Clicks & Notes

alt tags - The Content Inventory: Roadmap to a Succesful CMS Implementation

• when a company is setting up a content management system, there’s a tendency to focus too much on the technology and design of the CMS, and not enough on the content itself
• inevitably, when it comes time to populate the CMS, the company runs into trouble – hence the need for a content inventory
• things to list in your content inventory:
  • all content on the current website
  • content that is to be migrated to the new site
  • web-based applications or transactional systems to be integrated with the new website
• information to capture for each piece of content:
  • description
  • content owner
  • content type
  • format
  • location
  • update frequency
  • status
  • general notes

(via Column Two)

Here are some additional resources on how to do a content inventory:

• New Architect - Taking A Content Inventory
• adaptive path - Doing a Content Inventory (Or, A Mind-Numbingly Detailed Odyssey Through Your Web Site) – includes an Excel worksheet that you can download and use
• SIGIA-L - summary of content inventory responses
• MCPS Web Services - Web Site Content Inventory Process (PDF, 274 kb)

The following are examples that you can look at or download:

• Perspective Software and Design - Content Inventory and Tracking
• Contentology.com Toolkit – includes three Excel spreadsheets: a Content Evaluation Matrix, a Content InventoryAssessment, and a Content Requirements Plan
• PageSolutions - Web Content Inventory – includes content inventory, preparation, and migration worksheets

Update: See also Bloug - Applications to Aid in Content Inventories?, for ideas and pointers to tools for performing content inventories in large, distributed enterprise environments.

Step Two Designs - Step-by-step: implementing online forms

Online forms should be a key component of all corporate intranets, as they deliver clear productivity benefits and cost savings. Few organisations, however, have taken the next steps beyond simply publishing forms in PDF format.

• instead of merely serving as a static repository, an intranet can be used to enable business processes within an organization
• online forms can speed up both the initial information capture and back-office processing; however, it is more common for people to print out PDFs to be completed and processed by hand
• companies can use an incremental approach to implementing online forms:
  1. use simple HTML forms to capture information and generate an email
  2. pre-populate some form fields, ideally using information based on a user’s intranent login ID
  3. set up a simple workflow – still email based – with a limited number of steps ; additional code can be added to the initial capture form to provide some “form logic”
  4. implement full workflow and integration, which could be done by:
     • additional custom development of the existing forms
     • using workflow functionality of a CMS or EDM system
     • integration with an “enterprise workflow solution”
• using the workflow functionality of a CMS is recommended as an effective way of short-cutting the steps noted above
• addtional suggestions:
  • ensure ’single sign-on’ across all intranet systems
  • forms should be linked with the supporting information/policies
  • forms should appear in search results near the top of the list

New Thinking by Gerry McGovern - Web content management: Top 10 predictions for 2005:

7. - As the attention span shortens, so too will content. It will become more and more difficult to get anyone to read anything over 500 words.

8. - As the need to get people to the right content as quickly as possible increases, the importance of writing quality metadata will grow.

(via InfoDesign)

Robin Good’s Latest News - A CMS For The Web-Enabled Organization: Marqui CMS Review - Part I Requirements:

A part of his review of the Marqui CMS, Robin Good has compiled a series of requirements checklists for selecting a content management system. Aspects covered include the following:

Content Management Requirements:

• Usability – “The system should not require the study of extensive documentation to understand how to perform basic operations like: creating new content, creating new categories for content, adding images and links, adding new contributors and external authors, validating content awaiting approval for final publication, etc.”
• Version control & archiving
• Workflow
• Security
• Integration with external systems
• Reporting

Publishing Requirements:

• Style sheets
• Page templates
• Extensibility – “The CMS should provide enough flexibility and easy-of-use as to make it extremely simple to integrate code “snippets” to provide additional publishing functionalities.”
• Support for multiple formats – including HTML (Web), PDF, RSS, XML, and text
• Personalization – “The CMS should provide the ability to customize the type of information presented to different types of users based on user profiles, roles and access rights or even based on specific metadata in the source content.”
• Usage statistics

Accessibility Requirements:

• Accessibility – “should be able to conform to one or more accessibility standards such as the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)”
• Cross browser support
• Support for client-side functionality
• Speed
• Valid HTML
• Effective navigation
• Metadata – “should conform to a standard such as Dublin Core”
• Support for multiple languages

Business Requirements:

• Training
• Documentation
• Warranty
• Maintenance agreements
• Resources required – any pre-existing hardware or software that the CMS must interface with, or run on, including specific operating systems, databases, web servers
• Skills required to customize and maintain the system.
• Scalability
• Reference sites – a portfolio of successful implementations where the CMS software has been effectively implemented

Two different lists about KM from two different perspectives – useful to look at them side-by-side…

noirExtreme - 5 major dimensions that can characterise information sharing:

• Individuals —this is about people addressing an audience, talking to each other or reading what others write.
• Topics —we are interested in specific themes and not others: In am into VoIP and peer-to-peer and not into gardening and pets.
• Opinions —what it is all about: information, ideas, thoughts expressed, clashing and leading to others.
• Things —for lack of a better word. Food for thoughts, almost literally: news, articles, events, books, new web sites, new products, etc. Anything one can have an opinion about.
• Time —the organising principle that makes conversation and evolution possible.

(via EMERGIC.org)

Knowledgeline - Guiding Principles of Knowledge:

• Knowledge is information in context.
• Information should be easily shared with and collaborated on by clients
• Knowledge is: what, how and educational
• We should learn from our mistakes
• We should formalize and disseminate the things that work
• Ease of access and use is part of the value of knowledge
• Practice group and local/regional boundaries should be removed
• Knowledge is to share, not to horde for personal use
• Capture knowledge when it is fresh – know when it is stale
• Principles should not compromise activity/results
• Focus should be on supporting the core Business strategies

(via Knowledge Jolt with Jack)

Quality Web Content - How to write summaries for web and intranet pages, and why

The first text in most web and intranet pages should be a summary of 1-2 sentences. That’s a good rule of thumb.

Why:

• saves readers time
• helps the writer focus/clarify thoughts
• provides useful search results

Uses/approaches:

• “The executive summary-summary” – encapsulate the entire article in one sentence
• “The key message-summary” – just get to the point
• “The description-summary” – describe what the article is about (although, couldn’t the title serve that function just as well?)
• “The instructions-summary” – tells the user why/when/how the page should be used

(via Column Two)

Cutting Through - 10 ways to use blogs for managing projects:

1. Communicating with project stakeholders
2. Replacing paper
3. Building issue logs
4. Capturing information snippets
5. Publicising the project progress
6. Reducing email overload
7. Capturing requirements
8. Circulating screenshots
9. Keeping team members up-to-date
10. Provide an automatic audit trail

Cutting Through - Four ways to use wikis for project management:

1. Planning meeting agendas
2. Real-time minute taking
3. Brainstorming presentations
4. Keep documents up-to-date

See also Enhancing Internal Communications with Blogs, Wikis, and More (presentation by Nick Finck, Mary Hodder, and Biz Stone) for specific examples of how blogs and wikis can be used in organizations.