Enterprise Content Management as SaaS

Software as a service (SaaS) is a software application delivery model where a software vendor develops a web-native software application and hosts and operates (either independently or through a third-party) the application for use by its customers over the Internet.

Two factors are driving the movement to SaaS. One is the significant technical improvements over the last decade. Computer hardware costs like CPUs, storage and network bandwidth have dropped significantly. In the last two years, memory prices have fallen by almost 75% and CPU prices have fallen by 50%, while capabilities like processing speed and capacity have increased significantly.

The second factor is that certain software applications are becoming standardized. Due to these improvements, it is now possible to host a software application for thousands of companies with shared hardware and still provide good performance. Likewise, it is practical to accommodate the business process needs of thousands of companies using a single copy of software without having to re-write the software code for each customer.

As more software is being delivered as a service, business users now have greater control over the destiny of their business process improvement efforts. And while many SaaS projects require little from the IT department, IT is increasingly feeling the need to get involved to ensure that integration, security and compliance requirements are met. IT is now taking a more consultative role and acting as a liaison between business and vendor.

Why SaaS is Ideal for ECM?

An enterprise content management (ECM) solution has many components that need to be assembled even for the simplest of projects. Below is list of common ECM related technologies that frequently have to be integrated:

• Search
• Email management
• eForms
• Workflow
• Records management
• OCR
• Fax management
• Access control
• Reporting
• Electronic signature
• Viewing and mark-up
• Version control

In addition to the above, ECM projects require hardware and software like a database server, web server, application server for integration, writing integration code and a plan to maintain all of this and a plan for regular backup. In addition to the ease of implementation, ECM benefits from the SaaS delivery model because a lot of flexibility can be delivered via configuration instead of customization.

On-premise software gets customized very heavily and typically most of the features are not used. The customization is done by expensive staff that has to write and maintain software code. When any component of the solution is upgraded, the code has to be rewritten, making it very expensive to maintain. By contrast, SaaS configuration works like Lego blocks. Most critical business needs can be accommodated although the system is not "infinitely" customizable.

In the context of ECM, this means having capabilities like configurable search, line-of-business users can decide how much importance should be given to document properties like name, the keywords of the document and the actual content. Configurability of the user interface means that different users can choose which buttons they see. Configurable workflow allows business operation managers to adapt the workflow to their business processes. Configuration is very similar to building your own Google or Yahoo home page by making point-and-click selections instead of writing complex code. Configuration is much easier and more flexible than customizing code.

SaaS-based ECM also provides pre-built configurable applications for common business processes that are document-heavy. Examples of such processes include:

• Accounts payable automation
• Contract management
• Proposal management
• Logistics/POD
• Mortgage processing
• Field support
• Training
• Legal
• Architecture
• Construction
• Insurance processing
• Engagement management

Benefits of SaaS

Software as a service has inherent advantages that make it attractive for the vast majority of content management applications. These are the benefits of the SaaS model:

1. Democratization of turnkey software: companies of all sizes can now afford the basic applications that were historically only within the reach of very large organizations.

2. Extremely fast deployment: with SaaS you can be up and running in days, not weeks or months like on-premises solutions. And users are quick to adopt SaaS applications, so your time-to-value will be much faster with a SaaS solution. Unlike on-premises software, there is nothing to install and SaaS requires no hardware, no software, no additional network infrastructure and no IT expenses to maintain that infrastructure. All you need is a browser and an Internet connection.

3. Complete solutions: Typically, all needed components of a SaaS solution are pre-integrated. There is no need to pay for additional modules or expensive and time-consuming integration services.

4. Low cost: SaaS is delivered as a pay-as-you-go subscription. Combined with the savings in hardware, administration, and professional services, the total cost of a SaaS implementation is typically less than half of on-premises software.

5. Low risk: SaaS is easy to get out of, by simply choosing not to renew the services agreement at the end of the initial term. Usually, this is a one-year period. Often, SaaS providers (like SpringCM) will give you a free trial period, allowing you to configure your solution and try it before making the purchase commitment.

6. Easy to administer: SaaS solutions are usually administered by someone in the business unit, not by IT staff. And since there is nothing to install, no hardware, and no network management, the administration of a SaaS solution usually consists of simple configuration and user access management.

