Interview with Leah Clelland, Microsoft's Content Management Server & SharePoint Product Manager for Systems Integrator Partners

Leah, how have attitudes changed over the last few years with regard to CMS interest
and adoption?
Attitudes change with needs. In the last 10 years, demand for Web content management has steadily grown as the Web itself has matured. Key triggers for this growth have been the increased requirements for usability, compliance, accessibility, integration, personalization, and the reduced cost of ownership. In all, an improved employee, customer and partner experience at less cost and higher ROI are key goals fueling Web content management growth.

This shift towards a more structured and dynamic Web presence enabled by Web content management has created a fundamental culture shift for businesses. By giving the business user the opportunity to use their own tool to publish to the Web in a dynamic way, the dependency on IT has been reduced and technical resources can focus on value-add activities. Equipped with powerful tools that reduce the time to do their respective Web publishing jobs while increasing their capabilities, content owners and IT Managers are more productive. This lowers costs for individuals, teams and organizations.

Moreover, with a solution based on Microsoft’s Content Management Server, IT Managers are able to retain an appropriate level of granular control while having the flexibility to relinquish control when appropriate and business users and content owners can actively participate in the Web publishing process while retaining separate control over design elements and site structure. This is an increasingly important requirement as Web requirements grow beyond accessibility to include greater government and industry mandated compliance and accountability.

The greatest growth and adoption has taken place within the manufacturing, public sector, finance and healthcare industries. Many of these companies have already invested in the Microsoft desktop so, in comparison to the value that MCMS brings, their total cost of ownership is low. By nature, these industries manage high quantities of content, they are very structured and they must meet compliance and accountability regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley and Article 508.

Who is using Microsoft Content Management Server? What are some of the bigger public Web sites running on MCMS 2002?
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Open Courseware site is one of the world’s largest content driven public sites. This site uses MCMS to put tens of thousands of documents and course information online. This site recently won the Computerworld 21st Century Achievement in Education and Academia Award .

Other sites that use MCMS include Volvo, Ford, Jet Blue, Akzo Noble, Samsung, Sunguard, TrendMicro, IDQ, Wachovia and Royal Canadian Mint. Some of the world’s highest trafficked, load-driven sites are Microsoft sites running MCMS 2002 such as Microsoft.com, MSN.ca and XBox.com. At Microsoft, we sell what we use and we use the products that we sell. Microsoft also has a Standard Edition of CMS geared specifically to small and mid-market companies.

What’s the major difference between the Standard and Enterprise versions?
The key difference between the MCMS Enterprise Edition and the Standard Edition is scale. Prior to the release of MCMS SE in December 2003, Microsoft conducted a lot of market research. We listened to our customer and partner feedback and learned that the mid-market has the same needs as the enterprise level — just at a different scale. We kept the features and the functionality, the graphical interface and the workflow of the enterprise edition but adjusted the scale to be more appropriate for this level.

For example, the enterprise version enables an unlimited number of users participating in the publishing process whereas the standard edition limits the number of concurrent participants to 15. The enterprise version also supports load balancing while the Standard Edition does not.

For larger organizations, the Standard Edition can also serve as an entry point to the enterprise version. When introduced at a departmental level, it’s seen as a cost-effective, low-risk way to experience the value that MCMS can bring.

From CMS 2001 to 2002, Microsoft made a lot of changes and migrated to the .NET platform, what are the plans for the next CMS release? There has been a lot of talk in the marketplace that you may be integrating MCMS and portal solutions. Is this true?
In January 2004, our MCMS product team merged with the SharePoint group and moved to the Office System team. This was a significant first step towards delivering even more integrated and unified Microsoft Portal products and technologies. As part of the product development process, our planners and development teams are heads down working on their first milestone for the next release. Our research during this intense planning phase has focused on four key areas of investment: portals, collaboration, enterprise content management and overall infrastructure. A key theme is helping customers and partners leverage their Microsoft investments via continued integration with Windows Server System and the Microsoft Office desktop. This integration theme extends beyond Microsoft products to line-of-business applications and mission-critical systems. We recognize that the true value for many portals today is in their ability to unlock valuable data from these systems by making it accessible in a meaningful way to the business users.

Traditionally, the portal has been valuable because it offered a coordinated approach to Web publishing, branding and data retrieval by removing the IT bottlenecks and by effectively bringing together a bunch of disconnected information islands. While Microsoft Portal products and technologies such as SharePoint and MCMS will continue to provide best-of breed Web publishing solutions, we are also focused on continuing to deliver truly interoperable portals. Integrating systems with previously hard-to-get-to, yet valuable data will be a focal point for Microsoft as we continue to enhance how MCMS and SharePoint integrate with other Microsoft products and with mission-critical systems and data stores.