2014 Wish List for HP Content Management
There’s an informative article by Michael Kriggsman on ZDNet titled “Do our customers love us?” It talks about how customers crave for solutions and not just features. Michael writes:
“Adopting an outcomes-based perspective in enterprise software requires the vendor to develop a detailed understanding of customer aspirations and pain points across the entire buying and usage cycle.”
HP Customers we talk to are overall pretty happy with the “enterprise” features offered by the product stack, but like with every solution, they would like to see improvements. Based on feedback we received, we have compiled a short list of pain points that we would like HP as a product vendor to solve.
And here’s the wish list for 2014:
1. A new UI for every version, really?
Over it’s life TeamSite, the core content management product has had many User Interfaces in the past, from WebDesk and WebDesk Pro to the latest Content Center Standard and Content Center Professional. There is discussion around an even newly branded interface for TeamSite 8.0.
Do customers care? Quite honestly, customers do not apply every incremental upgrade that the vendor releases – there is just not enough of a business justification to do so. And when a customer on an old version of the product hears about all the UI changes and the associated “learning curve” for its internal product users, you make it that much harder to convince them to upgrade.
So, what are customers demanding: Make sure the existing Interface works even better. Perhaps reduce the number of clicks needed to apply Extended Attributes? Having a responsive design that works on multiple form factors is great… but in the process, do not degrade the desktop interface that works.
2. Spellchecker.
Guess what, the new version of TeamSite 7.4’s rich text editor no longer supports a spell checker! Not only that, it gives a nasty error when the spell check button is clicked within the TinyMCE widget of Data Capture Templates. Not cool.
We would like to see a spell checker that works out of box, just like in previous versions.
3. Improvements for Responsive Design Site building:
The new versions of SitePublisher’s Mobile Module packs a good punch with multi device rendering capabilities. However, It is still a good bit of work to develop Responsive Design websites using SitePublisher.
We would like to see an improvement in Fixed Area Layouts, that allow for easy, flexible grid layouts.
4. Workflow Development tools:
Pre TS 7.4, we had a Java Swing based Client application that provided a pretty decent tool to visually develop Workflow Models. It had a few kinks, but over-all works great. TeamSite 7.4 introduced a browser based Workflow Modeler tool. While browser based tools are the new fad in the industry, and regardless of the mechanism, the tool needs to work better than in the past – not worse. The browser based tool is a little inferior to the client tool, and makes the job of building complex workflows that much harder.
We would like to see a Workflow building tool (irrespective of the tool – browser based, client install, cloud based, etc), to work better than before.
Are you a customer of TeamSite? Do you want to share what you would like to see in TeamSite 8.0 that is due to be released mid 2014? Please comment below on what you would like fixed or improved. We often interact with HP Product Managers and Sales teams and this consolidated list will help HP prioritize their product develop.