7. Easy to use: SaaS applications are always built with the mindset of getting users productive as soon as possible. For example, the SpringCM solution has an intuitive Web interface, easy configuration steps and a quick tutorial designed to get users familiar with the system in minutes.

8. Easy to integrate: thanks to robust Web services, SaaS solutions fit nicely into other business applications. Often, the document management and workflow features can be invoked from within the other application, so the users do not have to learn a new system to take advantage of the added capabilities.

9. Easy to buy: SaaS applications are easier to buy. If you were considering a $500K on-premises system, you not only have to sell the project internally and get the budget approved but also write up a detailed RFP with help from IT and think of all the ways you might use the system. Instead, when acquiring a SaaS-based application, you can try it and see if it solves your immediate problems. You can go from thinking about a solution to go-live in as little as a few weeks depending on the complexity of your requirements.

10. Faster innovation: Because SaaS solutions are multi-tenant and easier for the vendor to support and upgrade and because a SaaS vendor can very easily find out if new features will conflict with old ones, SaaS companies typically release newer versions every two to three months.

Limitations of SaaS

Although SaaS works for the vast majority of solution areas, there are a few limitations that you should take into consideration.

1. While SaaS works for common business processes, if the business processes are extremely proprietary and very peculiar to the company, then SaaS may not be the right choice.

2. SaaS can handle large volumes of transactions and data, but if your application requires constant transfer of huge volumes of data (terabytes) over the Internet with an expectation of real-time processing, then SaaS may not be the best option.

3. SaaS may not be the right option for your business if your security requirements are such that only your internal IT department can meet them.

4. Although the SaaS model has been in operation for over a decade with millions of users, there are those who prefer the predominant computing model, which is still on-premises software.

Questions to Ask a Vendor

Not all SaaS providers are equal in their ability to satisfy your needs. Not only are there major differences in solution functionality, but there are also differences in each vendor’s ability to deliver and support the type of solution you need. 

Here are a few questions that any qualified SaaS vendor should be able to answer.

1. Are you a true SaaS provider, or simply a "hosted" or "ASP" solution? All genuine SaaS solutions are multi-tenant and this is what brings you many of the benefits of a SaaS solution. A truly multi-tenant SaaS provider can demonstrate that all customers are running the same version of the software using shared hardware.

2. What has been your average outage time over the past 12 months? The answer should be way less than 1%. For example, SpringCM provides availability of 99.7% for its solution.

3. How often is new software released? Because of the flexibility and effectiveness of the SaaS architecture, you should expect new product releases much more frequently than with the typical 12-18 month cycle of on-premises software vendors.

4. Is there lag time between a new release and your applying it? If the answer is yes, this is a sign that you may be dealing with a hosted or ASP provider, not a true SaaS. With SaaS, when a new release is available, everyone has immediate access to the new functionality.

5. How much domain experience do you have as a SaaS provider? This question is very important because, whenever possible, you want to deal with a company that really knows how to deliver SaaS solutions, not one who jumped on the bandwagon to take advantage of the rapid growth in the industry.

6. Did you start as a SaaS company? Many of the so-called SaaS vendors are really on-premises software companies who have re-purposed their software code to fit into an on-demand (hosted) model. Such systems do have advantages, but they also include many of the disadvantages of on-premises solutions.

7. Can I try the software for free? Every SaaS provider worth its salt will give you access to its solution for a trial period. This gives you a feel for how the solution will work for you day-to-day. One important consideration is to make sure that any of the content capture, configuration and workflows will be fully available to you as you transition from a trial to a full account.

8. How much customization is required to make the solution usable? The best answer is "none," since SaaS solutions use the concept of "configuration" instead of customization. As we covered earlier, configuration offers many of the same advantages as customization but does not require the significant time and expense.

9. How does your application scale? Certain applications run fine when there are 10 users or 100 users but cannot accommodate larger user populations. Ask your SaaS provider if their application can scale across thousands of companies, not just thousands of users.

10. How will you keep my content and data safe? There is a natural reluctance to trust the maintenance of valuable content (both documents and data) outside the corporate firewall. Good SaaS companies host in facilities that have sophisticated power backup, earthquake/flood-resistant construction, bio-metric security, SAS 70 Type certification and bulletproof construction. Although your IT department may not be able to afford such a facility, the SaaS vendor can do so because the cost gets spread over hundreds or thousands of customers.

