With the CUE Publishing Platform’s numerous capabilities, a need was born to highlight the solution’s best practices. Based on experience from a multitude of customer implementations, a special team at Stibo DX preconfigured a standard system, called Highways, to accommodate for and visualize the most common user journeys across CUE, CUE-Print and CUE-DAM. In this interview with Highways Product Owner, Bo Dalsgaard, we explore the benefits of the implementation for customers.
How was Highways initially launched to fill an internal need at Stibo DX?
Bo Dalsgaard: With a new CUE system at hand that could potentially be configured and setup with unlimited variation, the Highways setup was initiated and configured to zoom in and focus on concrete use cases. It was visioned to make it easier to understand the capabilities of CUE and thereby in a concrete way lead to putting all stakeholders on the same page.
Highways → how to use the system
- Flow descriptions and User journeys organized in a hierarchical Highways, Guides and Steps structure within the boundaries of a standard installation.
Cueways → technical preconfigured standard installation (out of the box system setup)
- Content types, templates, inheritance logic, drop trigger behavior, XML-configurations, favorite setups, tag mapping etc.
- Generic user profiles and access rights matrix.
- Limited database (text, photo, video).
How does Highways align with Stibo DX’s best practices?
Bo Dalsgaard: Highways is our suggested Best Practice.
On each release of the software there is a new version of Highways/CUEWAYS incorporating new and updated functionality. Highways has been separately tested and verified in our QA department prior to each new release and furthermore health checked specifically in the Highway team.
How does Highways highlight the flexibility and intuitiveness of the CUE platform?
Bo Dalsgaard: We “drive the car” rather than explaining individual pieces of technology like tires, windshields and exhaust pipes.
With a concrete role you can login to the system and right away find yourself in a workflow, that will pull on CUE, CUE-Print or CUE-DAM to solve your daily challenges.
If there are several options to carry out the same job, we choose the one that works the best in the specific context and stage the alternatives where they fit better. In that process we might point out to the user what to observe when.
What makes Highways unique?
Bo Dalsgaard: Some customers use the preinstalled setups and workflows as inspiration and starting point for their own system understanding, setup and implementation – others use it as predefined with little or no changes.
There are multiple benefits with the Highway approach:
- Education – easier to bring new heads around CUE up to speed (both on the customer as well on the DX side).
- New users can sit with highways on their own.
- Concrete transparency in workflows – what is possible?
- More predictability in project delivery.
- Highways are the Acceptance test criteria.
- Faster mutual understanding of how to use the system. Concrete discussions right away.
- Easier to change from Highways than to invent from empty scratch.