How To Manage Your Organisation With Qi

Transcription

1 Qi The Universal Content Management solution Qi is a web-based content, information and asset management solution that allows organisations of any size to manage, publish and share their content. Qi can be easily customised to adapt to any type of content and to serve it to diverse audiences, across any number of channels and platforms. Qi is designed for ultimate flexibility, collaboration, ease of use and speed. Qi is designed, developed and maintained by Keepthinking Qi capitalises on Keepthinking s ten-year experience with organisations in the public, arts and cultural sectors and it is currently in use in over twenty museums, galleries, local councils and other institutions 1. Key features / Beautiful and fast user interface. Easy to learn and a joy to use. / Total flexibility. Design any information schema and set of relationships and Qi will adapt to it. / Manage any type of content with one tool. Bring all of your content and assets under one roof and save time and money on training and integration as well as maintenance and licensee fees. / Complete integration. Qi integrates content and collection management, asset management, event management, e-commerce and much more. / Fully indexed, with universal search and replace. / Web-based interface with cross browser compatibility. PC, Mac, Firefox, IE or Safari. PC, Mac, Tablet, iphone or Android. 1 For a list of some of the organisations using Qi please see chapter at the end of this document

2 / Full accountability and audit trail. Integrated real-time reports. / Integrated digital asset management with on-the-fly resizing and format conversion 2. / Super fast, with advanced, multi-layered caching. / Bullet proof security. Top security features, including multiple sign-in technologies. / Based on open source technologies and web standards. / Database agnostic. Works with natively with MySQL, MS SQL and Oracle, as well as any ODBC compliant database. / Spectrum, Lido and/or Dublin Core compliant (Collection Management). / Full range of import and export formats: XML, JSON, CSV, PDF. / Integrated query API (XML/JSON). Rationale and history Principles Qi offers a flexible and integrated approach to overcome the limitations of similar products on the market. / Content Management Systems (CMS). In most CMSs, such as Drupal, Wordpress or ExpressionEngine, content is structured as pages, articles or comments, with limited scope for complex data models 3, large datasets and multi-faceted narratives. With Qi, content can be structured in complete freedom and can be easily customised to target the need of different audiences and features of different platforms. With Qi it is easy to adapt content to any context. / Collection (as well as Library/Knowledge/Document/Event/Information) Management Systems. In the last thirty years museums and galleries have adopted dedicated software packages to manage their archives and collections. Such systems offer a vertical approach to information and have very little flexibility or adaptability, often leading to compromises and/or incoherent data. Moreover, traditional collection management solutions offer little or no support for contextual information, which is necessary to create resources for different audiences. / Integrated approach. Most public-facing organisations have requirements that extend beyond what traditional Content and and Collection Management Systems can offer: they sell tickets and manage bookings for events, offer membership programmes, sell products online, collect donations, publish newsletters, syndicate information to others, manage digital assets,related usage rights... and much more. Before Qi, this complex information had to be stored in different applications and databases: integrating all systems was either not possible or required a great deal of effort, time and expense. Qi takes a radically different approach to managing, organising, publishing and sharing information. Integrated design Qi s integrated approach starts from a comprehensive information design that covers all the needs of an organisation in terms of content and information management. Considering the example of a typical museum, this may include one, some, or all of the following: / Management of collections of objects. / Events, exhibitions and displays, including ticket sales and facility management/booking. / Digital assets management and related usage rights. 2 Using Zencoder API 3 Complex data models in such CMSs are offered as add-ons, not natively supported. Qi description Release Feb

