TELic: A blog about Technology Enhanced Learning

TeamSite content management system

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I spent a good deal of last week restructuring the LATEU website, which uses the TeamSite CMS from Interwoven. I have to say it has not been a happy experience and leaves me wondering exactly how it is helping me to ‘manage’ our content. The overall process has been:

1. decide on new structure (tabs and navigation menus)
2. create new folders based on tabs (easy and quick)
3. move files from their existing location to appropriate new folder (easy, but not drag-and-drop easy)
4. create new navigation menus for each tab (easy, but long-winded)
5. apply new navigation menu to every page individually (slow, repetitive work)
6. re-make every single #@%*! link to other web pages on the site (really slow, boring, repetitive work)

Re: step 6 – amazingly, TeamSite hard-codes all internal links rather than making them relative – so if I move a page plus a folder full of linked files to a new location, all those links need to be remade. This is incredibly dumb. In a few cases, I got the page’s HTML code, copied it to Wordpad, did a manual search-and-replace and then copied it back to TeamSite. This is like web-page editing in the early 90′s… and I hoped I’d left that behind for ever.

Re: step 5 – why can’t TeamSite apply new navigation to a group of selected files in a single operation?

Oh, and it transpires that TeamSite can’t do link checking to locate broken internal links (let alone external links) and can’t tell me if I have any orphaned files not linked to any page. Duh.

I think what really gets me is the cumbersome clicks of the process in step 6, though:

• click Edit link to open file – wait for edit window to appear
• make the changes needed to the page (new navigation, updated links etc.)
• click Finish
• dialogue appears asking me if I want to overwrite the existing file – click Yes
• click Finish AGAIN
• dialogue appears asking me if I want to regenerate the file – click Yes
• the preview appears in a new browser window – check it is OK and close window
• click to Save file – then click to Finish
• next page please! And of course being browser-based, every click takes a second or two to take effect…zzz.

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