What is CMS?

CMS stands for content management system.  It is basically a system by which you store and make files available to multiple users.  The files stored can be just about any type of file from documents to audio or video files to databases and images.  The purpose behind many content management systems is to enable collaboration.  For example, a content management system can store company documents maybe a proposal for a sale. 

If a company has several branches, authorized people from any branch can access the file and make adjustments, comments, or simply view the file.  This works well for companies that out source projects as well as internal uses like legal documents, sales bids and proposals and even website development. 

One of the basic strengths and uses of content management systems is that they facilitate collaborative environments. 

Where can you find a Content management system for your business?

To begin, there are a large number of options from freeware to high end expensive solutions costing more than $15,000 on up.  Then there are also open source options which while free can take many many hours to set up yourself and may not be the best solution for a proper business. 

Some of your open source options include:

• DotNetNuke which runs on an ASP.NET platform and supports Microsoft SQL Server databases

• Apache which runs on a Lenya Java, XML, or Apache Cocoon platform.

• Fedora runs on a Java and supports MySQL or Oracle database solutions

• WordPress runs on PHP  and supports MySQL

• PHP-Nuke which runs on PHP and also supports MySQL

There are of course more than 50 open source Content management systems.  Now not all open source solutions are created equal and each need to be evaluated by what they can do for you, note that their price tag of free doesn’t take into consideration your time on setup, fixing bugs and making them all fit together to run a proper business. 

Experts agree that you will want to evaluate the following criteria:

1. Web application platform.  Look for a programming language that you are familiar with or that is widely accepted and easy to use. Additionally, the more operating systems and database solutions it is compatible with, the better for you and your business. 

2. Software license.  If you are going to change the software and redistribute it, you will absolutely need to investigate the particular licenses attached to the software.  Don’t assume because it is labeled open source that it is license free. 

3. Stability and development activity.  Many open source products are supremely stable because developers worldwide have the ability to improve, enhance, and strengthen the software without restriction.  That, in essence, is the core of open source products.  That being said, it would be foolish to assume that all open source products are stable and being consistently developed.  Some projects simply get abandoned.  Check to see when the latest version has been released and how many versions were released prior.  That is a good indication of the activity level.  Also, and active bug list on the website as well as a current list of bug solutions is a good indicator of developer activity.

4. User community.  The more people using an open source product, the better generally because this means people are actively striving to improve it and commercial enterprises are likely to partner with it to provide compatible software solutions.  For example, Google and Yahoo partner with Apache, the pioneers of open source. 

5. Documentation and source code are also good signs of continuous development and a working and viable product.  The documentation also reassures you that if you have problems or questions, there is documentation to help you out.

6. Web standards, accessibility.  Yes, there are open source web standards and the World Wide Web Consortium is one of the governing bodies.  Visit the WWWC website and make sure the content management product you’re considering checks out. 

7. Suitability and usability.  This shouldn’t be last on the list because if a product doesn’t offer the features you need, then it isn’t a product you should evaluate.  Make sure the content management system you’re researching meets your needs and provides the features you will need.  These may be accessibility features, tracking features, assigning tasks, formatting etc…

Outside of open source content management systems you will find some commercial options such as MemberSpeed.  These generally range in price from a few hundred dollars to a few thousand depending on their options.  Like open source options, commercial options support various platforms from PHP to web based content management systems and they support a variety of databases.  If you are considering an entry level commercial system you will want to evaluate them by the same basic criteria you’re evaluating open source options. 

One factor that wasn’t mentioned in open source criteria is tech support.  This is often because open source tech support is not your standard call and get an answer type situation.  Open source products generally ask you to report a bug and a developer will work on a solution. 

However, when you’re paying for a solution, tech support is a key component and something you will want to evaluate.  It won’t do you much good if your CMS goes down on a busy Monday morning and tech support isn’t answering your calls. For example, MemberSpeed has a fully dedicated support desk manned by experts who are ready to help its customers 24/7.

There are quite extensive CMS solutions offered by large companies like IBM and Oracle.  These products generally cost upwards of $15,000 on up and are extremely powerful and often beyond the scope of most small to middle sized companies. 

However, there are many small to mid sized business CMS solutions like MemberSpeed that are very robust and powerful yet affordable for even a home based business to use.

If you outsource any aspect of your business, rely on employees working off site, or operate in multiple locations, a content management system will make your workflow more seamlessly.  It will enable people to collaborate quickly and easily on a variety of tasks and your production will increase. 

While there are many commercial CMS options, the open source options available will likely meet most or all of your content management needs.  File sharing becomes as easy as logging onto the system and opening a document.  Collaboration is as easy as posting comments or making changes to documents, images, and even audio files.

If you’d like to take a free test drive of the MemberSpeed CMS membership management software you can get details here:

Click here to take MembeSpeed for a Free Test Drive.

Enjoy!

Learn how to conduct a successful interview

Structured Interviewing

Interviewing is the time where most companies rely on ‘gut instinct’ assuming that the candidate is qualified for the position when what they should be doing is evaluating their qualifications during the interview.  In addition to direct questions the interview will want to prepare specific behavioral questions, knowledge questions, and questions to assess a candidate’s interpersonal skills.