SharePoint Implementations

There are a few main considerations for governance and metrics in SharePoint implementations:

• metrics to gauge maturity, success, adoption, compliance and progress in your program;
• mechanisms for managing content across the full lifecycle including compliance with standards for tagging;
• governance processes and policies to control site and content ownership.

Metrics

Metrics will give you measures of success, adoption, compliance and progress. What is measured can be managed. When no objective ways have been put in place to measure how well a program is functioning, it is not possible to correct or improve it. It is essential to have a way of monitoring how things are going so changes can be made to serve the needs of the program.

Maturity

The first metric to consider is overall maturity and capability. Maturity in the SharePoint space can be considered across multiple dimensions, from the level of intentionality and structure of a process to the formal presence and level of sophistication of governing bodies. 

Consider a maturity model in which each dimension is mapped with a set of capabilities and characteristics that indicate a general level of maturity. Based on the overall characteristics of those processes (reflected in the rating for each dimension), the maturity of the organization’s SharePoint implementation can be measured at the start of a program and throughout its life. As processes are installed, the maturity is increased. That snapshot in time is a good indicator of the state of the program and can be used as a general measure of success.

Because SharePoint success is indicated by the ability to locate information (“findability”) and findability is the result of a combination of factors, it is possible to describe those factors in terms of existing practices and processes as well as benchmark the level of functionality or activity (for example, content quality measures, the presence of a process or the measure of the effectiveness of that process). One governance maturity measure regards whether there are any governing bodies or policies in place. Another might be the participation levels in governance meetings.

Use cases and usability

A second important measure of value includes overall usability based on use cases for specific classes of users. Use cases should be part of every content and information program, and there should be a library to access for testing each use case. Use cases are tasks that are part of day-to-day work processes and support specific business outcomes. At the start of the program, assessing the ability of users to complete their job tasks, which requires the ability to locate content, provides a practical baseline score to compare with later interventions.

User satisfaction is a subjective measure of acceptance. Although subjective, if measured in the same way, before an intervention or redesign and then after the intervention. The results will show a comparative improvement or decrease in perceived usability. The perception can be impacted by more than design. Training and socialization can have a large impact on user satisfaction.

Adoption

One simple metric for adoption is the volume of e-mail containing attachments as compared with those containing links. As users post their files on SharePoint and send links within messages rather than e-mailing attachments, they are clearly demonstrating use of the system. Looking at that metric as a baseline and then periodically on a department-by-department basis as well as company-wide provides a valuable information regarding SharePoint adoption.

Other adoption metrics include the number of collaboration spaces or sites that are set up and actively managed, the numbers of documents uploaded or downloaded, the degree of completeness of metadata, the accuracy of tagging, and the number of documents being reviewed based on defined lifecycles.

It is important to have self-paced tutorials regarding your particular environment and to monitor the number of people who have completed this kind of training. Participation in “lunch-and-learns,” webinars or conference calls on the use of the environment are other engagement metrics that can be tracked.

Socialization includes a narrative of success through sharing stories about the value of knowledge contained in knowledgebases, problems being solved and collaboration that leads to new sales or cost savings. Publicizing new functionality along with examples showing how that functionality can be used in day-to-day work processes will help people see the positive aspects of the program and help to overcome inevitable challenges with any new deployment. Those successes need to be communicated through different mechanisms and by emphasizing themes appropriate to the audience and process. An application for executives may not resonate with line-of-business users.

Alignment with business outcomes

A more challenging but also more powerful approach to metrics is to link the SharePoint functionality to a business process that can be impacted and that can be measured. One example is a proposal process that enables salespeople to sell more when they are able to turn proposals around more quickly, allowing more selling time or reduced cost of highly compensated subject matter experts. Employee self-service knowledgebases can be linked to help desk call volume. Those metrics are more challenging because they require the development of a model that predicts the impact of one action on another or at least an understanding that causality is involved, but they also can be a strong indication of success.

Tagging processes

The amount of content that is correctly tagged provides a useful measure of adoption and compliance. How do you know if content is tagged correctly? Taking a representative sample of content and checking whether tagging is aligned with the intent of the content publishing design will detect inconsistencies or errors in tagging. 

The percentage of content that is tagged at all is an indicator. One organization left a default value that did not apply to any content. The first term in the dropdown was "lark". If users left that value in, they were not paying attention and the quality of tagging was impacted. Measuring the percentage tagged with "lark" allowed for an inverse indicator. When the "lark" index declined, the quality increased. The quality of content can also be measured with crowd-sourced feedback. Up-voting or down-voting content can trigger workflows for review or boosting in ranking.

