CM Scribe Makes Web Content Management A Snap: Interview With Heidi Merscher of NetReach

TCW: Thanks for agreeing to chat with us today. For our readers who may not be familiar with you and your firm, please tell us a little about yourself and the company you work for.

HM: Yes, thanks for the invitation! NetReach started in 1994 as a web development and hosting company delivering highly dynamic sites, like the site for the Philadelphia Eagles with it’s associated e-commerce components or Togo’s online lunch ordering services. Being in that space—delivering these large complex sites—our clients, the people who owned the sites, needed to be able to manage parts of them; for example to be able to add new items to the Eagles store, so all of these sites were built with certain back-end administrative functions to allow the owners to “manage” parts of their own sites. Big technology shops, like NetReach were building these admin managers into their projects as custom programmed pieces to allow this “backend management” of content. cmScribe, our content management system evolved out of this thinking—allowing the owners of the sites to, well really take control of their sites so they didn’t have the hassle and expense of needing to come back to NetReach everytime they wanted to change something on their site. Anyway, that’s a brief company history.

My job at NetReach as Creative Director involves management and delivery of creative services, including management of the design team. It’s a little bit of a funny title and comes more out of say advertising or graphic design than technology—and that is basically my formal background, as a designer. The creative team at NetReach is responsible for delivering design and implementation services to our direct clients, as well as furnishing support services to our design, agency and consultant reseller partners.

TCW: We’re seeing more and more products label themselves as “content management systems”. This causes a lot of confusion amongst consumers because there are many types of systems and they aren’t all designed to solve the same problems. Tell us a little about cmScribe. What type of content management tool is it and what problems is it designed to solve?

HM: Well, if I can elaborate a bit on what I said above, about the custom programmed backend admin managers? What started happening, and it’s what you’d expect in any maturing industry, was that different clients were asking for some of the same types of things, same types of functionality over and over. The easiest things to think about here would be things like the ability to search a site, the ability to add/edit/archive news articles, eCommerce or store functions. So, in order to save time and money (instead of custom programming say the search function every time), if you built it in such a way that it was modular, you could reuse it anytime that people requested in on their sites. From the standpoint of cmScribe, the feature set that we have today was almost 100% driven by client requested functionality. Now getting back a bit to those early backend managers, they were very rigid. They were programmed specifically to allow for a very particular set of page elements to be affected.

TCW: Hold up… Can you explain that last statement a bit—page elements?

HM: Ok, take the example of a news item. If on your site, on the home page you were going to show three news items and they all consisted of:

a headline
fifty words of teaser copy
a read more link
and the rest of the story

Then your backend content manager would have been built to allow you to edit/add/delete those items. Period. So what’s the problem with that? Ok, say you NOW want to show five news items, you want to add a thumbnail photo to each item on the home page, and you want to add some reference links in the rest of story and a downloadable PDF? Tough luck getting all of those changes done without reprogramming those generation one backend managers.

cmScribe, or any good, modern content manager for that matter, has taken a great deal of end-user flexibility into mind, so any of the out-of-the-box functionality has a boat load of options. The scenario above would be no problem with cmScribe.

cmScribe is web-based and hosted (no software installations) so from anywhere at anytime if you have a log-in and a browser and are connected to the internet you can edit your site. The other interesting thing about cmScribe is that it is truly a page contextual CMS. You go to the page in your site that you want to edit and you edit the piece of content you want to edit versus any kind of page directory or folder-tree approach where you have to make a sort of cognitive leap between what the page looks like and what you are editing. Which by the way was a lot how those generation one managers worked.

TCW: So, cmScribe is a type of web content management system designed to empower non-technical folks to create, maintain, and deliver content via the web. Why do you think such a product is needed? What differentiates you from the rest of the pack?

