SDL Tridion: Summary of the Content Management and Delivery Cpabilities

Content Management

Templating

Templates in Tridion are modular and granular. There are templates at the component level (reusable piece of functionality) and the page level. The templating framework separates content, design, and application logic allowing for a better separation of concerns and collaboration between designers and developers. The modules, or building blocks, comprising templates are supported by BluePrinting, which allows for easier management and implementation. These building blocks can be assembled and debugged in Template Builder for functional and performance testing.

The way templates are design in Tridion will cater well to empowering the business and reducing IT’s involvement in regular everyday business tasks.

Tridion supports a number of standard industry tools for building templates including Dreamweaver and Visual Studio.

Workflow

Workflows can be designed using Microsoft Visio. Workflows can then be associated with any manageable asset.

Content Publishing and Delivery

SDL Tridion offers multi-channel support for better content reuse, synchronization, and management of source of records. The architecture enables the concept of “author once, publish many”, where the same piece of content can be published across different channels (Web, e-mail, print).

Tridion offers advanced audience targeting and personalization. It has is the ability to create and manage contacts and build group profiles. It enables content managers to personalize content based on audience characteristics (such as profile information or click stream), and measure effectiveness of content based on audience responses.

Another feature that Tridion offers is WebForms. It’s a tool that enables business users to create and update online forms quickly and easily and have them integrated within pages. The highly reusable modular architecture allows for these web forms to be reused across the site.

Given some of the limitations of the web content management systems, you often find numerous forms that have been built and deployed with little to no oversight, resulting in hundreds of duplicate forms that are unmanageable. The WebForms offering from Tridion would help in alleviating some of these typical issues with web forms management. As technology is only an enabler, the business would need better processes in place for web forms and lead generation management. Remember that forms can be a critical piece of a lead generation process. Solutions such as Eloqua serve the same purpose with a lot more out of the box for lead nurturing and gated and/or progressive profiling.

Localization and Internationalization

Content in Tridion is stored in Unicode. APIs and GUIs are Unicode compliant. Content can be managed and published in double-byte and bi-directional languages.

The Translation Management System (TMS) provides Tridion with full translation management and a language repository for reuse of previously translated content. Business rules and workflow can still be applied (with role-based security giving users access to authorized functionality only).

Blueprinting and the reusability of components and content will allow for better management of brand and message, while enabling local regions to localize that message.

It is also worth mentioning that SDL Tridion has a number of sites in their portfolio that clearly demonstrate these features.

As companies look to expand their global footprint, especially in emerging markets in south east Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America, the translation and localization capabilities of Tridion would be a corner stone to our success.

User Interface and Usability

Content managers can use a variety of interfaces to manage content and assets. SiteEdit allows for client-side/browse-based for quick content editing and publishing. Content Manager Explorer is another browser-based tool for advanced users. Office applications (Word) and Adobe Dreamweaver can also be used to create templates and manage content.

Tridion’s interfaces can be extended to provide more functionality (such as custom screens to manage integrations with other line of business applications).

Despite its feature-rich interface, Tridion’s interface (Content Manager Explorer, to be specific) is overwhelming and very demanding (system resource-wise) of the end-user’s machine. It is memory-intensive (given all the code that runs client-side) and it is often the case that end-users have to restart their browsers. This was experienced by Tridion presenters on site as well and was highlighted in the CMS Watch report as one of the weaknesses of the platform.

It is therefore important to understand the minimum system requirements for the potential business users to avoid any dissatisfaction with the system and its responsiveness.

SDL Tridion: An Impressive Web Content Management (WCM) System - Part 1

I did a quiet in-depth analysis of the SDL Tridion platform a while back. I'll be sharing my assessment over a number of blog posts. I'll cover the architecture, content management, content publishing and delivery, content migration methodologies, search, analytics, documentation, and extendability aspects of the platform, so stay tuned!

Architecture

The underlying architecture for SDL Tridion is modular, de-coupled, and based on industry standards (underlying technologies and protocols) and best practices.

Tridion supports both .NET and a Java-based deployment.

Content is stored in XML for better reusability and separation between content and presentation. The use of XML Schemas allow for more flexibility in structuring content. XLink manages relationships between schemas and documents. XSLT can be used to render content in native formats (HTML, PDF etc.). This XML foundation is the underpinning for Tridion’s content reusability and modularity.

Tridion also supports Web services for reuse, extension, and integration with other platforms.

Content delivery is decoupled from content management. This decoupling allows for easier content distribution, better demarcation of logical and physical architectural components, and more flexibility in how the platform is deployed and scaled.

Tridion supports standard application servers such as IIS and WebLogic. The Presentation server provides storage management (published content and related assets and their metadata), link management (across all assets to prevent broken links), and cache management (for better performance).

As for publishing models, SDL Tridion provides 5 models with the ability to combine them (for example, pages with high hit rate can be static, while areas behind the login can be dynamic and personalized). These models give us extreme flexibility in how we design our physical architecture.

One of the unique features of SDL Tridion is BluePrinting. It’s a modeling mechanism for content and processes. It provides the ability to separate the management of content, layout, applications, and profiles. This allows for better alignment to functional roles and the ability to reuse or localize content without compromising the corporate branding standards.

SDL Tridion has a developer community and a framework for developers to submit components for other SDL Tridion customers to use.

In summary, the product’s architecture is truly impressive and manifests a great technical aptitude on the Tridion engineers’ part. It lends itself well to potentially any physical architecture requirements and will likely meet most of your functional and technical requirements. But remember, there is no silverbullet with WCMs; you can never find a platform that meets ALL your requirements. Custom development should be expected.

Note: I relied on published documentation from SDL Tridion as well as meetings with their architects.