have one library and content type for medical forms, one library and content type for dental forms, etc. Each content type would be extremely specific and require little tagging. “If you need 30,000 content types, then so be it” is the idea. (insert eye twitch.)

The intent behind this – to reduce uncertainty and effort for content publishers – is noble and good, but the overly-granular content types seems to be in the realm of sledgehammer to kill a fly. To help explain why, I thought I’d enlist the help of a couple of friends and colleagues.

First, I emailed content management guru Bob Boiko, author of the Content Management Bible, to see if he agreed. His response?

“How many content types is the right number? The fewest possible to squeeze the most value out of the info you possess. If it were my system, I would create a generic type and put all the info that I could not find a business justification for into that bucket. It’s not worth naming if you can’t say clearly why you are managing it. Then I would start with the info we have decided is most valuable and put real energy into naming the type and fleshing out the metadata behind it. Then on to the next most valuable and so on till I ran out of resources. In that way, the effort of typing is spent on the stuff that is most likely to repay the effort.“

Amen to that! But I also wanted to get a tool-specific view from my colleague and SharePoint expert friend Shawn Shell. So I skyped him…

So, what do you think?

Well, having a content type for every document library is certainly an interesting approach, though I think your SharePoint administrators, as well as your users, will go quite mad.

So, I think the argument is that having this many content types is supposed to make it easier on the users by presetting all choices and removing the potential for error. If you never have to choose a content type because each library has a very specific default that matches the content you are creating, then there’s no confusion, the idea seems to be… From a general content management perspective, this is flawed. But what about from a SharePoint-specific standpoint?

I can understand why this might make sense on the surface.  Unfortunately, I think you end up exchanging one kind of confusion for another.  Further, there’s a huge maintenance implication as well. For example, if you have a content type for each library, you are, for all practical purposes requiring the user to decide where to physically store a document.  This physical storage then implies your classification — regardless of whether a default content type is applied.

So, you’re basically recreating all the ills of a fileshare folder structure!

In essence yes. To make matters worse, more complex SharePoint environments will necessarily include multiple applications and multiple site collections. Because content types are site collection bound, administrators will have lots more administration to create, maintain and ensure consistency across the applications and site collection. This would normally be true, but when you have such an overload of content types and libraries, the complexities of management are compounded.

So, if you have 50 content types, and you need to use them in 2 or 3 site collections, you’d have to create 150 content types. Good argument to keep your use of content types judicious. Is there a hard limit to the number of content types one can manage in a site collection?

The answer is “sort of.”  There’s no specific hard limit to the number of content types in a site collection, but there are some general “soft limits” in the product around numbers of objects (generally 2000). This particular limit is an interface limit where users will see slower performance if you’re trying to display more than 2000 items.  The condition won’t typically manifest itself for normal users, but it will for administration. The other real limit is the content type schema can’t exceed 2 Gb.  While this seems like a pretty high limit, if you have a content type for each library, loads of libraries in a site collection and robust content types, there’s certainly a chance to hit this limit.

What about search? I assume that a plethora of content types would have adverse effects on search.

It absolutely does.  Like everything we’ve discussed here, the impact is primarily two fold: 1) administration and 2) user experience. Content types, as well as columns, can be used as facets for search.  If you have an overwhelming number of facets in results, the value facets bring is reduced.  Plus, as I mentioned before, having large numbers of content types could also produce performance problems when trying to enumerate all of the type included in the search result.

From an administrative standpoint, we’re back to managing all of these content types across site collections, ensuring that the columns in those content types are mapped to managed columns (a requirement for surfacing the metadata in search results) and, if you have multiple Shared Services providers, that this work is done across all SSPs.

I expect there will also be a usability issue for those trying to create content outside of the SharePoint interface. Wouldn’t users have to choose from the plethora of content types if they started in Word for?

This is another excellent point.  Often, when discussing solutions within SharePoint, we think only of the web interface. When developing any solution, however, you need to keep both the Office and Windows Explorer interface in mind as well. Interestingly, using multiple document libraries, with a content type for each library, makes a little more sense from the end users perspective, since it’s similar to physical file shares and folders.
However, the same challenges that many organizations are facing related to management of file shares can manifest themselves when using the multiple library and matching content type approach as well — putting these organizations back in the same unmanageable place they started.

Great, thanks Shawn for your insights! I’ll be sure to spread the word to avoid a content type pandemic.

