Engineering a Design Method for Web Content Management Implementations Jurriaan Souer, Lutzen Luinenburg GX Wijchenseweg 111, 6538 SW Nijmegen, The Netherlands Jurriaan.Souer@gxwebmanager.com Lutzen.Luinenburg@gxwebmanager.com Johan Versendaal, Inge van de Weerd, Sjaak Brinkkemper Department of Information and Computing Sciences Utrecht University Utrecht, The Netherlands j.versendaal@cs.uu.nl i.vandeweerd@cs.uu.nl s.brinkkemper@cs.uu.nl ABSTRACT The process of implementing a Web Content Management Sys- tem (WCM) can be complex and time consuming. We argue that there is a need for a web engineering methods specifically address- ing WCM implementations. In this paper we present the design phase of our Web Engineering Method (WEM). The design phase of WEM addresses fourteen identified key WCM concepts and con- sists of the main activities: Conceptual Design, Architecture De- sign, Presentation Design and Detailed Component Design. The proposed method is validated through an expert validation and a case study. Based on the outcome, we developed a prototype of a CASE-application supporting the Conceptual Design activity. Fu- ture research includes further development of the CASE-application including the abstract syntax and automation of the transition. 1. INTRODUCTION Most public and private sector enterprises faced with challenges in satisfying evolving customer needs and meeting regulatory and compliance dictates, utilize Web Content Management (WCM) soft- ware. WCM software acts both as a controlling mechanism and an enabler: it controls the processes of managing the Web con- tent with workflow, scheduling, authorization, reuse of content and archiving. WCM software enables organizations to operationalize their own content-delivery strategy with specific user interaction, personalization, and multi-channel delivery. The implementation process of WCM systems within enterprises however can still be complex and time consuming. There are sev- eral reasons to substantiate this. First, WCM-supported Web ap- plications often involve customizations and integration with back- office systems. Secondly, WCM has a collaborative aspect since multiple users from different departments of the enterprise work si- multaneously on the same content and functionality. A third reason is that WCM presents information over multiple channels (web, mobile, e-mail, print) for different purposes (sales, marketing, e- Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. iiWAS2008, November 24-26,2008, Linz, Austria Copyright 2008 ACM 978-1-60558-349-5/08/0011 $5.00. business, services, questionnaires, etc.), often in a personalized context. And fourth, implementing WCM systems is not just about the technology, but also about people and processes and therefore involve change management [23], [24]. There is a need for a web engineering method for implementing WCM systems in particular to improve the implementation pro- cess (quality and user satisfaction) and speed up the development process [25]. Our resulting leading research question is: ‘What is an appropriate method for designing web applications based on a WCM system’. In [25] and [24] we introduced the Web Engi- neering Method (WEM) as a Web Engineering approach for the implementation of Web Content Management Systems in partic- ular to obtain high maintainability and give business owners the ability to manage and control Web applications. We call these type of Web applications CMS-based Web Applications. WEM is inte- grated in a traditional implementation method consisting of Orien- tation, Definition, Design, Realization and Implementation. This paper continues this research and elaborates on the Design phase. The contribution of this research consists of the development of the design phase to implement WCM systems. Secondly, we identified fourteen key WCM concepts which are based on a literature and market analysis. And finally the feasibility of integrating a CASE- application with a WCMS system is demonstrated. To date, the research field of Web Engineering has resulted in several methods to support the complex task of designing and cre- ating Web Applications [11], the research on the implementation of WCM however is scarce. There are several research groups work- ing on related work. We briefly elaborate on four relevant research groups within the Web Engineering research field. Ceri et al. de- scribe in [3] their Web Modeling Language (WebML), a notation for specifying complex web sites at a conceptual level. WebML and WEM are both focused on Web Engineering and the auto- mated generation of Web Applications. Koch et al. describe the UML-based Web Engineering (UWE) approach in [13]. UWE is an object-oriented, iterative and incremental approach for the devel- opment of web applications. Pastor et al. describe different meth- ods with the Object-Oriented Web-Solutions Modeling approach (OOWS). OOWS provides mechanisms to deal with the develop- ment of hypermedia information systems and e-commerce appli- cations in web environments [19]. Similar to our framework: the OOWS approach is supported by a commercial software applica- tion called OlivaNova. Vdovjak and Houben address in their paper on the Hera project the integration of external content providers explicitly [33]. Hera is a methodology that supports the design iiWAS 2008 Proceedings of iiWAS2008 351