The Pothole in My Community

This is a scene I see every day. I’ve always wondered why there was a gap between the road and sidewalk. Over the past two years I’ve watched the gap turn into a real nasty pothole. Drivers see a road and a sidewalk and naturally they expect them to work together in harmony. After all, that’s what they’re supposed to do right?

I watch drivers drive right through this pothole all the time. When not paying full attention, I have driven right through it as well. I just expect the road and sidewalk to know that they should meet each other so that I can have a smooth drive. But they don’t.

What else is wrong with this picture? Nobody thought about how the water would drain. When teams don’t work together, problems can be created that weren’t envisioned beforehand. So the water gets trapped and has no place to go. There is no drain. With rain, the pothole gets muddy and deeper over time. Because the two systems don’t work well together, the problem now gets worse, but who is to blame?

Who’s Problem to Fix?

Was the road or the sidewalk put in first? Both teams did their job by putting a road and a sidewalk down. They did what they said they could do and what they were trained to do, but it’s not the best scenario for the people who drive across this stretch of road. With nobody to blame, drivers are stuck looking at this ugly system that gets worse day by day. Over time, drivers have found alternate routes around this pothole and this road is less traveled due to this eyesore.

Is There a Pothole on Your Website?

"The road is the Content Management System (CMS) and sidewalk is the online community solution."

This same scenario happens when websites incorporate social communities that don’t fit well. Users expect a site and a community to work together seamlessly, without having a disjointed and frustrating experience. The organization will want a single view of both website and community data.

Recall the pothole: the road is the Content Management System (CMS) and sidewalk is the online community solution.

The sidewalk and the road both serve their purpose: the sidewalk serves pedestrians, while the road serves cars and bikes. Shouldn’t these two entities work seamlessly together? What would happen if we had the same construction crew design the road and sidewalk? Do you think there would have been a different outcome? You bet.

What if you had one vendor who provides your CMS, while another vendor who provides your online community solution. Do you think you would be better served if one vendor could design both?

If you find yourself staring at the pothole between your CMS and your online community solution , then read further.

Seamless Integration between Website and Online Community

Let me briefly describe what we provide. Evoq Social, our online community solution, is tightly integrated with Evoq Content, our Content Management System. Both solutions sit atop the DNN Platform.

We are a Content Management System, Application Framework and Community Solution all at the same time and all in the same database.

Unlike the pothole in the road, our customers don’t end up staring down a fragmented experience between their website and online community, wondering who’s to blame. Our customers don’t necessarily know which end of the application they are using (the CMS or the community solution) because it all flows together so well.

Since our solutions fit together so nicely, you can have elements of both CMS and Social sitting side by side on a page with no problem. That’s why you hear people calling DNN the Social CMS.

Common Features

Common features of a Content Management System include:

• The ability to easily create, maintain and re-arrange pages
• A user-friendly HTML editor that has workflow, versioning, version-compare and auto-save
• SEO tools with intuitive URL management capabilities
• Customized design and layout via simple CSS changes
• Mobile functionality, such as responsive design and integration with mobile apps
• Extensibility and scalability
• Having both broad and granular control of security and permissions
• Digital Asset Management with multiple asset upload, drag and drop, workflow, versioning, subscriptions and statistics

Common features of an Online Community solution include:

• Administrative controls for community managers
• Social Groups
• Activity Streams and Notifications
• The ability to like, follow, bookmark, share and flag content
• Integrated Gaming Mechanics including reputation points and leaderboard rankings
• Responsive design for user friendly experiences on mobile devices
• Reports and metrics on community member activity and content popularity
• Advanced Q&A and Ideation functionality
• Blogs, Discussions and Social Event Management
• Points that can be earned, Badges that can be won and privileges that can be unlocked

When your CMS and your online community solution can do all that from a single platform, then you have a lot of power under one hood.

If Your Community Has a Pothole, Fix It

Pictured: And now the sidewalk is starting to crumble.

Without road and sidewalk crews working together to achieve the goal of providing a holistic solution, they have failed. I recommend you look to solutions that work together seamlessly. Customers and end users don’t want to be standing in a pothole of frustration when two systems don’t work together seamlessly.

Free Trial: Content Management System

If you’d like to see this in action take a test drive of our solutions in the cloud. You won’t see any potholes in the road.

Start your free trial of Evoq Content.