RE: new to MCMS questions

 
> 1. I have fielded several questions from my content authors 
> along the lines of "yes, but will it work in Firefox?". The 
> company is officially committed to MS, but there are a good 
> number of employees who choose to use other browsers. I've 
> done some research, but cannot locate anything specific to 
> this issue, and of course there is nothing on the MS web site 
> about it. Do any of you who have worked with MCMS have any 
> experience with using non-IE browsers. I presume the edit 
> site controls will not work

The content editing controls can be either the default Ektron editor or the
Telerik editor. I'm not sure if the Ektron editor presently shipping with
MCMS can be run in FireFox, but Ekton's editors do run in FireFox on the
Windows platform. The Telerik editor works in FireFox and is 100% browser
based. It works best in IE on Windows, works rather well in FireFox on
windows, and I *believe* has problems in FF/Mozilla on Mac. So the short
answer is that you do have viable editor options.

> nor most of the more advanced SPS 
> components (scheduled for later phases), but will employees 
> at least be able to browse information using anything other than IE??

For example, you can access a SharePoint site with FireFox (I've only tested
on Windows). You loose a % of the DHTML functionality but the information is
all accessible. You can certainly browse an MCMS site with FireFox and not
loose any functionality. That is all dependent on the template developers
and content authors. If they use well-formatted HTML things are fine.


> 2. My next question relates to documentation... I see there 
> are only a few books specific to MCMS and those I've found 
> are targeted to the developer/administrator, not the lay 
> person. I am not a developer myself though I have a good deal 
> of knowledge of general CMS concepts as well as other tools 
> on the market. But this tool is not the most straightforward 
> application and the MS documentation is not very helpful from 
> my experience thus far.
>
> Not only am I responsible for not only setting up the site, 
> channels, populating content, etc. but also training all of 
> content authors/editors/approvers. I can't find much that is 
> helpful for me, nor anything remotely suitable for them. I'd 
> like them to have reference material on hand, but don't know 
> where to find this... I'm not comfortable sending them to the 
> MS site, but writing new help content is well beyond scope.

MCMS is really a Web CMS toolkit. It is not that friendly as an end-user
product, requires a fair bit of customization, and works best (most usable)
if the web author front end is massaged a bit for the client's needs. 

Depending on the budget and project resources you may want to explore  IT
Hit's Web Author Enhancements (WAE 2.0)
<http://mcms.ithit.com/features/features.html>. It's not cheap, but adds
significant functionality and improves usability of the MCMS web-based
authoring tools. 

You may also want to check out this book:
http://www.packtpub.com/book/mcms . It's the most recent and was written by
some very credible folk. In general though, we end up producing some custom
documentation for our clients. 


Best regards,
Brice