HM: I think I addressed this to some degree earlier, but in general, customers are requesting that their web projects include a content manager. And we’ve heard several different reasons why they need this. Some clients are really tired of the time and expense involved in having to go back to their web developer for every little change, or worse they feel a little like they are being held hostage! Other clients are using some kind of proprietary content management scheme that is just not flexible enough or doesn’t encompass their entire site, so they are frustrated. I was just in a meeting with a new client that described that she is using three different pieces of software, including Dreamweaver, in addition to the proprietary CMS to try to update her site—boy is she frustrated. The folks who built this site are going out of business and their CMS is no longer being supported. Some large clients are even a bit frustrated with their IT departments and big stalled enterprise-wide integrations and are negotiating to use our CMS under the radar, and without naming any names, are really happy.

TCW: Seems like cmScribe could be an attractive option for many small to medium-sized businesses (those organizations that employ 100-1000 people) who are struggling to keep their content up-to-date and available when customers need it. Tell us about a few of your customers and how they are using cmScribe.

HM: cmScribe is industry agnostic and we’ve got installations in financial services, pharma and healthcare, education, chemicals and industry, legal, cultural institutions, non-profits and associations. Here’s a few examples:

Education: We built the Learning Through Listening site for an interesting non-profit that has been around since WWII, Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic (RFB&D). The organization was founded by a wealthy philanthropist who wanted to offer returning war veterans with disabilities that impaired their ability to read an opportunity to get an education by providing audio versions of textbooks. RFB&D now serves nearly 180,000 kindergarden through graduate level+ students with its digitally recorded CD-based textbooks and novels. The organization wanted to develop a web-based resource to help teachers — who are generally limited in time and look to the web for classroom materials — to find audiobooks, lesson plans, activities and other resources to facilitate the teaching of listening skills in the classroom and to communicate to them how these resources translate into success.
The major challenges to building this site were to guarantee that is meets Section 508 of the US Rehabilitation Act and the W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). We’ve posted a case study on our site if your readers want in-depth information on the Learning Through Listening project.
Pharma and Healthcare: Health Form Online came to us several years ago with a site that was using content management but it was a very rigid system so they could not do what they envisioned. Less then a year after switching to cmScribe, they were on-target to deliver over 50 accredited online continuing education (CE) courses to psychologists, social workers, counselors, nurses, and other allied health professionals. Their healthcare education website has a very distinct market niche in its focus on health psychology and behavioral medicine continuing education and now it offers more than twice the number of behavioral medicine CE courses than the largest competitor.

I’ll read what Dr. Laura Stanton, one of the co-founders has to say about our product, (she says it better than me!): I quote: …”cmScribe’s flexibility and ease of use has allowed us to design and deliver each course in the best way for the material—not restricting us to a rigid presentation, but rather allowing us to continuously update our courses as the science advances. Additionally, we can manage participants’ use of the site, including access to purchased courses, scoring of test material, gathering course evaluations and delivering certificates, all automatically. cmScribe’s e-commerce package allows us to accept and manage course payment—it’s a complete technology platform that has worked well for us”.
Real Estate: The Binswanger organization offers a complete range of fully integrated real estate services to meet their corporate clients’ needs anywhere in the world. In the 1990’s, they implemented a major international expansion program, because they realized that multinational corporations and institutions needed a real estate service provider that could support their truly global presence. They built strong partnerships around the globe, and established local real estate coverage of the United Kingdom, Europe, Mexico, Central and South America, Asia and the Pacific Rim (you know location, location, location and everything is local). Headquartered in Philadelphia, Binswanger can deploy any or all of a full spectrum of real estate services: Transaction, Management, Financial, Asset Recovery, Appraisal, Marketing etc.
Two really powerful pieces of internet functionality that cmScribe provided to them was “Project Connect”, a secure installation of the cmScribe discussion board and linked document repository which allows this organization global collaboration and instant communication. The other function was a multi-language ability, that combined with cmScribe templates allowed the smaller global regional offices (i.e. Binswanger Brazil) to publish content in English and in the local language, in this case Portugese, where the visitor could select the language they wished to view the site in.