So there you have it folks. Less is more. Standardize, simplify and don’t let your content types multiply needlessly. Your content contributors and SharePoint administrators will thank you.

SharePoint Scaling Limits

Source: http://old.markharrison.co.uk/blog/2004/09/sharepoint-scaling-limits.htm

I frequently get asked for SharePoint scaling limits so I though I would blog an entry I can refer people to.

First an extract from the Capacity Planning section of the Windows SharePoint Services Administration guide which answers general WSS limits questions:

None of these are hard limits enforced by the system. They are guidelines for designing a server that has good overall performance.

• Site collections (Database scope) 50,000 … Total throughput degrades as the number of site collections increases.
• Web sites (Web site scope) 2,000 … The interface for enumerating subsites of a given Web site does not perform well much
  beyond 2,000 subsites.
• Web sites (Site collection) 250,000 – You can create a very large total number of Web sites by nesting the subsites. For example, 100
  sites each with 1000 subsites is 100,100 Web sites.
• Documents (Folder scope) 2,000 … The interfaces for enumerating documents in a folder do not perform well beyond a thousand entries.
• Documents (Library scope) 2 million … You can create very large document libraries by nesting folders.
• Security principals (Web site scope) 2,000 … The size of the access control list is limited to a few thousand security principals, in other words users and groups in the Web site.
• Users ( Web site scope) 2 million … You can add millions of people to your Web site by using Microsoft Windows security groups to manage security instead of using individual users.
• Items (List scope) 2,000 … The interface for enumerating list items does not perform well beyond a few thousand items.
• Web Parts (Page scope) 100 … Pages with more than 100 Web Parts are slow to render.
• Web Part personalization (Page scope) 10,000 … Pages with more than a few thousand user personalizations are slow to render.
• Lists (Web site scope) 2,000 … The interface for enumerating lists and libraries in a Web site does not perform well beyond a few thousand entries.
• Document size (File scope) 50 MB … The file save performance degrades as the file size grows. The default maximum is 50 MB. This maximum is enforced by the system, but you can change it to any value up to 2 GB (2047 MB) if you have applied Windows SharePoint Services Service Pack 1.

For SharePoint Portal Server, here’s an extract from the Capacity Planning whitepaper:

It is important to understand the ramifications of the different features and functions of the SharePoint Portal Server solutions to size the system so that the performance of the system is good.

The following table lists some of the SharePoint Portal Server objects and describes their recommended use. “Typical” indicates comfortable and well tested; “maximum” indicates that the system can support that number, but not without some performance ramifications or
special configurations.

An asterisk (*) indicates a hard limit; no asterisk indicates a tested or supported limit.

• Portal sites (full) - typically 2 … maximum 15 *
• Portal sites (child) - typically 10 … maximum 100 *
• Areas – typically 1,000 … maximum 10,000
• Best Bets – typically 1,000 … maximum 25,000
• Area depth - typically 5 … maximum 20 *
• User profiles - typically 50,000 … maximum 1,000,000
• Audiences – typically 500 … maximum 10,000
• Audience memberships – typically 500,000 … maximum 5,000,000
• SSO credentials – typically 100,00 … maximum 100,000
• Search indexes - typically 3 … maximum 32
• Content sources -typically 25 … maximum 250
• Search scopes – typically 25 … maximum 250 *
• Indexed documents per content index – typically 100,000 … maximum 5,000,000
• Indexed documents – typically 2,500,000 … maximum 20,000,000
• Thesaurus entries - typically 1,000 … maximum 10,000
• Alerts – typically 50,000 … maximum 1,000,000
• Team sites – typically 10,000 … maximum 250,000

Personal sites – typically 10,000 … maximum 250,000

Understanding the differences between Alfresco’s repository implementations

Source: http://ecmarchitect.com/archives/2009/08/31/1038

People new to Alfresco are often unaware of the existence of two different repository implementations within the product. One, which I’ll call the “DM Store”, is the classic store, the one that’s been used by Alfresco since the beginning. The other, the “WCM Store” or, as it is often referred to in API-speak, the “AVM Store”, was born with the addition of the Alfresco WCM product offering. Whether you are doing document management or web content management, you use the same Explorer client, but under the covers, your content lives in two very different types of repositories.