Change triggers

Metrics tell the organization something: whether something is working or not working. But what action is triggered? A metrics program has to lead to action: a course correction to improve performance. The change cycle can be characterized by conducting interaction analysis to measure the pathway through content and how it is used (such as impressions or reading time). 

If users exit after opening a document, that exit could be because they found their answer or because the content was not relevant. It is only by looking at the next interaction (another search, for example, or a long period of reading the document) can it be determined whether the content was high value or whether it did not provide an answer. Based on this analysis, it is possible to identify a remediation step (create missing content or fix a usability issue, etc.).

Search interactions also provide clues for action. When top searches return no content, the wrong content or too much content, the root cause can be addressed with an appropriate action (improve tagging, create content, tune the ranking algorithm or search experience with best bets, auto-complete, thesaurus entries, etc.).

By reviewing and troubleshooting content interaction metrics, patterns may emerge that point to problems with the publishing process or compliance with tagging guidelines.

Content processes and governance policies

SharePoint governance consists of decision-making bodies and decision-making mechanisms for developing and complying with rules and policies around SharePoint installations. This is the glue that holds SharePoint deployments together. Mechanisms for creating a new team sites and collaboration spaces need to go through a process of review to ensure that redundant sites are not created. Abandoned sites need to be retired or archived. Content needs to be owned and reviewed for relevance. If content is not owned and abandoned sites not actively removed, the installation becomes more and more cluttered.

Without clear guidelines for how and where to post content and ways to apply metadata tags, users will tend to post content haphazardly, and eventually libraries will be cluttered with junk. Over time, people will dump content in SharePoint because they are told they need to post it for sharing but no one will know how to find valuable content. Site administrators must understand the rules of deployment and control how users are utilizing SharePoint to prevent sprawl and keep the system from becoming cluttered with poorly organized content.

Among the chief goals of governance is to prevent SharePoint from becoming a dumping ground by segmenting collaboration spaces from content to be reused and enforcing standards for curation and tagging.

Consider that every element of SharePoint has a lifecycle and that this lifecycle has to be managed. Those elements range from design components that are created based on the needs of users and rigorous use cases (including taxonomies, metadata structures, content models, library design, site structures and navigational models), to the sites themselves that are created according to a policy and process and disposed of at the end of their life, to the content within sites that needs to be vetted, edited and approved for broad consumption. All of those are managed through policies, intentional decision-making and compliance mechanisms developed by a governance group.

SharePoint governance needs to be a part of the overall information governance program of the enterprise. It is part of content and data governance with particular nuances based on how the technology functions. In fact, many tools are designed into the core functionality of SharePoint to help with governance operationalization. The overarching principle is to consider the audience and the breadth of audience the content is designed to reach.

One analogy is that of an office structure. The lobby, which has a wide audience, limits what can be displayed. The lobby environment is visible to all, so it needs to be managed rigorously. But walking into a cubicle in the office building will reveal the personality of its inhabitant: personal photos, papers on the desk, individual and idiosyncratic organizing principles. A messy desk perhaps. A shared work area might be someplace between the orderliness of the lobby and the messiness of the individual workspace.

Those gradations are the local, personal and departmental level spans of control analogously managed in SharePoint. Information that has an enterprise span needs to be carefully managed and controlled. In a collaboration space, things can be a little more chaotic. In fact, the one thing to keep in mind is that content has a different value depending on the context and span and will increase in value as it is edited, vetted, tagged and organized for specific audiences and processes.

Segment the high-value content by promoting it from a collaboration space to a shared location and apply the tags that will tell the organization that it is important. Separate the wheat from the chaff. Manage high-value content and differentiate it from interim deliverables and draft work in process. Throw away the junk or take it out of the search results so they are not cluttered with low-value information.

Many people complain that they can’t find their content in SharePoint and they want search to work like Google. The answer is to put the same work into managing and processing content as search engine optimization departments do for web content, and the search engine will return the results that you are looking for.

SharePoint requires an intentional approach to design, deployment, socialization, maintenance and ongoing decision-making. The rules are simple: there is no magic. They need to be applied consistently and intentionally to get the most from the technology.