3 / Visitor information, including marketing activities (e.g venue hire). / Products for sale online. / Donations, friends/supporters and fund-raising activities. / Website content management, including newsletters and other marketing activities. / Any other information for internal as well as public consumption. As already mentioned, traditionally each of these archives are managed vertically, using different software systems and applications that are difficult and expensive to integrate with one another. Beside the cost of individual systems and their integration, organisations incur additional costs such as: / Multiple software and maintenance licenses / Need to train staff for different packages and different interfaces / Increased hosting expenses Qi overcomes all of this by offering a solution that covers all of the requirements, within a single database, an integrated digital asset library and a unified user interface 4. Multiple products in one As already mentioned, Qi may be used as: / Content Management System (websites, kiosks, iphone apps, visitor information screens, etc.) / Collection Management System (including core collection information as well as loans, valuations, authorities and vocabularies, import and export facilities and much more) / Library Management System (including core library information as well as loans, authorities and vocabularies, advanced search facilities) / Digital asset management with digital rights management (sophisticated search facilities, sharing, multiple formats, automated format conversion for images, video and audio, download of assets in multiple sizes and more) / Tickets and bookings management (fully integrated with events and exhibitions) / Online shopping (unified shopping basket for products, tickets, donations, memberships, etc, with the option of splitting products and orders by department - your customers can purchase everything you offer with a single transaction and you receive multiple orders for fulfilment by different departments) / Print management (turnkey production of printed material, including catalogues and brochures 5 ) / Customer relationship management and fund-raising/loyalty management (release 5.5 December 2012) Design principles Qi is first and foremost a content management framework, in which information is / highly structured / solidly organised / flexibly interrelated 4 Important: Qi offers an integrated approach to all of the above, although it does not have to. You can continue to use your Collection Management System and use Qi to add contextual information (we have integrated Qi with Mimsy XG, Museum+, TMS, Adlib and ModesXML) 5 Typically using Adobe InDesign and EasyCatalogue, with a real-time connection to the Qi database Qi description Release Feb

4 Separation of content and presentation Qi seamlessly integrates the management with the publication and sharing (presentation) of information, whilst keeping these aspects completely separated and independent from one another. Content and content relationships (to other content, as well as authority lists and media assets) are managed independently from their presentation: this allows the same content to be re-used in many situations and contexts: / Different audiences, requiring different layers of content / Different platforms, requiring different asset sizes and formats / Multiple versions or the same content - including changes or re-skinning of the user interface Once you have your content in Qi, you may use it as many times as you like in as many application as you need. Whatever happens, you won t need to export and import it ever again. Content objects, types and nodes Content is made of objects, it is structured into types and it is organised in nodes. The crucial difference between object oriented content and the traditional page/article/comment structure lies in abstraction: web pages, articles and comments are some of the many possible types of objects and are not prescribed in every situation (e.g. a Collection Management System). When required, pages may function as content aggregators for other types of content (e.g events or exhibitions). Nodes and types Nodes may be used to separate different types of content or to create groups of the same type of content With no limits to the number of types of content and nodes, Qi offers a solution that can contain any information repository of any scale - not simply websites. Qi is currently used to manage complex museum collections (e.g. The Public Catalogue Foundation) and bibliographies (e.g. The Burlington Magazine), which are independent from their website publication and which prior to Qi would have required separate, vertical software applications. Nodes Nodes are ways of organising content in a logical way. Nodes may correspond to the main navigation of a website or to different collections in a collection management system, to allow the management of very complex repositories. Each node can be associated with many types of content, so that it may be possible to have (for instance) paintings (type of content) in different collections (nodes). User permission are attributed to the combination of types and node, so that a group of users may have writing access to Paintings in Collection A, but read only Collection in Node B. Qi description Release Feb

5 Types of content Typically, a Qi implementation starts with the design of the underlying relational database, which includes content, authority lists and relationships. Each type of content is designated as a dedicated database table, aptly structured and indexed. Any data schema Qi can be implemented around any data schema. Then in Qi we define how we want to input data for each field in type of content and what are the relevant constraints and relationships. There are over fifteen types of field to choose from (e.g. text, rich text, lists, dates, times, colour, etc) and over twenty different validation rules (e.g. required, numeric, mix/max length, etc). For ease of use, organisation of information and access rights, fields may be divided into different tabs. The flexibility of Qi even allows to use different fields in different nodes for the same type of content (e.g. a painting is a painting, but if it s part of the museum collection it will needs different fields, compared to when it is on loan for a temporary exhibition). Content relationships One of the real strengths and the biggest difference of Qi compared to other system lies in its ability to manage relationships. Any element of content may be associated with any other element, across multiple types and nodes. A simple example in a museum environment is the ability of cross link collections to exhibitions, in order to display objects that took part in an exhibition. This can be extended to the shop (books, catalogues and merchandise that relates to the exhibition and/or the object) and much more. Qi description Release Feb

