Self Contained Simplicity

"OpenEdit 6.0 is our first attempt at putting together a list of our best features and best practices that focus on simplicity and re-usability." - Chris Burkey

Over the past seven years OpenEdit has grown it's list of capabilities by implementing one feature at a time for one client at a time. This collection of features has progressed into a Content Management System that places the focus on the presentation of information. This is in contrast to most Content Management Systems that focus on the data storage model and treat the presentation and accessibility to the information as secondary. We feel the data storage model is less relevant than the ability to access, interact, and modify the display of each piece of valuable content within your site.

During this morning's introduction and brief history of OpenEdit, Chris painted a detailed picture of a company and a software that continues to place the web site at the center every OpenEdit web application. No matter whether you are working on an image, an HTML file, or a configuration file, OpenEdit currently enables each user to find, access, and manage this information based on permission levels from within the browser. In most cases, the tools, or links to the tools which are required to edit the content is found inline. Now that these tools are in place and accessible, the next step is to promote collaboration.

"In many ways OpenEdit is entering it's second stage of growth in an effort to provide internet users with a collection of tools that is designed for the end user." Throughout the morning, Chris continued to outline a plan for enabling both site administrators and end users to collaborate on multiple projects where OpenEdit enables a one to many relationship for effective communication and work flow surrounding the information being discussed and developed.

"A good example is our issue tracker where there are many people collaborating to resolve a single issue that has status, attached files, messages, date of entry, hours tracking, etc." Chris continues "The intent is to ensure each feature of OpenEdit is self contained with as few interdependencies as possible. The idea is to allow each feature of OpenEdit to be able to interact with, or even within, other parts of your application."

A good example came from Frank Corrigan of State Farm who observed that the source of many discussions and projects are content from within their media library. "Quite we would like to initiate a discussion surrounding an asset or group of assets within our library." Another important component of this collaborative work flow is user separation which can be managed with user permissions via the account manager.

OpenEdit 6.0 represents a great list of tools. The next step is enabling more collaboration so many users can work together on all the content of your OpenEdit application. As the tools continue to improve the time to market for these powerful capabilities continue to shrink.