SharePoint Beyond the Firewall: Put Your Content to Work

SharePoint is undoubtedly one of the most important and widespread enterprise productivity tools, used by an estimated 67% of medium-to-large organizations, according to research firm AIIM. Many companies are heavily invested in SharePoint, and for good reason: it’s a highly adaptable solution that can be effective for content management and file sharing across a range of use cases. But SharePoint does have its limitations.

Where SharePoint struggles is when content needs to be securely shared outside the firewall, and consumed by remote workers, partners, or suppliers. Extending SharePoint for external needs introduces IT challenges, including content protection and security, user governance and support, and initial and on-going infrastructure and license costs.

This creates a challenge for organizations with sizable SharePoint investments and large populations of users. Rather than replacing SharePoint, it’s more practical to build on existing investments to provide secure, external collaboration and document sharing, without adding unnecessary complexity and cost to IT infrastructure, or putting sensitive or regulated content at risk.

According to AIIM, security and control are the top concerns of SharePoint administrators since it is routinely used to manage highly sensitive and regulated content: 51% of users share financial documents, 48% legal and contractual documents, and 36% board of directors and executive communications.

Leverage Your SharePoint Investment for External Document Sharing

As companies start sharing sensitive documents with collaboration partners, they need to maintain tight access control. SharePoint control over document access is not as well defined as many large enterprises might want. Attributes to consider for secure, seamless content sharing that complements your SharePoint investment include:

• Secure, policy-based document-sharing control.
• Agile response, and easy set-up and adoption.
• Low, up-front investment.
• Ability to leverage existing systems without adding new complexity.
• Provisioning and support for a community of external users.
• Cloud-based solutions are now meeting all of these demands to unburden the in-house IT infrastructure, but still allow internal users to continue using the familiar SharePoint-based platform and applications, with little or no change or added overhead.

Maintaining Control Over the Content Lifecycle

Externalizing SharePoint is one thing. Having control over the content once it’s left the firewall is another. For comprehensive control, you’ll want to consider tools with the following:

• Access rights for external partners. Given the large number of potential collaboration partners and the number of documents to share, you’ll need granular and dynamic document administration.
• Encryption. As soon as SharePoint documents pass beyond a firewall, they need to be encrypted and remain encrypted both as they move over the internet and while they are at rest within the external document sharing application. Seamless encryption means hackers can’t access the data within a document at any stage.
• Virus protection. Avoid picking up file-based viruses that could penetrate your network while content is in motion, and shared and accessed from various geolocations and devices.
• Information Rights Management (IRM). IRM services let IT departments provide secure document access to any device—PC, smartphone, tablet—while dynamically managing content rights even after a document has been distributed. Such systems have the ability to let users view without downloading documents, and prevent printing or screen capture. Ideally, IRM should be plug-in free so that it is frictionless to users. Finally, digital watermarking identifies a document as confidential and also embeds in the document the name of the person doing the download. This helps ensure that the user will be extra careful not to lose or leak the document.
• Monitoring and auditing. Know which people are looking at what documents, for how long, and create audit reports from this information. This verifies compliance with data privacy and other relevant regulations, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.

These security, compliance, and information governance capabilities should be accessible without requiring additional SharePoint software customization, or introducing a new user interface.

Galaxy Consulting has over 15 years experience in SharePoint implementations and management. Please contact us for a free consultation.

Improving User Adoption

Many organizations that deployed a content management system have gone through phases of deployment, development and upgrades without leveraging common practices around information architecture and usability. 

In some cases, a well-intentioned IT department holds user requirements sessions, only to implement the technical features without truly understanding core principles of usability. In other situations, a particular process will be enabled and user tested with good design principles but employing the “build it and they will come” deployment plan. 

In other words, let users just start using the system. In rare cases, organizations do get those elements right but then after the deployment is completed, there is no organizational design to maintain the system, continue to train users, and update design and functionality as user needs change.

The reasons for a lack of user acceptance break down into numerous categories ranging from lack of user involvement in the development process to inadequate content.

For these reasons, many users of content management systems are frustrated and long for a well-designed, maintained, highly functional system with well-organized information and search that gives them what they need when they need it. They blame the technology rather than the way that technology has been configured and managed.

The challenge is that everyone wants everything to be user friendly and intuitive. Users want tools that help them do their jobs without requiring that they jump through hoops to upload and access information. If the system is awkward and poorly designed, users do not want to spend the time to learn how to get the most from the system. However, even when the tools are sophisticated and well designed, fluency is still necessary to leverage them effectively.

