Using open source software to answer the multi-site challenge

In an Internet age dominated by personalised content and instant information delivery, every business demands a strong and dynamic web presence.

But while web presence has never been more important to enterprises, managing it has never been more difficult – intranet, extranet and internet sites, multimedia and social media, and mobile sites are all proliferating at a phenomenal rate as enterprise web strategies fragment to deliver ever more content through ever more channels and devices, all with smaller and smaller teams.

Businesses striving for competitive advantage in the marketplace are targeting consumers and higher SEO rankings by looking to unify a customer’s web presence across any number of websites and services by rolling out microsites for products, services and campaigns.

Providing fresh content to attract and retain traffic to corporate and marketing websites demands greater content and a growing number of contributors generating such content, increasing the complexity of managing a unified content generation and approval process across departments, sites and sometimes continents.

Content everywhere

Multiple sites, wikis, blogs, intranets, extranets, web apps and RSS feeds serve the needs of departments, partnerships, customers and employee teams and the larger the enterprise, the greater the diffuse interests and resulting online destinations seem to become. And when content needs to be shared across not just one but many of these destinations, the overhead likewise increases for already under-strain IT departments.

The trend towards OSS solutions

Enterprise-level problems demand enterprise-level solutions and organisations frequently turn to Enterprise Content Management (ECM) tools from major software vendors to provide the structure and interface necessary to publish content from users across the company. However such solutions can be costly and complex to implement.

In recent times, the focus is turning to open source software to cut costs and avoid vendor lock-in (Cooter, 2007) with more than 85% of companies surveyed by respected analysts Gartner currently using open source software (OSS) in their enterprises (Gartner Newsroom, 2008). Open source CMS systems are both numerous and varied in both their capabilities and focus and many flavours have been deployed liberally by company departments and individuals as the relentless drive to quickly and inexpensively establish a web presence for an organisation’s new products and services continues. This in itself creates additional issues for IT departments, which are left with “rogue” sites to administer as they continue to play catch-up with the needs of their most important customer – the business itself.

There is a pressing need for a solution to centrally control the web presence of an organisation across multiple sites, leveraging the power of open source but within a secure and scalable environment that can be overseen by corporate IT.  Ultimately, any content management system needs to abstract away the complexity of maintaining website content to the enterprise’s key content creators, separating the creation, presentation and administration of a website so respective business functions can focus on what they do best and collaboratively produce the best result possible.

At the same time, users should be able to deploy content to where it is most relevant – independent of the constraints of server location, domains and subdomains, site structure or varied approval workflows.

Multi-tenancy vs multi-site

Several open source solutions attempt to fulfil this need with a multi-tenant solution, allowing multiple websites to be run from the one system on a single server. While suitable for some smaller applications, this infrastructure lacks both scalability and flexibility for ongoing management of a large enterprise’s web assets. Additional websites cannot be added to the management interface without recreating or copying them to the server on which the multi-tenant software is installed, and content cannot be shared across the individual instances of the CMS.

True multisite management is also essential for an enterprise environment due to the likelihood that many disparate versions and instances of a CMS and its associated plugins exist, some by the necessity to tailor specific websites to their target audience. Such variable environments cannot be adequately addressed by multi-tenant solutions. Security and availability is also aided by the multisite approach, with sites remaining self-contained and able to be run on separate physical or virtual servers across the globe, while sourcing their content from a central management system. Should the management server become unavailable, sites can continue to serve their existing content due to their independence from the management server and one another.

Jentla multisite ECM

Jentla extends and enhances one of the most popular open source content management systems, Joomla!, to provide a world-class ECM platform for large enterprise web deployments. With Joomla estimated to run more around 2.7% of the top one million sites on the World Wide Web (Joomla! Site Directory), the GPL-licensed CMS is one of the top OSS solutions implemented in businesses today.  It offers a user-friendly interface to non-technical users for easy content creation, while also providing an array of options and community created extensions to suit almost any website format or use.