The best way to conduct an interview is to have a structure established before the candidate arrives.  This enables you to maintain control of the interview and to extract all the necessary information that you need to make an appropriate and effective hiring decision. 
 

An Interview Structure Might Look Like This:

• Greeting and nonverbal assessment

• Brief conversation to set candidate at ease

• 5-10 warm up questions.

• 10-20 Behavioral Questions

• Confirmation questions.  Clarify concerns.

• Candidate question period

• Closing questions/discussion.  Ask for references.

• Address the next steps in the process.

• Handshake/Goodbye

• Move on to next interviewer or process is complete
 
Decide in advance how long you have for the interview and make sure that the candidate is aware of that time frame when you make the appointment.  Also decide how you want to document the interview for later reference and in the event that any legal concerns arise.  The best way to conduct any interview is to prepare ahead of time. 

Let’s begin with questions to ask yourself to establish a structure.

1. Who is conducting the interview?

2. How many people are going to be interviewed?

3. What will the interview format be?
a. Series (will there be a series of interviews)
b. Face to face with one person
c. Sequential, (the interviewee will meet with several people one after the other)
d. Panel (the interviewee will meet with several people at once)
e. Group interview (Several candidates meet with interviewers in a group setting)

4. How much time will you allow for the interview?

5. Lastly, what questions will you ask the candidate?

Once you’ve established a general format for the interview and all parties involved know what to expect the next step is to identify key questions that you want the candidate to answer.  There may be additional questions that you’ll need to ask based on the candidate’s answers and there may be fewer questions that need to be asked based on the candidate’s answers and performance during the interview.  (If the candidate blows the interview in the first five minutes then there isn’t a need to prolong the agony, simply cut the interview short, gracefully, and move on.)

Assessing Non-Verbal Cues

Assuming that your candidate’s have arrived in a timely manner and are groomed and dressed professionally.  I’m also assuming that they have introduced themselves properly and have thanked your for meeting with them and have shaken your hand.  Additionally, pay attention to how your candidate sits during the interview.  If they’re attentive to what you’re saying with their posture or if they’re sitting back with their legs crossed and behaving in too casual a manner. 

Are they taking notes on the interview or doodling?  Yes doodling.  I’ve witnessed senior management drawing on their notepads one time too many!  Not a good first impression unless they’re applying for an artist position. 

Does the candidate make eye contact and have they been respectful of all members of your staff before, during, and after the interview.  If they have failed to meet any of the above professional behaviors, then depending on the job position and requirements you may need to call the interview short.

Interview Questions.

A great place to begin any interview, after the initial handshake and visual assessment, is with a job description and some general rapport building questions to set the applicant at ease.  General questions might include the weather, the drive in, the sports game last night. 

Next, you’ll want to move in to the introductory questions.  These questions serve to warm up the applicant and get them into ‘interview’ mode.  Questions might resemble the following:

 “Please describe your current job responsibilities.” 
“What do you like most about your current job?”  Least?
“Why do you want to leave your current position?”

Based on the candidate’s answers to your questions, you’ll likely have a few more questions to dig deeper or clarify their answers.  Then it is time to move into the competency based questions.  Competency based questions are designed to keep the interview in control of the interview and they cover measurable skills, knowledge, behavior, and interpersonal skills.  They are the core of the interview and where you will derive the majority of your decision making information.

Competency based questions can address many behaviors, skills, and experience.  For example:

• “Tell me about an unpopular decision that you’ve had to make and how you handled it.” —This question assesses the candidate’s decision making skills.

• “Describe a situation where you were overwhelmed by a problem at work and how you handled it.” — This would address the candidate’s problem solving skills.

• “Tell me how you prioritize tasks and budget your time?” – Time management.

• “Tell me about a time when your team or department did not meet expected goals.  How did you handle that?”  — Management or Team Building.

• “Tell me about a time that you had to deal with a difficult employee/co-worker.”

• “What do you do at work to relieve stress?”

• “Describe what motivates you at your current job?”

A competency is a trait or quality that contributes to a candidate’s ability to meet the job requirements as established by you and your company prior to posting the position.  The questions therefore focus on having the candidate explain past experiences to predict future behaviors.  Questions will be designed to assess all behaviors, skills, and experiences necessary to perform the job’s responsibilities.

The next stage of a structured interview will  be a clarification or confirmation stage where you briefly address questions about the candidate’s education, and work history making sure to inquire about any inconsistencies.  If the competency portion of the interview has been comprehensive then this portion of the interview will be brief.

The last phase of the interview is the closing.  This is where you turn the interview over to the candidate to ask any questions that they may have about the position and to establish a method of communication for the future.  What is the next step?  When will you have a decision made?  How and when will the candidate contact you?  This is also the time where salary requirements will  be clarified.

Once you’ve completed the interview, if you haven’t documented or assessed the candidate’s answers to your questions then take a few moments to record your assessment.  I recommend a formal interview format where assessing an answer to a question can be as simple as circling a number on a scale of 1-10 so that you don’t have to write down complete answers.  This also enables reassessment of the interview to be an easier and more efficient process.  Leave room at the bottom of the form for comments.  Sign and date the form and make sure that the candidate’s name is on the top.  This will keep them together.