The Alfresco story on why a second repository implementation was created is that the Engineers writing WCM didn’t believe the DM store was capable of providing the kind of support for versioning, branching, and layering functionality they needed (hence, the AVM acronym, which stands for Advanced Versioning Manager) so they created an entirely new repository implementation to support WCM.

Why does this matter, apart from being a possible topic of conversation at your next get-together (”Healthcare is easy to fix. Do you think Alfresco will ever unify their two repository implementations?”)? It matters because the “two sides” of Alfresco are not equivalent in terms of functionality and depending on what you need to do, you may find yourself performing unnatural acts to work around the disparity.

Many projects will be completely unaffected by the differences between Alfresco DM and Alfresco WCM. But it is important to know what these differences are when you first begin to plan your solution to avoid uncomfortable conversations between you and your customer when you realize you’ve made a bad assumption.

I’ll assume you know the high-level capabilities of both Alfresco DM and Alfresco WCM. Obviously there are some things one product can do that the other can’t that are by design (sandboxes and virtualization in WCM, for example). What’s more important to understand are the subtle (and sometimes not-so subtle) differences between the two. Here’s the list and a table that summarizes, if you are into the whole brevity thing:

Content Modeling. Alfresco DM uses a proprietary XML-based description of the content model while Alfresco WCM uses XML Schema. On the surface this isn’t a big deal, but it does mean if your repository contains a mix of DM- and WCM-stored data, you won’t have a single model that defines it all and you could possibly have duplication between the two.

Custom Content Types. In Alfresco DM, when you create content, you tell Alfresco what its content type is. If you’ve extended the out-of-the-box model, you can have any number of business-specific content types with your own custom metadata. In Alfresco WCM, custom content types are not supported. In WCM, your content type is your web form. Interestingly, although the “Type” dropdown is shown in the “Create Web Content” dialog, and it will contain custom content types you’ve defined using the Alfresco DM model, your selection will not be honored. All AVM content is created as an instance of the “avmplaincontent” content type no matter what you select. However, although you must do it through an API call, you can apply custom aspects to AVM content.

User Interface Configuration. Alfresco DM uses a proprietary XML-based configuration file to define the “property sheets” that display metadata in the Alfresco Explorer client for a given content type or aspect. Alfresco WCM uses the embedded Chiba XForms engine to inspect the XML Schema (XSD) and automatically create a web form that will produce data that conforms to the XSD. XSD annotations can be used to influence the presentation of the form fields. One outcome of this is that it is much easier to localize things like property labels in Alfresco DM than it is in Alfresco WCM.

User Interface Extension. If you need to change how the Alfresco Explorer client behaves, there are some things you can do through XML, but advanced customizations will require JavaServer Faces (JSF) development. Alfresco DM and WCM both use the same Explorer client so this applies to both (See “Alfresco User Interface: What are my options?”). However, if you need to change how the web form engine works, you may need to write new Chiba XForms widgets. For instance, Optaros developed a web form used to describe points and regions on Google Maps. That kind of thing requires you to understand how to extend Chiba.

Structured (XML) data entry. Data entered in an Alfresco WCM web form is saved as XML that conforms to the XSD you’ve defined. There is no similar facility for capturing data as XML available within Alfresco DM. At one point the Community code line had “ECM Forms” which was essentially WCM web forms for the DM side of the house, but that’s disappeared in the latest Community release. On the DM side, when you edit metadata you are editing object properties whose values get stored in the database, not as XML.

Transformations. You can use either Freemarker or XSLT to transform Alfresco web form XML into other formats. That transformation is defined as part of the web form configuration which you do within the Explorer client. In Alfresco DM, transformations are more about binary file transformations (DOC to PDF or GIF to PNG, for example). If you want to do Freemarker or XSLT transformations on XML content stored in Alfresco DM, you’ll need to write that yourself (an Action would do the trick). If you want to do DM-style transformations on binary files in Alfresco WCM, that’s not out-of-the-box. You’ll have to do that using the API.

Rule actions. Alfresco DM allows you to configure rules on folders to trigger actions (out-of-the-box or custom) to operate against newly-added, updated, or deleted documents. Alfresco WCM does not support rule actions at all.

Auditing. Alfresco DM has a granular auditing sub-system. You can configure it to audit just about anything you want. Anything except WCM. You can audit web project creation, but not changes to individual web assets within a web project. At least not out-of-the-box.

