Tools Consolidate Content

New applications from Stellent Inc. and Interwoven Inc. are aimed at centralizing and consolidating enterprises content management systems and operations.

Stellent, of Minneapolis, will announce this week Stellent Site Studio, an add-on to its Stellent Content Management suite that automates the process of managing multiple sites at the same organization. Meanwhile, Interwoven, of San Jose, Calif., announced last week a Server Consolidation solution designed to centralize content and revisions.

Stellents Site Studio provides out-of-the-box support for processes that most customers were building into Stellent Content Management on their own, company officials said.

These processes support the development of multiple Web sites or minisites within the same organization by supporting shared development objects, templates and content libraries.

This allows companies to more easily transfer site building and management responsibilities to individual business units and more clearly define roles involved in implementing a Web site, according to officials.

Site Studio contains out-of-the-box site components, or "fragments," and supports the creation, management and offloading of new components as well, creating a consistent look and feel of multiple sites in line with a corporate brand, officials said.

They said Site Studio will lower time to deployment and costs of deploying multiple Web sites within an organization as well as provide better control, management and security of the sites.

Seattle Public Utilities—a city government agency that manages water distribution, sewerage and drainage, wastewater treatment, trash and garbage collection, recycling, and graffiti removal—is using Site Studio in beta and plans to develop up to five sites.

"We used to be separate utilities; now one agency handles all of those services, which makes it complex to develop a Web site," said Lisa Perrin, Web manager at SPU. Site Studio is easy to use for her content team, providing an edit button on a Web page that users can click on to make changes to the content, Perrin said.

Interwoven, meanwhile, is packaging existing technology into a solution designed to help enterprises consolidate their content management servers.

The package includes Interwoven OpenDeploy Server Consolidation Edition, for distribution management, bundled with Interwovens TeamSite content server, which adds snapshotting, change management and versioning. Consulting services from IBM Global Services and Accenture Ltd. round out the solution.

Interwoven Server Consolidation solution can support deployment schedules, security and maintenance for multiple business units or departments, acting as a traffic control hub, Interwoven officials said. The solution can reduce the number of physical servers needed to support an organizations content management operations and improve operational efficiencies by automating and standardizing content distribution processes, officials said.

Pricing for Stellent Site Studio ranges from $30,000 to $60,000 on top of Stellent Content Server, bringing the total price range to $75,000 to $200,000. Its available June 15. Interwovens Server Consolidation solution is available now and priced at $200,000. Consulting services are available separately in packages ranging in price from $6,000 to $18,000.