6 Content and context Content does not live in isolation - it relates and connects. Typically, while looking at an exhibition, visitors may be re-directed to collection objects, from there to other exhibitions, collection trails, educational activities, etc. More complex example involve narrative trails, where a theme (context) is associated with multiple objects (content) to create detailed user journeys (themes, guided tours, highlights, etc). The user experience through the content become transversal, organic and much more akin to a real museum experience. Instead of linear metaphors and tree structure, we have multiple narratives and discoveries. Relationships, while typically linking two or more content items, may also include qualifying information, which is flexible and configurable. In a recent implementation, when defining objects included in an exhibition, our client wished to specify the exhibition catalogue number for each object and whether the catalogue carried an illustration. Customisable relationships Specify any number of fields to qualify relationships. Relationship are also bi-directional. You may link an artist to a painting... or vice-versa. So for instance when looking at a painting record: Qi description Release Feb

7 Work of art view When looking at a the record of a work of art, see the list of related artists. While when looking at the artist record: Artist view The corresponding artist record will display all related works. Media assets A sophisticated Digital Asset Management is integrated with Qi and it is prefigured to accept assets in over 400 file formats, including all popular types of electronic documents, images, audio and video. Documents, audio/video and rich media (typically Flash), may have alternative images: e.g. an exhibition catalogue which are uploaded as as PDF may have an associated cover image as JPG; a video may have an image placeholder, while a Flash asset may have a substitute image for users without the Flash player installed. The Media Library Media files (images, documents and multimedia) are divided by type and organised in folders. For audio and video, Qi automatically creates all the required format to deliver multimedia to all platforms, including tablets and mobiles. Images are automatically resized in as many sizes and formats required. Sizes are defined during the configuration of Qi, but can be changed at any time following new requirements (e.g. for new templates or Qi description Release Feb

8 delivery channels). The whole media library can be simply reprocessed in the background to include the new sizes. Video conversion Qi uses Zencoder to convert any uploaded video to multiple formats that are compatible with any browser on any desktop and mobile platform. Video assets are automatically converted to as many formats as required. Typically, content managers upload H.264 MPEG-4 videos, that are converted by Qi into required extra formats to be displayed using HTML5 on any platforms, including mobiles. Audit trail and deleted records The entire history of each field in each record is stored within Qi and never deleted. You may immediately recover a previous value, see who changed it, as well as undelete a record or a media asset. The full story For each record, Qi maintains the full history of changes, field by field, including the ones that were rejected. This includes entirely deleted records, which can be restored at any time. Approval workflow Granular user permissions allow ultimate control of who may read, add to, upload, modify or approve content and media assets, distinct for each combination of type of content and node. Everything may be done by the same person (in smaller teams) or by extremely diversified groups of people. All with great simplicity. Any action on content (new records, modification of existing records or deletions) must be reviewed and approved by a more senior user, with approval rights for the specific type of content in each particular node. This can be done in the review panel or directly at the record level. Qi description Release Feb

9 Review and approve Subject to permissions, content editor will see everything that needs reviewing, including details of what s changed, who made the change and when. User and group permissions Qi allows extreme granularity in managing who can see or do what, down to the finest details. Separate privileges (read/write/add/delete/approve/audit) may be selected for each node and type. Permissions Sophisticated access management Vocabularies The full set of the Getty Vocabularies (ULAN/The Unified List of Artist Names, AAT/Art and Architecture Thesaurus and TGN/Thesaurus of Geographic Names), as well as the Oxford English Lexicon are fully integrated within Qi 6. More external vocabularies and authorities are easily integrated on request. 6 Subject to relevant license fees from the Getty Foundation and Oxford University Press. Qi description Release Feb

10 Third-party authorities Qi integrates AAT, ULAN and TGN from the Getty Foundation. Shop module Qi includes an e-commerce module, seamlessly integrated. Product and orders may be organised in a single or in multiple department, with separate processing and fulfilment. In any case, Qi offers a seamless customer experience, a unified shopping basket and a single payment, while behind the scene the order can be split into different components and sent to different departments (if required). Each department may fulfil a portion of the order separately, while the customer is informed at every stage of the progress of his/her order. Each component offers full visibility of the entire order, to reconcile with the payment on the merchant bank statement. The shop module includes search and report capabilities. Qi description Release Feb

