[Sigia-l] Sharepoint Issues (was CMS Recommendation)

Thu Oct 20 19:12:15 EDT 2005

A number of you have asked for this feedback on our specific SP issues.
I am on the user experience and content production side, so I will do my
best to describe the technical issues our architects & developers have
faced with SharePoint (though I'm not entirely fluent in that
language!).

We are a health insurance company with 4 portal sites - members,
employers (HR departments), brokers (our sales folks), doctors.  We also
have a general marketing site that links to each portal.  To date, the
marketing and member sites are the only 2 that have been redesigned and
build on the SharePoint system (apologies if I'm not using the
terminology correctly). Goal is to redevelop all sites for a true portal
experience over the next few years.  

MS sold us on SP portal services and assured us it had the CMS
capabilities we needed. After deployment, we learned this was not the
case.  MS then said we could buy their separate CMS product. 

We have multiple user groups with different personalized content
(members must sign in to access the site).  I.e., Acme Company has ABC
health plan which offers the following Web features.  Smith Company has
XYZ plan with different features.  Jones Company has ABC plan but their
members don't use our claim forms, so we have to suppress them.  Also,
each individual member has different content based on his plan.  The
site is personalized to show your own benefit details, past claims, etc.
To further complicate things, we bought another company 10 years ago and
still have all of their old back-office systems, so all of our business
is sold on 2 different platforms, with 2 different claims systems, 2
benefit admin systems, etc. that feed into the Web.  We used to have 2
member sites. The redesign combined them, but the content is still
different.

In order to meet personalization needs, we were not able to implement
SharePoint out of the box.  Instead, we had to create custom code to
ensure that we could accommodate all of the personalization rules and
business needs.  As a result, much of the content is hard-coded.  In
order for me to change content, I have to open a ticket to ask a
developer to change the code and wait for it to be prioritized and
scheduled in a monthly build.  According to Microsoft estimates, over
90% of the content on both the secured and unsecured member site is
hard-coded and therefore unchangeable without a developer's involvement.

I hope this clarifies some of the issues. Let me know if anyone has more
questions and I will do my best to answer.

Thanks again for all the recommendations!

Sarah

-----Original Message-----
From: sigia-l-bounces at asis.org [mailto:sigia-l-bounces at asis.org] On
Behalf Of Billie Mandel
Sent: Thursday, October 20, 2005 3:10 PM
To: sigia-l at asis.org
Subject: RE: [Sigia-l] CMS Recommendation

I'm currently working on a Sharepoint implementation as well, and the
lack of CMS features was quite shocking to me when I started this
project.  MSFT seems to be trying to push folks toward their CMS product
(http://www.microsoft.com/cmserver/default.mspx ), which is quite
expensive  and doesn't fit my requirements, though it might serve yours.

A Sharepoint deployment consultant we used to help with initial setup
recommended that I check out SiteCore - http://www.sitecore.net.  I'm
looking into it, but am thinking that I'm going to end up designing
something custom and having a .NET developer build it.  

Question: Several of the features you're mentioning below (versioning,
permissions, targeting content by audience) are native features of
Sharepoint.  What are the specific features that you've found to be
lacking?  

While we're on the subject of Sharepoint, does anyone have any inside
knowledge as to why the end user interaction is so wretched for this
product?  There seem to be so many of what I would call mistakes that I
can only imagine that MSFT had some strategy I just don't know about.
Or perhaps I'm cutting them too much slack? 

- Billie

-----Original Message-----
From: sigia-l-bounces at asis.org [mailto:sigia-l-bounces at asis.org] On
Behalf Of Ockler, Sarah
Sent: Thursday, October 20, 2005 11:04 AM
To: sigia-l at asis.org
Subject: [Sigia-l] CMS Recommendation

Can anyone recommend a good CMS with the following
requirements/constraints:

-Site is built with MS SharePoint
-Need versioning, permissions etc.
-Site is personalized with dynamic content based on member (it's a
member health plan Web site) -Site is largely transactional with little
static content

I'm not sure if that's enough info. We've just started to look into CMS
after learning MS SharePoint couldn't deliver what we needed. We've
gotten a proposal from Interwoven so far.  I don't have a lot of
experience with large scale CMS. Any thoughts are appreciated.

Thanks! 

_______________________________________________
Sarah L. Ockler
Web Content Producer
Great-West Healthcare
8505 East Orchard Road
Englewood, CO  80111
v: 303.737.1308 :: f: 303.737.0008
www.greatwesthealthcare.com

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