Feature List

The Feature List is divided into four major areas.

First general information about the product (Name, Technology, Price, Market Status). This overview should greatly cut down candidate systems for your consideration.

Then the three phases of Content Management to describe specific features -

• Content Creation
• Content Management Proper
• Content Delivery

1. Product Overview

• Description
  • Product Name
  • Company Name
  • Company/Organization website
  • Product web page
  • Company's description
  • Our Description
• Technology
  • License - Open-source, Proprietary, which
  • Type - General CMS, Front end (UI), News Portal, Blog, Wiki
  • Platform - Windows, Linux, Mac, etc.
  • Web Server - IIS, Apache, etc.
  • Application Framework - Perl, Python, .NET, J2EE, PHP, Cold Fusion, etc.
  • CMS Framework - AxKit, Cocoon, Midgard, Zope, etc.
  • Languages - Perl, VB, Java, PHP, Python, etc.
  • Databases - Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL, any ODBC, etc.
  • API - public to allow extensibility.
• Status
  • Release - 2.0, etc.
  • Year introduced
  • Number of Installs, Downloads
  • Developer Community (website?, mail list?)
• Marketing
  • Price
  • License (per CPU, per user, etc.)
  • Market Position (Revenues, Competitors)
  • Sales Methods (Sales Force, Online)
  • Support Contracts, Consultants
  • Online Demos, Sandbox, Prototype, Trial
• Installation
  • Online How To
  • Hours/Days for Typical Install
  • Documentation online/printed
  • Download site/CD-ROMs
  • Code Commented
• Support
  • Online Help
  • Tutorials
  • Training Classes
  • Cost
  • Commercial Contracts
  • Help Desks
  • Independent Consultants

2. Content Creation (Acquisition, Aggregation, Authoring)

• Acquisition
  • Native support for filetypes
  • Multiple file transfers (FTP, site import)
  • Conversion tools (e.g.,Word to XML "chunks")
  • Rights management
  • Mandatory tagging (force structure and semantics)
  • Supported RDF ontologies (e.g., Dublin Core)
• Aggregation
  • Incoming syndicated feeds
  • Metadata management (read incoming metadata)
  • Integrated Web services (e.g., currency conversion)
  • UDDI tools
• Authoring (Editing Tools, Templating, Tagging)
  • Content Element Editors (Naive and Power Users)
    • WYSIWYG Through-The-Web
    • Text-only Forms
    • XML Editor
    • Spell checker
    • Content objects use templates
    • Asset repository (images, sounds, Flash, video, etc.)
  • Template Editor
    • WYSIWYG Through-The-Web
    • Template Gallery
    • XML Editor
  • Tag Editor (semantics and style)
    • Drop-down menus of all tags
    • Metadata Thesaurus
    • Taxonomies/Ontologies online
  • Help online
    • Context-sensitive help
    • Documentation
    • Examples

3. Content Management Proper (Workflow, Editing, Approvals, Staging, Repository, etc.)

• Workflow
  • Access Permission Levels (Privilege granularity)
    • Number of levels
    • Per User, Per Folder, Per Role, Per Item
    • Flexible assignments to workflow
    • Creator automatic owner
    • User subscription to workflow
  • Check In/Check Out
    • Open page on web (Edit this page)
    • Automatic file lock on open
    • Conflict Resolution (who has it?)
    • Instant Messaging (email, phones)
    • Merge Tools, Diffs
  • Workflow Messaging
    • Email notifications (links to work)
    • Status (stage in workflow)
    • Comments at each stage
    • Audit trail (workflow log)
  • Arbitrary Roles (Writers, Editors, Graphic Artists, Rights Managers, Publishers, etc.)
• Versioning
  • Scheduling, Expiration
  • All elements, templates date/time stamped
  • Archive with rollback (per file or site?)
• Personalization
  • Relationship Management (History)
  • Actions tracking
  • Session/Click/Behavior analysis
  • Individual visitor ID (cookies)
• Localization
  • Multilingual server
    • Respond to browser language requests
    • Gist translation option
  • Workflow
    • Automatic notifications
    • Quality checkers
  • UI multilingual
• Reporting
  • Chrono workflow and by worker
  • WebTrends-style for whole site
  • Specific monitors
  • Performance (page delivery times)
• Storage
  • Format (text, HTML, XML)
  • Database only
  • Files
  • Files and database
• Backup
  • Onsite and offsite
  • Files and database
  • To nonvolatile media
  • Disaster recovery plan
• Security
  • Firewall rules
  • Encrypted sessions
• Staging Server for QA
  • Testing methodology
  • Replicates publishing environment

4. Content Delivery (Live Server, Publishing, Syndication)

• Publishing (Delivery)
  • Separate Delivery from Creation/Staging/Testing
    • Use different server platform?
    • Replication
    • Synchronization of mirror sites
  • Multi-Publishing to different clients
    • PDAs
    • Cell phones
    • Handicap accessibility
• Syndication
  • RDF Syndicated News Feeds
  • Web services