Associations: Ok, I want to talk about a smaller site that also makes good use of some of cmScribe’s advanced functions. WRA Sports, the Whitpain Recreation Association (WRA), is a volunteer run organization that offers baseball/softball, basketball, soccer and field hockey for the children of this township in southeastern Pennsylvania. The content managers of this site are the parent volunteer coaches and the “soccer moms” and they are doing a great job of editing and adding and changing the site. One thing that I didn’t mention before when you asked about what distinguishes cmScribe from other cms sytems is also it’s incredibly granular permissioning system. So in the case of this site, the different sports teams are responsible for managing their particular areas and are permissioned to allow for that. cmScribe is fully driven by style sheets and so if you have a lot of different folks managing content it will help to keep a site looking nice and consistent. Much like the Binswanger site, the WRA Sports site also has a secure password protected area that allows the board and coaches secure areas to collaborate and upload documents.

TCW: While cmScribe certainly could help an organization better manage their online content, I wonder if small software development shops might also make attractive customers for you. Developers could use cmScribe to quickly create sites that their customers can manage themselves. Is this something you see as well?

HM: Absolutely, in fact we have developers that are already using the product to build sites.

TCW: It’s clear that web content management is a good idea, yet adoption of web content management tools is oftentimes a lengthy process. Price seems to be one of the first obstacles to adoption. Talk to us about your pricing structures and provide a typical example so our readers can get an idea how much it costs to get started.

HM: Actually, that an interesting question. Because the adoption is actually NOT a lengthy process for our tools, but the development process can go on for a long time, sometimes over a year. Those long, drawn out development cycles always get bogged down for three reasons: organization dynamics (rule by committee, endless client internal meetings with their related unavailability, legal and or regulatory review), the design process (multiple rounds of client tweaking) and finally the client does not have their content organized. For example we are currently wrapping up a project that has taken over a year, it is a 150+ page site and once we helped them get their various content owners on board, helped organize and write/edit the content, and go through design process the actual cmScribe implementation of the site took 2 1/2 weeks—I kid you not! Now the legal review and edits have taken, oh about 3 additional months! That’s a bit of an extreme example and we did have multiple production people inputting content—but deploying a site is really the easy part. On the other hand if a client has a really good Project Manager in place shepherding the process along, the development of a project can go very smoothly.

We give clients a 2 hour training session then 2 additional hours of online or phone support and for the most part we go back and look at some of these sites and they are happily editing away and adding content and pages etc. The editing tools are very much like Outlook or MS Word so anyone who has familiarity with them doesn’t have a problem, hence the adoption isn’t a big thing as there is no big “workflow process” issues to overcome.

Price has not really been an issue. Our projects are generally priced anywhere from $25,000 to $150,000+ which includes the software license. You have to remember that this is the full enchilada: web consultation, design and development, content integration, the software and license and training. At the higher price range we are generally writing custom extensions to the software to meet particular client needs. Hosting is on a monthly basis on top of that, it ranges from $500 per month for a dedicated server to $44.95 for shared hosting. Some clients want to host the software themselves on their own servers which they can do as long as they support .NET 2.0 and SQL.

We also offer an SAAS pricing model for client’s that don’t require extensive design services. We have some very functional, attractive pre-designed site templates that can be customized with the client’s colors, logo and photos are other grahics. The sites are pre-built to include the home page plus five standard pages, like a “Contact Us” page with a form. After deployment, which takes about 1 or 2 days the client can add pages, modify pages, delete pages and add functionality. This model starts at $299.95 per month, with a 1 year commitment. Some clients are using these for micro-marketing sites or smaller clients find this an attractive option.

TCW: If one of our readers is interested in learning more about your products, how can they get additional information?

HM: Go to http://www.netreach.com.

TCW: Thanks for taking time to educate our readers about your firm and the clients you serve. We really appreciate it.

HM: Thanks to The Content Wrangler for this opportunity. I really enjoyed it.

Learn more about Netreach and cmScribe.