It Should Just Work.

Back in the late summer of 2017, the website implementation team, made up of both IT and Marketing staff, had just finished launching their new corporate web presence on their new content management system (CMS). While the 6-month project had delays and missteps, the launch was, happily, uneventful. Celebrations were limited to high-fives and fist-bumps. The website looked fantastic, testing was complete and the trainers were scheduled to come in next week to begin training the content contributors and front-end developers.

With the new CMS in place, there was finally an enterprise-level publishing architecture and workflow that showcased 4 environments (test, authoring, pre-production & production). The CMS provided a content promotion capability called push-publishing. It was designed for content to be promoted, in a single workflow direction, from creation/edit, to review and then publish (live). The functionality met the requirements and it worked with the fresh dataset and information architecture.

Fast forward to 2022, the original team that launched the current web presence has either left the organization or moved on to other internal projects. The current stakeholders are mainly from the marketing department with IT in standby support. The CMS has been an ongoing success as marketing stakeholders have continued to build their digital customer experience around the platform. Website properties and datasets have grown 10x as requirements continue to evolve.

But… there is just one area that is becoming more of a challenge as the CMS takes on more datasets and complexity. What used to just work, push-publishing now has become fragile and inconsistent with content promotion between environments. In fact, its bad timing in flaring up around deadlines and events has taken its toll on business stakeholders. Their confidence has been shaken as these bad experiences become more frequent.

In short, with the growing dataset and more complex, evolving layers of development, today’s content promotion needs have outgrown what the CMS’s push-publishing capability was designed for. Current stakeholders put expectations that it should just work — without fully understanding the limitations. Nevertheless, the CMS support team struggles with several issues including:

• Inconsistent content promotion/delivery.
• No diff reporting on environments to confirm publishing architecture is in sync (or not).
• Environments falling out of sync — mostly due to users not following best practices.
• Troubleshooting and recovery times take too long.

While the general satisfaction of the CMS is good, the experience around push-publishing, as well as the delays and downtime it can cause, has created a level of frustration with all CMS stakeholders. It should just work.

Motiv is familiar with these content promotion hurdles and understands complexities and broader requirements that push-publishing really wasn’t designed for. That’s why we have developed a content orchestration solution for content management systems — we call it ImpulseSync™.

• Establish better confidence with self-resolving, fault-tolerant content promotion (w/diff reporting)
• Perform bi-directional content promotion.
• Create and edit content in any environment.
• Recover from out-of-sync environments in minutes.
• Develop real CI/CD development processes (w/GitHub integration)
• Leverage modern architectures with unlimited horizontal scalability (no-cluster, regional & global publishing).
• Migrate, instead of upgrade, your content to the latest version (#NoMessUpgrades).

It should just work.