CMS Hardtalk

Composite has just presented a brand new CMS, that looks promising in respect to simplicity and user friendliness.

Just to round up (some of the) the usability definitions:

Effectiveness, which is the accuracy and completeness with which users achieve certain goals. Indicators of effectiveness include quality of solution and error rates. In this study, we use quality of solution as the primary indicator of effectiveness, i.e. a measure of the outcome of the user’s interaction with the system. [Frøkjær 2000]

Efficiency, which is the relation between (1) the accuracy and completeness with which users achieve certain goals and (2) the resources expended in achieving them. Indicators of efficiency include task completion time and learning time. In this study we use task completion time as the primary indicator of efficiency. [Frøkjær 2000]

Satisfaction, which is the users’ comfort with and positive attitudes towards the use of the system. User satisfaction can be measured by attitude rating scales such as SUMI. In this study, we use preference as the primary indicator of satisfaction. [Frøkjær 2000]

Composite has with their brand new C1 focused on efficiency! This means that as few user resources as possible have to be used to achieve a specific goal. This is of course difficult to measure as every vendor have a specific function domain that they focus on, and what one vendor thinks is important might be judged less important by another. Again: Usability has to be balanced with a lot of other factors (GUI extensibility, GUI Model simplicity, etc.)

User interface: Good first impression

The first impression is good. C1 has a simple graphical user interface (GUI) which instantly reminded me of the first versions of CMS GUI. This is positive in the sense that novice users will not be terrified by a complicated GUI.

The efficiancy of the UI has not been tested yet.

“One Layer UI”

Composite has tried to create what they call a “One layer User interface”. This means several things:

• You don’t have to bother about which layer you are in - “There can only be one”!
• You can switch directly to other areas by a single click
• You can switch between different areas (e.g security and ordinary content) without loosing data (thanks to the extended use of Windows Work-flow Foundations)

In my opinion it is positive that Composite has tried to minimize the mental model of the user interface.

Back to the page-based model

Page-based model versus item-based model in short:

The item-based model use items in the back-end (the CMS) that will make up a single page in the front-end or will make up the appearance of data in the front-end. The page-based model usually have an one-to-one relation between back-end and front-end: An item in the back-end correspond to a page in the front-end. The main weakness of the item based GUI has been the difficulty of understanding the relation between data-items in the back-end and pages in the front-end. The main weakness of the page-based model has been that content is more than just a text field to be delivered to a page. Content usually has more structure and content has to be reused on several pages. This is a challenge in the page-based model.

Composite has done what in the CMS business is considered “bad” in the CMS phere. They have chosen the UI model to be page-based and have developed a simple way to include other data;

Simple and effective!

Architecture

One of the technical focuses has been to deliver an architecture to support a new level of segmentation between the data layer and the application layer. This has been done with Microsoft LINQ technology in Microsoft.net 3.5 (check out some videos about LINQ here).

As mentioned Composite has definately taken advantage of Windows Work-flow Foundations (nice!) and has made integration of data from other data sources very easy. This is a continuation of their former strategy on delivering a good tool for the webmasters .

Even though I didn’t get the chance to see the arhitecture in details and the C1 platform has not yet been tested, it seems that the development lab has done som serious planning to deliver a flexible technical platform for the customers. We’ll test it in the “BNP CMS and Portal Benchmark 2008″ (just launched).

Hosting and support

Composite won the prestigious CMS AWARD 2007 in the partner support category. With C1 they have expanded their ambitions to being the best in this area. Composite has signed up with a couple of hosting Partners that will take care of the hosting of C1. This means that the customers and partners will not have to worry about contacting a hosting partner.

Product strategy

Composite has a very idealistic strategy. They will not compromise the quality of the product and until now C1 CMS seems to be a very good choice for a lot of customers and advertising agencies that need a CMS but do not have the hardcore developers on the pay roll.

Composite has focused the product on this specific target group’s wishes and requirements. This also means that Composite has given lower priority to functionalities that are important to for example global companies. In the current version the CMS has no support for localization and language versions of pages/content items. As I see the user interface this will not be a problem to incorporate, but definately it will make it a bit more complex.

What I consider important is that Composite has the courage to focus on the needs of a narrow target group and try to make an excellent product for this group and let the product grow with the customer’s needs. Far too many vendors focus on a broad customer audience and often their product fail in head to head comparisons with more specialized products.

Some downsides initially (from a personal view)

I dislike when an Internet Software/Service removes the toolbar in my browser. In my opinion C1 can benchmark great on Efficiency but it affects my overall satisfaction on working with the CMS when having to open a new window when I need to go to another URL.

I have worked with CMS more than ten years now and I can’t remember that I have ever before lost the option for text editing content online. I would rather prefer that Composite had implemented the Word-press auto-save solution;

combined with the standard solution

to avoid loosing content when editing.