When adoption is poor, it is difficult for an organization to get the majority of users needed to achieve the good collaboration, where the knowledge is producing real value and triggering successful cycles of participation and contribution. So moving to a new platform, rather than solving core issues, seems to be the preferred approach that many organizations take, though that will lead to a recurrence of the core challenges. It is best to get to the root of the problems and address them.

Even with a perfectly configured system and design that is user tested, validated, refined, tested some more and validated again, there is no guarantee that the system will be adopted and embraced. Taking an intentional approach to the system requirements and design will go a long way toward increasing the likelihood of user adoption. User adoption requires a thoughtful, intentional approach to a number of areas.

Here are some ways to maximize the chances for success of user adoption.

In many cases, users don’t have a voice in the design decisions and are not sufficiently kept in the loop through ongoing communications from leadership. Involve users in the development process. Socialization should be part of a project from the beginning and continue throughout the life of the project.

Perform user acceptance testing. It is very important to give users a chance to test the system before asking them to use it.

Create realistic expectations for how intuitive the system can be. No matter how user friendly the system is, it may never be completely intuitive to all. The nature of work processes and the information to support those processes can be complex. 

The nature of the task might require understanding terminology that is not part of everyone’s vocabulary. If the job itself requires training and skill development, the information may also require a degree of socialization. Some systems can be very complex.

Allow users time to develop a mental model. When learning to use an application of any sort, users need time to grasp the big picture and become fluent in the details. This means that it would be better to show users the details over time as opposed to in a one-shot training. Doing that at the scale of any enterprise requires planning and development of just-in-time learning that people can move through to get the big picture and can access in the context of their work processes. 

Provide users with the consistency they need. A consistent taxonomy and information architecture will help improve usability in the first place but also increase the learnability of the system. Once users learn about one part of an information structure, they can more quickly understand and internalize other areas if the same terminology is used.

Update functionality often enough to keep up with changes in user requirements. No information environment is static, so ongoing feedback that drives new functionality and capabilities is required. It is important to keep users updated on features in each new release. 

Without updates to functionality, continued testing and adjustments, the delta between what users need and what the application provides will get larger and lead to greater dissatisfaction.

Provide high-quality content. A system deployment should begin with value for the user. That means populating repositories with curated, tagged quality content that they will find valuable. Too often there is a “lift-and-load” migration in which poorly organized content filled with redundant, outdated and trivial content is presented to the user in a new environment. No matter how good the design is, the content will not be viable if it does not meet the users’ work requirements, and it will not be accessible if it is not tagged and organized.

User acceptance of a system will be improved when the right information is available for the tasks and the right processes are reflected in the application.

Offer users an easy way to contribute content. Another barrier to acceptance is a difficult process for uploading content. Too many metadata fields, long lists of choices or fields that don’t apply to the content will keep people from content uploading. The process for uploading content should be as painless as possible. Frequently the best answer is machine-assisted tagging where an auto-classifier tuned to the content and taxonomies appropriate for the process presents the user with suggested values, and the user either accepts them or selects a different value.

Establish a robust governance process. A content management system lives in an ecosystem that is continually changing. There are multiple upstream and downstream processes, and resources need to be allocated with a view to the larger picture of the information environment. 

The system owners and sponsors must make decisions in that context as well as within the context of the system environment. Therefore, they should have a seat at the table in the enterprise information governance decisions and the institution of controls, standards and compliance processes all the way down to the level of content repositories. If sites and content do not have ownership, they will quickly become outdated. If policy decisions are made without compliance mechanisms, they will not be implemented.

Users don’t hate content management systems. They hate poorly designed applications. In reality what they don’t like is the lack of functionality, the poorly constructed taxonomies, confusing navigation, endless fields to fill out and poor-quality content. With the correct approach to design and deployment and with adequate training and ongoing updates, people like and in many cases like a content management system. It helps them do their jobs, makes tasks easier to accomplish, improves efficiency and lets workers redirect their efforts to the more challenging and fulfilling parts of their jobs.

Electronic Signature and Content Management

 At this time of digital transformation, it is difficult to talk about managing content management without talking about using electronic signatures. E-signatures make it possible to create digital workflows, help to maximize ROI from content management, and enhance productivity, compliance, security, and analytics.