Object-level permissions. In Alfresco DM you can assign users and groups to roles at the folder and file level. In Alfresco WCM, the UI will only let you go as low as the web project level. The API supports more granular security but you have to implement that yourself with custom code.

Search. Everything in Alfresco DM is full-text indexed and searchable. In Alfresco WCM, only the Staging Sandbox of each web project is indexed. You can do a search from your user sandbox but you’re really searching the Staging Sandbox. If you have any content you’ve created in your user sandbox that you have not yet committed to Staging, web project search won’t find it. Another limitation is that you cannot search across web projects. That search box that’s visible in the far upper right-hand corner of the Alfresco Explorer client is the Alfresco DM search–it won’t find anything in any of your web projects.

Advanced Workflow. Alfresco DM and Alfresco WCM use the same JBoss jBPM workflow engine so there’s no functional difference between what you can do with workflow on either side. The only catch is that in Alfresco DM, all deployed workflows show up in the “Start Advanced Workflow” dialog whereas in WCM, you have to tell Alfresco which deployed workflows are okay to use for WCM. That’s covered in the Alfresco Developer Guide and on the wiki.

File protocols. CIFS and FTP are the only two file protocols supported by both Alfresco DM and Alfresco WCM. Similar protocols supported by Alfresco DM such as WebDAV, inbound SMTP, and IMAP, are not supported by Alfresco WCM.

Deployment. Some people use Alfresco DM to manage content that is published to the web because they don’t need the additional features WCM offers, or they have some other reason to export content to another server. Unfortunately, Alfresco DM does not yet offer a deployment component like the one in Alfresco WCM. If you want to export content from Alfresco DM to some other destination in a systematic way, you’ll have to roll your own solution.

As John and Paul said, “It’s getting better”

Some of these differences will become less drastic in coming releases. For example, Alfresco is implementing a new form service that will be used to define the content model and user interface across the entire product line, so that helps. The WCM deployment functionality is also being refactored and will ultimately work for both DM and WCM. And at every community event Alfresco talks about “repository unification” as a goal for the future, although the timeline is lightyears away in terms of software releases.

As I said, depending on what you’re doing these differences may not affect you at all. Just make sure you don’t assume that a given feature is available everywhere, and make sure you’ve made a conscious decision about what content to put in which repository (DM or WCM) based on your requirements.

SWOT analysis on Oracle UCM by the University of Minnesota

Source: https://wiki.umn.edu/view/StellentWCM/UMContentSWOTAnalysis

Aug 24, 2007 – 08:39:55 – JeffreyAbuzzahab

UMContent (Oracle UCM) Pilot
Implementation SWOT Analysis

Strengths:

• CSOM: The Core Services (SOA) architecture is outstanding.
• CSOM: If you don’t have tons of autonomous units and are document centric, then you can’t go wrong with UCM as we have it installed today.
• CSOM: Good separation of content from display.
• CSOM: Metadata is available along with the document in most cases on the server side and SAO.
• ASR: Content server is big and can handle large amounts of content.
• ASR: Powerful, customizable, extensible from Content Server perspective.
• ASR: Forces thoughtful organizing and structuring of content
• ASR: Creates discipline in web page formatting
• ASR: Document conversion engine (?dynamic converter?) does a pretty good job of transfering styles from basic word docs to the web
• ASR: Document Management is the strength at the core
• CEHD: Web interface to content manager is fast for a Web interface.
• CEHD: Visual folder model in Site Studio great for organizing, naming URLs and naming navigation links.
• CEHD: Dynamic Converter is surprisingly robust, and a fine solution for rigorously-structured Word docs.
• CEHD: Dynamic navigation is efficient and stable.

Weaknesses:

