Core Dump

The Rockley Group have updated their Content Management System Return on Investment calculator. If you're considering implementing a CMS, this is definitely something you should look at.

We first created the CMS ROI Calculator as a companion piece to our book Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy. We’ve recently revamped it to reflect current industry costs and we’ve added a new section on publishing tool costs.

If you are interested in purchasing content management technology, this calculator will assist you in determining costs.

Note that developing a successful business case is about a lot more than running numbers. You need to:

* Analyze your situation
* Determine your pain points
* Identify what those pain points are costing you
* Identify what those pain points are costing you

And of course you need to put these numbers into the context of a business case that will help your organization to understand the benefits of moving towards content managemen

Labels: content management, technical communication

The Content Noob has a long post about content types and why you should be looking at them. If your using a content management system or if your practicing topic-based authoring, you'll need to know about content types, and this article is a good introduction.

A Type is the basis, the foundation, the primary class, or the standard, upon which all instances of something are modeled, and against which all examples of that thing are compared. A Type describes the thingness of a thing, which is recognizable, no matter how much variation is evident among all the things.

For example, mammals are a particular type of animal. Since we were in primary school, we have recognized the fundamental characteristics of that type: Mammals breath air, they bear their young live, they nurse their young, and they have fur of one kind or another. The mammalian type, however, is almost infinite in its diversity throughout the world, and there are even some examples that “violate” the type—like platypuses. Yet as a type, mammals are pretty clear, whether they walk, swim, fly, or climb.

In exactly the same way, every piece of content on your website (for that matter, every piece of content) has a primary type. Quick examples include articles, press releases, product specifications, photographs, graphic charts, customer reviews, blog posts, demonstration videos, support manuals, login splash screens, order forms, et cetera ad nauseum. In one way or another, everything on your site is content, so everything has a content type.

Labels: content management, technical communication

Charles Cooper of the Rockley Group uses a recent experience he had with AT&T (admittedly an easy target) to point out how companies can make better use of their business content - a concept that Ann Rockley calls intelligent content.

The goal of intelligent content is to be able to provide your customers what they want, when and where they want it. Too often, companies take the easy way out and make overly simplistic assumptions about how to deliver. That appears to be what’s happening here. Where possible, it’s always best to ask people what they want, but in this case, it’s obvious that AT&T didn’t pay any attention to that (I told it “Palm Springs, California” and “FedEx”), and simply made a bad assumption based not on what I asked for, but what their computer system told them (hey, it’s a Canadian phone, he must want a Canadian number!).

Don’t do that. Ask your customers what they want. Pay attention to their answers. Test the assumptions you make and then make some more and test those too. Intelligent Content can deliver what your customers need, but ignoring your customers, and delivering what you think they want based on poorly thought out rules and automated tools that blindly follow those rules isn’t the way to make your customers happy.

Labels: content management, technical communication

Content management projects are notoriously difficult to implement. There are a lot of reason's for that: the technology is complex and still somewhat leading edge, it has a major impact on peoples' working habits, and it requires close co-operation between IT and business units. That last point can be a major stumbling block in many organizations.

In the past couple of weeks, I've come across two surveys that suggest while companies need content management and eDiscovery, they can't get out of their own way to implement it. I'm being flip of course, but the fact is both these surveys found that tension between IT and business units gets in the way of project success. This isn't exactly big news. Anyone who has worked in an enterprise setting knows that you need IT's blessing to get most projects approved and there are good reasons for this, but until IT and the business units can find a way past their differences, projects will continue to flounder and the company's bottom line could suffer.

Labels: content management

Ann Rockley is one of the foremost experts in the field of content management. Her book, Managing Enterprise Content, is essential reading for anyone planning a content management project. Tom Johnson has an extensive interview with her in which she talks about "intelligent content".

Is “intelligent content” a new term for our industry? If so, who coined it?

As far as technical communication goes, “intelligent content” is a new term. In some ways, it’s a new term in the broader content industry as well.

I coined the term, just like I did for much of the terminology used today for reuse because there wasn’t a term to describe something that existed, or there were too many terms, and talking about something or trying to explain something was difficult.

Technical communicators are very focused on producing high quality content that meets the customers’ needs, often in a very short period time and often with tools that won’t stretch to meet their needs. Many have begun to move to DITA and some are adopting content management, but when you have the conversation with management about why they should move to DITA and adopt content management, it is very difficult to get across the concepts and the return on investment. DITA is a standard, content management is a tool, but how does it help the organization to do what they need to do better?

Labels: content management

The Fierce Content Management Newsletter (which is new to me, but I may have to start reading it), has put together a list of the top 10 content management sites. Among the sites selected are AIIM, CMS Pros, and the fast Forward blog. I'd have included Scott Abel's The Content Wrangler in the list myself, but perhaps he's too focused on the information architecture aspect of content managment and not the product selection aspect. Still, there are several sites here that I haven't looked at before.

Labels: content management

In this Content Wrangler article, Paul Trotter of Author-it Software makes the case for re-using content at the paragraph level, rather than at topic level.

The obvious question, then, is, “Why not just save the paragraphs and forget the topics?” In other words, go to the paragraph level, but do it in a way in which the user doesn’t have to really do anything. There are a few products that do store content in paragraphs rather than topics. As a result, if a writer was to copy and paste a paragraph into another topic and save it, the system would say, “I’ve got that paragraph; I’m going to reference it.” In this way, content is never duplicated, and all identical content residing in the company’s database is instantly consolidated.

I'm not sure that this approach is viable, unless you have very sophisticated and easy-to-use mechanisms for managing the tens of thousands of paragraphs that you might have in a large documentation project. On a smaller scale, you can do this with structured methodologies like DITA (using conrefs) and some authoring tools (snippets in Flare/Blaze and RoboHelp).