11 The shop Integrated user experience combined with sophisticated order management and fulfilment. Import / Export / Reporting Qi includes sophisticated import, export and report capabilities. Export: / XML / XML for Excel / JSON / PDF Import / CSV / XML Usability Qi is based on a web interface that pays great attention to usability and accessibility, as well as security. With Qi content managers can take care of all aspects of any type of content, including authorities, relationships and media assets, in a safe, web-based application, with granular permissions and flexible workflows. Accessibility Accessibility of paramount. Qi integrates all of the common accessibility features, such as coherent page structure, access keys, skip navigation, etc. Moreover, whilst designed to make best use of current technologies, such as Javascript and AJAX, Qi is fully WAI level AA compliant and will work even if Javascript is completely disabled. Presentation components As a framework providing complete separation between content and presentation, Qi is template independent. Templates are built and/or customised for each project and application, to allow the greatest Qi description Release Feb

12 flexibility as well as freedom from design constraints. Instead of templates, Qi implements libraries and components, which provide raw functionalities that can be easily extended and customised. National Galleries of Scotland A bespoke template, built using standardised components, puts objects in context. Libraries include: / Hierarchical navigation, with unlimited levels of nested menus. / Standard pages, with images, file attachments and relationships to other content. / Image and multi-media galleries, including continuous zooming and multi-platform media players. / Paginated lists of articles (e.g. news, press releases, events, exhibitions, etc). / Paginated lists with content in context (e.g. collection trails, guided tours, floor plans, exhibitions, etc). / Events calendars, including search according to date, type of event, audiences, etc. Booking and ticket sales. / Online Collection basics (as each collection is different we usually look at them individually). / Online shop (shopping basket, checkout and payments). Qi description Release Feb

13 Current and future plans Qi has been completely re-designed and developed in the course of 2010 and 2011 and released in June 2011 (version 5.0.0). Following the initial release, a plan for future improvement and functionalities has been drafted, which has largely been driven by the needs and aspiration of our existing clients and Qi adopters. Version was released in January 2012 and has started the series of customer-driven improvements that will see Qi grow and enhance its capabilities, whilst keeping to its principles of extreme speed, flexibility and ease of use. The next releases will add (among other things): / More powerful and flexible media asset management / New and improved field types / More powerful search facilities / Content dashboard, statistics and collaboration / Improved access control and security We will always work with our clients to prioritise required new functionalities. Upgrading from Qi version 4.x Qi 5 represents a giant leap forward compared to Qi 4 and upgrading requires substantial effort. The main structural difference concerns the database schema, which has been completely re-designed to allow growth and extreme flexibility. We have developed a software utility to covert any Qi 4 data and asset into a a Qi 5 structure. If Qi is used to manage a website, some of its backend code (models) will need to be adapted or re-written. We do offer a fixed price upgrade from Qi 4 to Qi 5 - please contact us for more details. Technical and functional advantages of Qi 5 compared to Qi 4 / Database schema. While Qi 4 was based on a single table for all content, in Qi 5 each content type has a different table. This allows much bigger repositories with no impact on performance and much more precise data modelling. / Flexible relationship definition. Each type of relationship between content record may have none or many qualifying fields - not simply Title and Caption in context like in Qi 4. / Speed. Qi 5 has been completely re-built and optimised for PHP 5.3, with speed improvements of of to 600% compared to its predecessor. / Audit. Qi 5 implements an audit trail and never deletes any records. This did not exist in Qi 4. / Full text indexing. Full text indexing is also new to Qi 5. / Global search and Search & Replace. Also new to Qi 5 is the ability of searching across the entire database as well as using search and replace features. / Import. Qi 5 can import data (as CSV/XML) and images in batches and apply appropriate, customisable post-processing. / Reporting/export. Qi 5 can produce customisable reports in XML, XML for Excel, PDF, CSV and JSON. / API. Integrated RESTful API (in progress). / Digital asset management. Qi offers functionalities that are comparable to a dedicated DAMS, which are much more advanced than the simpler Media Library of Qi 4. Qi description Release Feb