Quite a few content management tools include e-signature implementation such as SharePoint, Box, and other content management systems (CMS).

Electronic signatures, digital business, and content management are interdependent. Without e-signature capability, documents continue to be printed for signing, then photocopied, shipped, corrected, imaged back into the system, archived, and shredded. 90% of the time and cost of labor dedicated to managing paper can be saved by using e-signatures. There are also other benefits of using e-signatures such as faster decision making, shorter sales cycles, and improved customer experience.

In the last few years, financial services, insurance, healthcare, and government have embraced digital transformation. A major driver is compliance and risk. Many organizations are concerned about legal risk or they struggle with the constantly changing regulatory landscape in their industries, in part because manual processing is very prone to errors.

Rather than react to regulatory pressure with additional people, manual controls, and process complexity, organizations that adopt e-signatures have these benefits:

• Leverage workflow rules to execute transactions correctly and consistently.
• Capture a full audit trail and electronic evidence.
• Minimize exposure to risk due to misplaced or lost documents.
• Make the process of e-discovery easier, more reliable, and less expensive.
• Demonstrate compliance and reduce legal risk through the ability to playback the exact process that was used to capture signatures.

Let's look at this example: the VP of compliance is asking for transaction records from 5 years ago. How helpful would it be to quickly produce all signed records, in good order and replay the entire web-based signing process for context.

According to Forrester Research, organizations and customers now recognize that e-signature is an important enabler of digital business.

Today, the business is digital and e-signature is a foundational technology enabling end-to-end digitization. Let's look at this example: a customer filled out an insurance application. When the package is ready to be signed by the customer, traditionally it would revert to paper. Instead, documents are handed off to the electronic signature solution. This solution would manage every aspect of the e-sign process, including notifying and authenticating signers, presenting documents for review, capturing intent, securing documents, collecting evidence, etc.

Once e-signed, the documents can be downloaded in PDF format and stored in any archiving system. The e-signature audit trail and the security travels seamlessly with the document, ensuring the record can be verified independently or the e-signature service.

A document centric approach to embedding e-signatures within signed records allows for greater portability and easier long term storage in an CMS solution. Additional metadata related to the e-sign transaction can be handed off to the CMS as well for analytics purpose.

Adopting electronic signatures is quick and easy and does require IT or programming resources. Companies who are looking for a more integrated automated workflow, e-signature plugins for SharePoint, Salesforce, Box are available.

Organizations can quickly and easily enhance approval workflows with a more robust e-signature solution than a checkbox on an approval routing sheet, while also automating archival.

Headless CMS - Contentful

In the last post, we have described headless CMS. Headless CMS architecture is rising in popularity in the development world. 

This model allows breakthrough user experiences, gives developers the great flexibility to innovate, and helps site owners future-proof their builds by allowing them to refresh the design without re-implementing the whole CMS.

One of headless CMS is Contentful. Contentful platform lets you create, manage and distribute content to any platform. It gives you total freedom to create your own content model so you can decide which content you want to manage. 

With an uncluttered user interface, Contentful is an efficient tool for creating and managing your content online, either alone or in team. You can assign custom roles and permissions to team members, add validations depending on the kind of content you have to insert and add media such as images, documents, sounds or video.

Contentful has a three-step process. First, you define a content model which is independent from any presentation layer that defines what kind of content you want to manage. In a second step, you and other internal or external editors can manage all of the content in easy-to-use and interactive editing interface. In the third step, the content is served in a presentation-independent way.

Being presentation-layer agnostic is one of the strengths of Contentful because you will be able to reuse your content across any platform.

To create a web site, you will either have to code it yourself and load content from Contentful API or work with someone who can develop the web site for you. Contentful is the platform where you can update the content of your web site, a mobile app or any other platform that displays content.

Contentful runs on all browsers. Contentful offers the most powerful REST APIs and the only enterprise-grade in-production GraphQL API.

There are three steps you'll have to take in order to deliver content from Contentful to your apps and websites.

1. Create your Content Model

The Content Model is the first step to structuring your content properly. It consists of creating content types that will accept only certain types of data for entry. For example, when creating an interactive quiz, you will need to add something that is a question, multiple answers, an indicator of the correct answer and potentially an image. This can be set up in the content model, so you can then easily just add as many "Questions" to your Quiz as you want.