• CSOM: Can’t do full text search, let alone replace, and even ordinary content searches are tricky.
• CSOM: Lots of server and OS – dependent configuration items make server setups difficult to maintain and clone.
• CSOM: Many features are top level content server level features, mean the must be shared at the individual site levels. This forces us to rely on central administration of those features and any site specific customizations are less likely to happen if they then must be over ridden in every other site (we will have thousands of sites.) Examples: workflow, metadata, security.
• CSOM: Site namespace issue: root level sites are not possible, requiring vast amounts of “bad links” link redirects or link rewrites.
• CSOM: Direct linking to Contribution Data Files, no styles can be applied to these files. They just render very thing.
• CSOM: Only one type of content can be set in the replaceable region on secondary layouts.
• CSOM: Only one region on a secondary layout can be set as replaceable.
• CSOM: Summary/Detail views are difficult to achieve (if not impossible)
• CSOM: Forms based input is difficult to achieve (if not impossible)
• CSOM: Experience programmers have difficult time locating information about services or iDoc syntax when faced with typical programming issues. (Documentation format issue)
• CSOM: UCM is too native document centric, or may be just the documentation is to native document centric. We find that trying to use dynamic * CSOM: converter on forms submission, and static lists data file output is alluding us. We want to take the files and “work” with them and are finding it difficult to get dynamic converter to work with them.
• CSOM: Site Studio is like web development from the 1990’s.
• CSOM: Site Studio contributor content authoring interface is user unfriendly it is a hindrance to user adoption and acceptance (Site Studio user interface usability issue).
• CSOM: Full CSS based layouts can cause site studio to behave oddly in both contributor mode and in site studio development mode, without lots of non-value added special handling.
• CSOM: Inter-region HTML mark-up of element s appears to routinely disappear or be altered.
• CSOM: Contributors will need extensive training compared to that needed for our current CMS or ‘many other CMSes’.
• CSOM: Using the same Data File from a Static List in different regions on a primary layout and secondary layout might not work. If the replaceable content is supposed to use the Data File
• CSOM: Centralized content server architecture makes it very difficult for Unit Areas to create components.
• CSOM: Layout mark-up routinely disappears.
• CSOM: Site Studio crashes fairly often.
• CSOM: Fragment Edit mode is troublesome. Often I want to edit a fragment and I end up adding it to a layout. (Site studio usability issue)
• CSOM: Excessive number of steps to edit web assets, five to seven click for each change.
• CSOM: With the loss of some Admin features the navigation to support functions (like the link to dynamic converter disappearing.)
• CSOM: Real Security Certificates are needed on the Dev/Staging/QA/Production instances.
• CSOM: The product mix feels caballed together. Viable names, casing, formatting are all different depending on what part of the product you are in.
• CSOM: We receive lots of “Unable to generate form” errors in site studio and contribution mode.
• CSOM: Cannot preset Static list default values for each instance of a list on a layout, cannot even get rid of the useless Column 1, Column 2,… defaults.
• CSOM: Lack of Debugging tools and functions
• CSOM: Lack of log file views that are appropriate for Site Studio Developers and Contributors
• CSOM: Thumbnails are not fuctioning on the Dev server
• CSOM: Wysiwyg handles unordered lists and list items in unexpected ways
• ASR: Slow to work with (multiple steps for simple concepts)
• ASR: Complex, developer intensive, and doesn?t deliver a web site that warrants the front-end labor
• ASR: I-doc scripting is proprietary and requires study
• ASR: No pool of experienced developers around to learn from
• ASR: No pool of experienced developers to hire
• ASR: Kludgy – lots of work arounds
• ASR: Doesn?t deliver on core RFP functionality
• ASR: Can?t do full-text search and replace
• ASR: No single sign-on (X.500 or LDAP)
• ASR: Styling done within WYSIWYG editor is not accessible
• ASR: Doesn?t provide semantic tagging with WYSIWYG editor
• ASR: Inverse relationship between content provider flexibility and accessibility. One Stop will require both.
• ASR: Cannot integrate outside data sources w/out JSP functionality
• ASR: Access to some functionality is compromised by Admin vs. Sub admin roles
• CEHD: Documentation for proprietary iDoc script is poor.
• CEHD: Six pilots have overloaded the system, cannot exclude content from other Webs… goes over 255 character limit for naming exclusions.
• CEHD: One poorly written query can bog down entire system.
• CEHD: Expensive Web design client required for Site Studio to function properly, DreamWeaver^? recommended.
• CEHD: WYSIWYG editor is actually a form based editor.
• CEHD: Form based editor does not support element-selector pairing in compliant CSS.
• CEHD: WebDav^? integration is odd, access to a folder requires access to all parent folders above in the hierarchy, this is just plain silly.
• CEHD: System is completely dependent on Microsoft Windows OS to function, yet does not keep pace with progression of Microsoft developments.