14 / Media assets conversion. Among the new media functions is the possibility of dynamically converting video and audio into multiple formats for different platforms. / Users and group management. Users can now belong to multiple groups, with a logic that is similar to Unix user management and LDAP. Groups have much more granular access control. / Sign-on. Qi offers /password or X.509 (beta). LDAP in progress. / User interface. The changes in UX compared to Qi 4 are so extensive that they need to be experienced. The most striking differences include: - Tabbed content - Organise media in groups according to media folder - Choose assets from library using preview, not just file name - Preview audio and video in context -... and much more Please get in touch for a demonstration. Detailed specifications Flexibility / Ability to adapt to any data structure and design / Complete customisation of content types and relationships / Extensible content types and nodes / Ability to re-use content and assets / Support for foreign characters / UTF-8 / Interface localisation in any language / Metadata, classification and tagging / Support for multiple sites/repositories within the same database Interface / Flexible and customisable input screens and tabs / Flexible, customisable field types and validation rules / Comprehensive keyboard shortcuts and access keys / Support for drag-and-drop features / Support for friendly URLs / Support for comments, task assignment and notes between editors / Spell Checker / Universal full-text indexing and search, with results sorted by relevance / WYSIWYG Editor, based on web standards Management / Content scheduling / Content staging Qi description Release Feb

15 / Relationship management / Multiple repositories and support for multiple languages within the same repository / Reporting in Excel, XML, JSON and PDF / Web-based administration / Workflow manager / User and Group permission manager / Configuration editor Asset management / Complete asset management (Images, Video, Audio, Flash) / Category / Structure / Folder Manager / Automatic multiple resizing of images / Automatic encoding of multimedia assets / Upload Word, Excel, PDF and more than 400 file types Performance and scalability / Advanced multi-layered caching using Memchache / Support for shared, dedicated, cloud and multi-tier environments / Support for database replication / Support for MySQL and ODBC database engines (native support for MS SQL and Oracle in October 2012) / Support for load balancers and scale-on-demand environments Security / Audit trail and versioning / Content Approval and Workflow / Granular, role-based Permissions / Statistics of login history and activity / Support for LDAP, X.509 and Active directory / SSL Support Interoperability / AJAX Support / API in XML/JSON to integrate with third-parties / Content syndication (RSS, ATOM) / Metadata Standards Support / Mobile support / UTF-8 support / WAI Compliant / Web Services Support (SOAP, REST) Qi description Release Feb

16 / XHTML / CSS Compliant / Customisable support for LIDO/Dublin Core and Spectrum Standard (export) / Support for OAI/Harvesting servers and interfaces Specification & Technology Web Server / Apache 2 Database server / MySQL version 5.1 or greater / PostgreSQL / Any ODBC compliant database / Microsoft SQL Server 7 / Oracle 8 Programming languages / Back end: PHP 5.3, based on the CodeIgniter 2.1 MVC framework / Front end: HTML5 with CSS3 / Javascript: Qi is designed to work without Javascript enabled; however we do recommend JS enabled browser Accessibility / Compliant with WAI Level AAA guidelines Languages / British English / American English / Italian / Any other language on request Web browser support / Internet Explorer 7+ / Firefox 3+ / Safari 3+ / Google Chrome / Mobile Safari / Mobile Opera 7 Available Q Available Q Qi description Release Feb

17 Support / Training Programme / Comprehensive Documentation / In-Application Help and Online Help / Open, Modular Framework with Example Code / Pluggable API License Qi is licensed as Commercial Open Source. Keepthinking do not usually charge a licence fee, we only charge for configuration and bespoke functionalities, plus the bespoke design and templates we create for each project. Each license comes with: / Unlimited users / Unlimited types/nodes/records / Unlimited repositories (within the same project) / Non-recurring licensing model Current users The following organisations have adopted Qi for their content. / The Public Catalogue Foundation. Collection management, website content management, API. / The British Council. Collection management, website content management. / The National Galleries of Scotland. Website content management, e-commerce, API. / The William Morris Gallery. Collection management, website content management. / The Horniman Museum. Website content management, Intranet management. / The Burlington Magazine. Library management, website content management, API. / Bologna local council (Italy). Website content management. Intranet management. / The Ashmolean Museum. Website content management. / The Wedgwood Museum. Collection Management, website content management, kiosks management. / The National Maritime Museum. Website content management. / Charlie Chaplin Archive. Website content management. / Universal Leonardo/Central Saint Martins. Website content management. Qi description Release Feb