On Copy and Paste…

I saw something today that got my mind wandering –

I may have this wrong, but my understanding is that they made versions of a bunch of classic video games that are now interoperable. Meaning, you can take objects/concepts from one game and use them in another – find the “magic sword” from Game A and use it in Game B. They essentially connected a bunch of video games into a shared universe.

(Ever see the Steven Sondheim musical “Into the Woods”? Same idea.)

( …but don’t watch the movie. It’s awful.)

Anyway, could we do something like this in the content technology space?

Stick with me –

What if you had a “Copy this Content” button in your UI? Clicking it would copy the current object in some JSON format to your clipboard (either the actual client clipboard, or some cloud service). Configuration options in the CMS would control what the resulting JSON would look like (you could even have multiple formats to copy into).

Then, in some other system, you could simply “paste” it. That system would have “paste gateway” that took in pasted JSON. Configuration options in that system would control how it was interpreted into a managed object in that system. (It should update an existing object if it can match some identifier.)

Voila – you could simply “copy and paste” managed content between systems. It would be like a universal import/export feature for single objects, controlled through the UI. Call it, “UI-assisted integration.”

Yes, yes, this is why integration platforms exist. But this model is low-tech, low-overhead, and universal: JSON out of one system, JSON into another system, using the client as an ad-hoc, always-available transport layer.

I’m reminded of a CMS vendor that once did a “copy-ability” audit of their UI. They wanted to ensure that editors could copy data cleanly and effectively, because they decided that supporting copy-and-paste at the UI level was a valid integration pattern. They proactively catered to that UX pattern, which I think is prescient and …refreshingly human?

Of course, vendors often get weird about this. Every vendor wants to make their system integration friendly… but not so friendly that they reduce lock-in. Getting their software to play nice in their closed ecosystem gives them a selling point for their own suite, so playing too nice can be counterproductive to sales.

(Plus, every vendor wants to appear sophisticated. This is just simple enough to feel …low-rent.)

But, to start, a single vendor could do this between two products they own. Optimizely, for example, should do this between CMP and CMS. They have other integration options, to be clear, but I’d love to see it introduced like this, and I feel like the demo value is there – everyone can relate to copy-and-paste. That would demo very well.

…meh. Probably a dumb idea as I’ve written it up here. But I feel like there’s the kernel of a good idea in here somewhere.

Someone do something with it.