Jentla builds on Joomla and solves the multi-site problem by using secure web services to manage up to thousands of sites from the one central management interface, without those individual websites relying on the uptime or performance constraints of the management system. Eliminating reliance between the management layer and the web servers under it ensures sites can be moved to new or upgraded servers as the site’s traffic increases, yet still allows the site to be administered and maintained through a central management interface.

Secure framework

Intranet content can be safely sourced from or shared with a company’s internet-facing websites through the central manager, maintaining consistency and information currency of the organisation’s intellectual property and operational documentation without compromising on security.  If required, a single web page can be tailored to different audiences on different sites by the inclusion of “merge tags” holding site specific data that is merged into the page upon presentation.

Similarly, Jentla simplifies site testing and new content submission by allowing the IT department to set up internally-accessible staging sites replicated from its production websites, allowing changes to be updated and tested in a controlled environment before being propagated to internet-facing servers.  Staging sites can be layered by placing them in series, giving an approver the rights to publish to the next staging site, until the flow of all approvers has been completed and the content is finally published on the final destination. When combined with a powerful and flexible content creation workflow this ensures all content destined for public consumption has undergone the rigorous checks necessary to ensure both compliance and an on-message result for the company.

Managing upgrades and performance

Within Jentla, site maintenance is at the administrator’s fingertips. Joomla upgrades and security patches can be deployed to one or multiple sites simultaneously from within the manager, and each site’s full extension set can be viewed, altered or exported for further analysis across the full range of websites managed by the company’s IT personnel. The problem of managing many disparate environments across webservers is therefore reduced exponentially.

Performance concerns can be alleviated with the use of Jentla, a load balancer and commodity web servers. Jentla can achieve redundancy of a website without time and bandwidth-consuming database replication by creating identical sites across servers and configuring the sites as a “site group”, allowing users to update content to all of the sites simultaneously. Content updates to the sites, either by the Jentla content management workflow or via user generated content are sent to the Jentla Manager then distributed to the sites, making it possible to keep a group of sites identical.

Because the updates are delivered from the manager to each individual site, there is no need for database replication, and by simply placing a load balancer in front of the identical sites an easy and cost-effective redundancy solution can be achieved.  Data traffic between the locations is limited to content updates – low in volume compared to an equivalent database sharing/replication solution – significantly reducing the cost of data traffic. Grouped sites can also be hosted in multiple data centres, making low cost multi-location a reality.

Joomla for the Enterprise

Jentla also takes the usability of Joomla and enhances its features to better suit enterprise deployments. While Joomla restricts content to a single category to simplify management of a site for everyday users, such a simplification is somewhat restrictive for a CMS system to be deployed in a large enterprise. Jentla extends category management to allow multiple levels of categories and also enables articles to be associated to multiple categories, allowing content required to be shown in multiple places on a site to remain truly centralised. Users can update the one article and have all instances of that article, on one or multiple sites, instantly updated to reflect the latest version.

Joomla templates can also be centrally managed from Jentla, allowing the look and feel of sites to be altered independently of the content across groups of sites simultaneously. Template changes can be trialled, analysed and rolled out quickly and simply, and template configuration can be exported from all sites for analysis.

Jentla also makes management of registered users and varied user groups across sites easier. Users can be permitted to register on a single site and use their credentials across other sites across the enterprise that are managed by Jentla. Site members can participate and create user generated content on one site or multiple sites, and may be allocated to one or many user groups, making it easy to reward the loyalty of your valued customers and better target varied markets of website visitors.

Conclusion

With online participation and engagement continuing to increase and IT budgets shrinking, enterprises must find more cost effective ways to manage a cohesive presence on the web. Open source solutions such as the Joomla Content Management System allow large organisations to achieve their online objectives quickly and efficiently, and offer the flexibility of an open source licensing model, but lack the true enterprise-level features required to reach wide-scale deployment for such critical implementation. Jentla bridges this gap between ease of use, cost effectiveness and enterprise-level functionality by offering a true multi-site solution that allows IT departments and business users to maximise the benefits of their internal and external sites through the use of a centralised management interface controlling content, site administration and design.

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