IMHO
January 30, 1998
John Swenson
MSDN Online
Microsoft's first Web TechEd conference featured an amazing range of technical presentations on everything from linking Web sites to databases to putting the latest user interfaces on top of your Web applications. If anyone still doubts that Web development has become as technical as other forms of software development, here was the evidence. More than 3,000 developers—many of them from Fortune 500 companies—spent three days attending presentations on 82 different Web-development topics.
After so much hard-core technical talk, imagine my surprise when I had lunch with a group of Web developers on the final day of the conference and asked about their biggest concerns and issues. Did they mention any of the technical topics covered at conference? No, they started discussing the human problems associated with publishing big corporate Web sites. They talked about the difficulty of getting their managers to adopt the new development ideas they learned at conferences like Web TechEd, and they talked about the difficulty of establishing simple procedures to let more people inside their companies contribute to the corporate Web site.
Two Web developers who work for a large chip manufacturer brought up this latter issue, which has more to do with people than technology. They talked about the problems associated with having hundreds of employees publish information to their company's intranet and extranet. It turns out that approximately 400 people at this company post information directly to the Web.
This number wouldn't seem so high, except that all these employees must not only create the content (text, graphics, and layout) they want to post online, but they also have to do all the work of preparing their content for the Web. They have to add the HTML tags and whatever else is necessary and then post the files in the proper location on the correct Web server.
This method of Web publishing—requiring every employee who creates information for a company's Web sites to understand HTML—isn't that uncommon. Many companies require their employees to understand Web publishing in order to get their material on the Web.
The more I think about this, the more absurd this seems. Is there any other type of publishing where people who write articles or create graphics also have to learn the technical skills of publishing? Can you imagine a newspaper reporter or magazine writer running the presses at the printing plant? There are some examples of this, but they're few and far between. The editors of some small weekly newspapers, for example, handle all their writing, editing, and publishing tasks (sometimes even advertising, too). But you'd never find anyone who handles more than one of these tasks at a large newspaper.
When desktop publishing took off in the early 1980s, many people discovered how easy this new technology made it to publish newsletters, brochures, and other documents. They found that desktop publishing software allowed them manage all the tasks of layout, editing, writing, and publishing.
When the Web took off a couple of years ago, the same thing happened. A lot of people started publishing their own Web sites, handling all the tasks of layout, design, and content creation.
Does it make sense for employees in all but the smallest companies to learn all these Web publishing skills? Why should employees who want to post information on their corporate intranet or Web site have to understand the technical details of Web publishing? As corporate Web sites grow bigger and more complex, it makes sense to separate the people who create the content from the people who understand the technical details of Web publishing.
Many companies do separate these two functions. When I write an article for MSDN Online, for example, I don't add the HTML tags or post the article to our Web server (although some writers here do like to add their own HTML tags). We have employees who specialize in those tasks. It's not that I don't want to understand how to perform those tasks, it's just not an efficient use of my time to stay up to date on all the technical procedures.
There's an interesting parallel here to application development. At Web TechEd, developers heard a lot about the benefits of separating their Web applications into multiple tiers. They also heard a lot about the benefits of separating their Web content from their application's user interface.
If separation is good when you're developing Web applications and Web sites, why not apply that same strategy to people and separate the process of Web publishing from the process of creating Web content? If it takes special knowledge to understand how to publish information on the Web, why not concentrate that task in the hands of a few specialists?
New tools and applications are arriving that may eliminate this issue altogether, by making it easy for employees without any technical knowledge to publish their information on the Web. At Web TechEd, Microsoft demonstrated the capabilities of its new Site Server 3.0 BackOffice application (see the Microsoft Site Server Web site at http://www.microsoft.com/siteserver/default.asp for more about Site Server). Microsoft senior Vice-President Bob Muglia showed how a company could set up pages on their intranet using Site Server, where employees without any technical skills could publish information.
In the example he used, Muglia showed how a company could set up an internal Web site where employees could list job openings. Using drop-down menus, they could select the job category, department name, and other information. Then they could type the job description into a window and click Send to post the opening. In this example, the Web administrator had set Site Server to prevent the job postings from actually getting published until someone had reviewed each submission, to make sure the submitter had permission to post job openings. It would be easy, however, to set up sites where employees could publish directly to the Web, without any technical Webmaster standing between them and the Web.
With better tools such as Site Server 3.0, employees won't have to possess as much technical knowledge in order to participate in their company's Web publishing process. But until more companies simplify their publishing processes, many individuals will still be prevented from contributing.
The other way to let employees publish information—forcing them to send every submission through a Webmaster—only creates bottlenecks. When every submission has to go through Web specialists, information can take days or weeks to make it onto the Web site. Still, this approach may be better than requiring employees to learn the technical skills to publish information themselves. In this age of specialization, employees shouldn't have to know HTML to get their information published.
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