Opportunities:

• CSOM: We still see that having a central content repository as being a large value. But the limitations of what are top level shared services threaten this opportunity.
• CSOM: Content objects are very sharable and movable; however the primary/secondary pages and their limitations seem to threaten this opportunity.
• CSOM: Certain aspects of the SOA lend themselves well to CSS based implementations; however site studios in place contribution mode implementation and the default fragments are a threat to this opportunity.
• CSOM: Being to use workflow to capture business processes, and efficiently queue content related tasks.
• CSOM: Leverage the information in the Active Directory system (assuming OIT makes this one of their priorities too.)
• CSOM: Change in Oracle handling of licensing is seem as a positive development. UMContent can now take advange of a more complete technology solution.
• ASR: Shared content management across the institution will lead to a more consistent and effective institution-wide web presence
• ASR: Metadata model is a good mechanism for content sharing
• ASR: Distributed web content management is a model we will implement. We are looking for opportunities within that model to maximize the value of our content expertise without making overwhelming demands on our web developers. Web CMS should save IT time, not add.
• ASR: Digital Asset Management and Document Management components have uses for ASR, and could be combined with Web CMS as a comprehensive communications tool.
• ASR: Oracle may invest heavily in this product segment and integrate this product with other products we own (PeopleSoft^?, UMCal, etc.) UMContent may end up providing us with an intergrated and flexible solution.
• ASR: Working with units and OIT on deploying this product effectively requires a new level of IT cooperation- a level that we have not yet reached. That cooperation can be leveraged for other projects and products, and build trust between central and unit-based IT units.
• CEHD: Hire developers centrally to clean up system
• CEHD: Develop semantic fragments… then EVERYONE can use the same well-written fragments while retaining unique visual design.

Threats:

• CSOM: Upgrades / enhancements may affect our current “workaround” development
• CSOM: Components seem to have global effects. Each component could over-ride the next. The many add-ons in the server architecture will make for an unstable development environment.
• CSOM: The Dev Content Server upgrade from 7.x to 10gR3 seems to have failed and we haven’t been told much. This makes us lose confidence. When we then asked about the customizations that Mariah did to the server while her, we found out that some of them where done without OITs involvement and that we are not sure if they were reapplied and functioning after the reversion back to 7.x. Images (?and assets?) didn’t work after the upgrade. UM Relations fragment templates had to be reapplied after the upgrade. (why?) No timeline after the attempt about when the upgrade might be reattempted, and no communication of the “all clear”. Therefor we must assume that somethings still aren’t working.
• CSOM: Contributor mode continually asks for username and password.
• CSOM: Wysiwyg – getting to the HTML Source view to be able to paste in Dreamweaver code is very combersome.
• CSOM: Content Server searches are case sensitive (and appears to not be changable)
• CSOM: Lacks the motion of “Modules” present in most Web Content Management Systems. 1 2 3 4 5 6 and the ones it does provide we have plenty of already. (wikis, discussions and blogs)
• CSOM: Lack Forms management tools that are easily used by contributors.
• CSOM: Lacks out-of –the-box the ability allow contributors to add content to layouts in ways they prioritizes.
• CSOM: Lack of a OIT priorities list, users priority list, issues submitted to Oracle list with priorities, resources, costs and timeframe.
• ASR: Number of pilots who now have sites up and live in production (0) is not a promising sign.
• ASR: If pilots are not successful, adoption rate will be slow, thus sharing will be much less effective (less of an opportunity.)
• ASR: Unclear how /not easy to share fragments, layouts, etc effectively
• ASR: Metadata integrity is fundamental to large-scale deployment with content sharing. Not clear if units will commit to maintaining metadata effectively. Metadata may drive content inappropriately if not monitored for quality.
• ASR: Spend big money on consultants / professinoal services to get the functionality and results we are unable to get on our own, and then still not be happy with the output.
• ASR: Upgrades / enhancements may affect our current ?workaround? development
• ASR: Upgrades / enhancements slow (The elusive 8.0 we said we would purchase.) When? Timelines are guesstimates. Many in the RFP group room said, “Yes, if it’s 8.0,” when the questions was to buy or not to buy.
• ASR: Complicated and unwieldy for future support. Units need dedicated staff to be fluent in Stellent / i-doc skills to update/program changes for OCM and One Stop.
• ASR: There is an inherent conflict between the desire to have a centralized WCMS for the University and our decentralized institutional structure and vested interests. It is possible that this product will never allow us the “atomization” of delegation that they claimed in the “response to RFP”, and therefore, will only be effective if seperate instances are used.
• CEHD: No clean/easy migration path out of system.