Articles

Content management systems often are deployed within a single department (such as legal or marketing) and therefore are implemented with a focus on the needs of specific and even isolated audiences. The “E” of ECM may stand for “enterprise,” but few installations have that kind of scope, instead providing solutions to only specific, vertically oriented business goals. With transactional enterprise content management (tECM), however, the primary business goal is most certainly enterprise-wide: pushing high volumes of content through the system quickly, efficiently and accurately. In a transactional environment, document management is not a collaborative tool but an infrastructure. It takes “t” to put the “E” back in tECM.

Keyword research assists with making intelligent decisions regarding which words to target and in what order and where those words need to appear in our site content. Many of the words or phrases we come across while working through the research process might also in turn become preferred terms in our taxonomies. Further, we’re also likely to uncover some really great related (and unrelated) terminology originating directly from the fingers of our target audiences themselves...

Many organizations have turned to component-oriented content creation to create more sophisticated knowledge products, in more languages, and at lower cost. Our research shows that organizations that use XML authoring are more mature than their peers with respect to the adoption of best practices for search and metadata. We examine the metadata capabilities within DITA (and content management systems), discuss two major benefits that can be achieved by using descriptive metadata and taxonomy, and recommend some best practices for getting started with metadata for component-oriented content.

Measuring the right aspects of search performance requires a holistic view of the content, processes, applications and usage patterns that collectively makeup search integration and experience (“SIX”).

Faced with increasingly complex document and information management needs, many organizations are exploring socalled enterprise content management (ECM) suites. However appealing the ECM seems to organizations, its selection and implementation is complex and fraught with challenges.

As social tagging grows increasingly popular on the Web, organizations are curious to see how this trendy Web 2.0 approach can benefit the business world. Social tagging allows users to employ their own language to organize and retrieve content, and encourages social collaboration between peers by making those tags visible to others. Organizations are thus looking to social tagging as a potential solution for increased findability on intranets, news/blog monitoring and collaboration in workgroups. 

Far from being dead, taxonomies are more important than ever. In this article, Seth discusses the renewed importance of taxonomies from a number of perspectives, including the work of leveraging user research for improved experience, various taxonomy structures and their impact on content findability and reuse, and gaining buy-in from diverse groups of stakeholders.

I recently sat in on a very exciting presentation about how Web 2.0 will flatten organizations and unleash knowledge and creativity locked up in employees stifled by rigid hierarchies… Oh wait a minute, wasn’t that the same talk I heard about knowledge management and collaboration back in 1998? So, what is different? What is the same? Are there lessons that can be leveraged from prior experiences with these concepts? 

Now that faceted search interfaces are so prevalent, patterns are emerging that establish good design. If you are considering embarking on a faceted search implementation, here are five important points to consider.

Managing content — whether documents, transactional data or digital assets — is about providing content in context. Users can't find what they need for many reasons: (1) information and systems evolve and tend toward a disordered state; (2) in most organizations governance processes around asset management, search, taxonomy and metadata are immature; (3) content is not "selectively managed. In this interview we discuss a number of issues around content management, taxonomy, tagging, metadata and search, and provide some ideas on how to tackle the chaos to create business value. Access full article...