Questions not to ask.

There are of course questions that you need to avoid asking for legal and moral reasons,   including questions about the origin of a name, questions about a person’s residence, age, physical appearance, marital status, children, religion, and finances.  Tread lightly when inquiring about education, military experience, organizations, disabilities, criminal offenses, citizenship, and a person’s name sticking only with the facts.

How Crons can be an asset to  your business.

What is Cron?

Cron is the name of a time based scheduling program that enables Unix users to execute scripts, or commands, automatically at a specified time/date. It is generally used for system administration commands, for running a backup script, or for connecting to the internet and downloading your email.  Now you’re interested, right?  Email is something that almost everyone, certainly every business owner, can relate to. 

So how can you use Crons? 

Quite simply, If you want to automate something on your computer that runs more than once, you can use a cron.

But wait, we’re getting ahead of ourselves.  Let’s take a step back and examine exactly what a cron is. 

A cron is a daemon, yep another tech term – sorry.  A daemon is a program that only needs to be started once and then it will sit quietly waiting until it is required.  Most Linux distributions, versions of Linux designed from the original Linux base code called a kernel, come with Crons automatically installed and entered into the startup script. 

For example, you can write a cron to delete your temporary files.  You can designate it to delete them hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly. 

Even more useful for an internet business owner might be the ability send email messages to subscribers every morning at 5:00am.  You can set the cron job on your server to handle that every day.  You can even set your cron to send one email every day until all your email messages have been delivered.  You can schedule it to delete your website members with expired accounts, to receive an update on your subscribers from your mailing list manager and you can investigate your links on other websites if participate in link exchange programs.  Pretty useful, right? 

Another term you’re likely to come upon as you get into crons is the term Cron tab.  This is basically the command that creates the list of commands on your system and is not editable.  However, the crontab file, I know, the creators of the terminology must get a good laugh from confusing folks, the cron tab file is the actual list of commands and that is capable of being edited with a few commands.  Each user can have their own cron tab file. 

What does a Cron Look like?

The good news is that it is fairly simple.  You have a few fields you will use including:

Minute - denotes the minute of the hour that the command will run, anything between 0 and 59.

Hour – denotes the hour the command will run on and will be between 0 for midnight and 23 for 11pm.

Dom – this is the day of the month you want your command to run on.  For example the first day of the month would be denoted as 1.

Month – what month do you want to run the command, choices are 0-12 or you can write the name of the month out.  For example, October

Dow – stands for day of the week and you can choose 0-7 or write the day as it is normally abbreviated.  Example Sat would mean Saturday

User – is the person that runs the command.  You can specify a user but you do not have to.  You can also deny a user from using a cron with a simply deny command.

Cmd – is the command that you want to run.

Here’s what a typical cron command will look like.
 
Let’s imagine that you have installed a cgi script called task.cgi in your cgi-bin directory.  If you want to run this program each morning at 5:15am on Sunday, here’s what it will look like:

15 5 * * 0 /home/username/www/cgi-bin/task.cgi

30–represents the minute of cron work
23–represents the hour of the day
0–represents the Sunday.
The * represent every day, month, and weekday.

Scenarios you may face

Many distributions offer pre-configured cron jobs.  Different versions of UNIX store cron and support files in different locations and may use a slightly different format however if you have a Linux system you may be able to view these with the following commands:

• /var/spool/cron               main cron directory
• /var/spool/cron/cron.allow    grant access to the cron facility
• /var/spool/cron/cron.deny     revoke access to the cron facility

To set up a cron job your system may have a cron tab function on your web panel.  This is a simple interface that will allow you to click on a few buttons and set your cron job. 

The last option is that you will have to upload a cron job into your ‘cron.txt’ file.  There are four basic steps involved and they include Create cron.txt using your notepad application, uploading it using your telnet server, installing the txt file as cron file with the command ‘crontab cron.txt’, and then checking it to see if it works. 

Tips in setting up your cron jobs include:

• Occasionally check your cron to make sure if it is working.  For example you set your cron to send your ezine at 11.30 PM. Then you subscribe yourself to see it is working or not. Later you can unsubscribe yourself.

• If you are creating cron file first time and uploading it to your server, do it in ASCII mode.

• If you are setting the script path in your schedule, the path SHOULD be from your hosts server root. NOT your domain path.  Ask your host about the procedure if you are not sure of something.

• Script names are case sensitive on Unix. So be careful in entering the script name.
If you are creating cron.txt file and uploading, you should not allow spaces between them however you should have a space after your command.

Wrapping it up

It is easy to get excited about the possibilities of crons and automating your business and computer to work while you sleep without the extra cost of additional software.  Before you get carried away take the time to understand your server’s set up and capabilities.  Some systems are significantly more intuitive and programming crons is easy.  Others will require more attention and a longer learning curve.   This article merely scratches the surface of what crons are capable of and how to implement them.