Rich Media Publishing and Management Part 2: Sorting The Candidates

Test Drive Before Buying
This rule applies to any and all technologies these days, but especially with rich media publishing and management systems. "If you don’t need a manual or a lot of training from the vendor," Vonder Haar reminds us, "then chances are higher that you will have success propagating the use of the application throughout your company. Conversely, if you can’t figure it out, then chances are that others will not either."

Easy content creation is especially critical if the expectation is that subject matter experts, and especially key executives and thought leaders, will be performing from cubicles or their offices without the assistance of producers. And, once the content is finished, encoding media and publishing to a portal has to be as easy, as little as two or three clicks in some cases. Content management tasks such as naming, indexing, replication, and reconciliation of files on caches should be automated, for the most part. Processes that require finessing such as setting expiration dates, management of back up systems and tweaking of templates for special events can be done in the back room by a technician.

Lawrence Orans, principal analyst at Gartner, recommends that customers have a pilot implementation include focus groups that really test usability among employees who are going to be the target users. "Get a few $40 web cams and really kick the tires," Orans suggests. "At the same time, deploy a couple of caches in a lab and just try the publishing process. This is particularly important if your goal is to roll this out to multiple sites. A test should validate that the technology works, that the vendor is making good on their promises and, at the same time, it builds skills in the IT department before putting stress on the system out in the production network."

The bottom line when evaluating and selecting a rich media publishing and management system is that the customer has to be very well educated and prepared to evolve with the provider of one or more platforms before fully realizing the potential of ubiquitous rich media content creation. It could be several more years before information workers consider sitting down at their computers on a regular basis to capture their message and deliver a complete rich media experience with only a few clicks of the mouse. The vision is that preparing the content contained this article in rich media format could be as simple as it has been to prepare it in text.