Labels: content management

We don't use Microsoft's SharePoint at work and after reading Tom Johnson's article in which he provides some tips for customizing it, I'm not sure I'd want to use it, although it would probably be better than not having anything at all. Yet despite its failings (some of which are pointed out in Tom's post), there are a lot of Microsoft shops out there who will use it as a matter of course. Tom provides some good advice and if you're using SharePoint, the article is worth a look.

With all these quirks, it’s hard to see why SharePoint is so popular. I suspect it’s popular because none of these serious flaws are apparent until you try to customize your site, and 99% of the time people leave the sites as is.

Even despite these quirks, if you’re company uses SharePoint, you may be stuck with it. Once you get these concepts down, however, SharePoint is a workable solution as a file repository, a website, and a corporate blog. SharePoint does provide a ton of collaborative features with almost no custom coding. Few other platforms can make the same claim.

javascript:void(0)

Labels: content management, Microsoft

Eric Armstrong has written about the higlights of the DITA CMS 2008 conference that was held last week in Santa Clara CA. I went to the 2006 conference in San Francisco and found it a very worthwhile experience. If you want to get an idea of what's going on with DITA and content managment, this is a good article to read.

And for more from the conference, check out the Palimpsest blog from Scriptorium, which also has write-ups on more than a dozen sessions.

Labels: content management, DITA, technical communication

The Palimpsest blog from Scriptorium is carrying a series of posts from the Content Management Strategies 2008 conference in Santa Clara, CA. I went to the 2006 conference in San Francisco and was quite impressed, so I'll be following these posts closely. So far, there are posts covering six different sessions.

Labels: content management, DITA

The term "content management" gets bandied around a lot these days, but I suspect that a lot of people who use it don't really know what it means. For example, it's not document management, as one person I worked with thought. So what is it? According to Paul Trotter, CEO of Author-it Software Corporation, component content management is:

... the category that provides the most benefits for localization and the one we will be focusing on. Rather than storing documents, they store and manage the small re-useable components that are used to assemble documents. Components come in various sizes and types. They can be as small as a single word or as large as many paragraphs, or they may take the form of graphics or hypertext links.

In this article on the Content Wrangler site, Trotter looks at content management, what it is, and why you need it. And if you have more than one writer in your group, or if you write documents for more than one product, or produce documents for more than one audience, you do need it. Trotter's article is one of the best that I've seen on the subject (and I've seen quite a few), and he speaks from experience - Author-it is one of the few writing tools to incorporate a content management system directly into the product.

Labels: content management

Ron Miller talks about a seminar on Joomla!, an open source content management system, that he attended. Many of the attendees were non-technical and unfamiliar with content management. Ron thought about using a metaphor for content managment, and came up with the idea of the publishing process.

If I were presenting, I would have made a comparison to the print world, an area many can understand. In the print world you have a publication with a hierarchy:

* Managing Editor sets policy
* Editors assign articles
* Writers write articles
* Editors edit articles
* The layout artist presents the articles for publication
* The printer prints the publication
* The delivery person delivers the publication to readers

If you think about it, content management does the same thing with a publication, except it does it electronically. If the presenters could have given this big picture yesterday, I think they would have been more successful in helping the non-technical audience members understand conceptually what they were talking about.

It's a good metaphor, but the problem I can see with it is that not many people are familiar with the publication process. I've been trying to come up with an alternative, and about the only one I can think of is based around a kitchen, where document management would be like a pantry, and content management is more like a recipe book. I'm sure there are better metaphors - does anyone want to take a stab at it?

Labels: content management

Eric Armstrong of Sun has published a review of the XDocs CMS (content management system). He likes it quite a bit. It's relatively cheap, as these things go, and it supports DITA. Oddly, for a documentation-related product, the documentation comes up lacking.

Labels: content management, DITA

Most companies who are considering using structured authoring tools, such as DocBook or DITA, are also considering a content management system. DITA has some special requirements that should be considered, and W. Elliot Kimber examines these in a post on his Dr. Macros's XML Rants blog.

So I thought I would try to outline what I think the key DITA non-obvious content management features are that any CMS that claims to provide DITA support should provide. I will not state what should be obvious requirements related to the creation and management of links, the ability to search on content and metadata, and so on.

Labels: content management, DITA, XML

Content Analysis Heuristics presents a framework for doing content analysis, which is probably the most important part, and the hardest, of any content management project.

While you can use heuristics for any kind of website or intranet, regardless of size or content, certain heuristics may be less applicable for some sites. For example, a game site that is designed to encourage users’ exploration may not present bounded horizons. In fact, it would be doing gamers a disservice to let them know the entire game path from the start. So some evaluation is necessary as to whether or not (or how strongly) a specific heuristic should apply to the site you are designing.

Labels: content management

Companies often look to content management systems as a panacea for their information management problems, but make bad decisions, like implementing a CMS without doing upfront analysis of their information. This article, the first of a two-part series from Boxes and Arrows, looks at how companies implement content management and offers some suggestions on how to do it successfully. It's one of better and more succint articles I've seen on the subject.

To implement a successful content management system, we have to go beyond business process and technology and understand how the organization, as an organism, interacts with and uses its content. Four factors are crucial to ensuring an organization can successfully manage its content:

* Who will interact with the system? Who will create and manage the content? Also, who will need to find and use the content later?
* What are we managing? What is mission-critical? What kinds of data do we need to manage?
* How is the system managed? How is the content authored, approved, and managed? How does the CMS enable your business processes?
* How is the content used? Who will use it, when, and why? How does this integrate with your Information Architecture?

Labels: content management, technical communication