2. Add Entries and Assets

Entries refer to the content itself. Entries could be blog posts, product features or ingredients of a recipe or any other content. These entries will depend on your previously created content model. In this phase you can also add assets like images, sounds, videos and many other files.

3. Deliver your content with our API

The delivery part of the content may or may not be left only to developers. In this step you set up API Keys that will determine which content will go to which platform. After the delivery is set up correctly, your content is then available for consumption as soon as you hit the “Publish” button.

We have over 18 years experience with numerous CMS, so we can help you with Contentful as well. Call us today for a free, no obligation consultation.

Headless CMS vs Decoupled CMS

A headless content management system, or headless CMS, is a back-end only content management system (CMS) built as a content repository that makes content accessible via a RESTful API for display on any device.

The term “headless” comes from the concept of chopping the “head” which is the front end, i.e. the web site off the “body” (the back end, i.e. the content repository).

Whereas a traditional CMS typically combines the content and presentation layers of a web site, a headless CMS is just the content component which focuses entirely on the administrative interface for content creators, the facilitation of content workflows and collaboration, and the organization of content into taxonomies.

It doesn’t include presentation layers, templates, site structure, or design, but rather stores its content in pure format and provides access to other components (e.g. delivery front ends, analytics tools, etc.) through stateless or loosely coupled APIs.

The headless CMS concept is one born of the demands of the digital era and a business’s need to focus on engaging customers with personalized content via multiple channels at all stages of the customer journey. As the content in a headless CMS is considered “pure” (because it has no presentation layer attached) just one instance of it can be used for display on any device; web site, mobile, tablet, smart watches, etc.

There is some confusion around what makes a headless CMS truly “headless”, as vendors use the term somewhat loosely to label their decoupled or hybrid CMS systems. But a true headless CMS is one that was built from the ground up to be API-first, not a full monolith CMS with APIs attached afterwards.

Cloud-first headless CMSs are those that were also built with a multi-tenant cloud model at their core and whose vendor promotes Software as a Service (Saas), promising high availability, scalability, and full management of security, upgrades, and hot fixes, etc. on behalf of clients.

Coupled CMS vs. Headless CMS

Most traditional (monolithic) CMS systems are “coupled”, meaning that the content management application (CMA) and the content delivery application (CDA) come together in a single application, making back-end user tools, content editing and taxonomy, web site design, and templates inseparable.

Coupled systems are useful for blogs and basic web sites as everything can be managed in one place. But this means that the CMS code is tightly connected to any custom code and templates, which means developers have to spend more time on installations, customization, upgrades, hot fixes, etc. and they cannot easily move their code to another CMS.

There is a lot of confusion around the differences between a decoupled CMS and a headless one because they have a lot in common.

A decoupled CMS separates the CMA and CDA environments, typically with content being created behind the firewall and then being synchronized and pushed to the delivery environment.

The main difference between a decoupled CMS and a headless CMS is that the decoupled architecture is active. It prepares content for presentation and then pushes it into the delivery environment, whereas a headless CMS is reactive. It sits idly until a request is sent for content.

Decoupled architecture allows for easier scalability and provides better security than coupled architecture, but it does not provide the same support for omni-channel delivery. Plus, there are multiple environments to manage, this increasing infrastructure and maintenance costs.

Advantages of Headless CMS

• Omnichannel readiness: the content created in a headless CMS is “pure” and can be re-purposed across multiple channels, including web site, mobile applications, digital assistant, virtual reality, smart watches, etc., in other words, anywhere and at any time through the customer journey.
• Low operating costs: headless CMSs are usually cheaper to install and run than their monolith counterparts, especially as they are typically built on a cloud model where multi-tenant options keep the running costs low.
• Reduces time to market: a headless CMS promotes an agile way of working because content creators and developers can work simultaneously, and projects can be finished faster.
• Easy to use: traditional CMSs tend to be cumbersome and complex as vendors attempt to offer every available feature in one box. Headless systems focus on content management, keeping things simple for those who use it on a daily basis. The entire user experience can usually be managed from within one back end.
• Flexibility: content editors can work in whichever headless CMS they like and developers can build any kind of front end they want in their preferred language (e.g. Ruby, PHP, Java, or Swift) and then simply integrate the two via APIs (like JSON or XML) over RESTful communication. This allows for polyglot programming where multiple programming paradigms can be used to deliver content to multiple channels, and enables a company to benefit from the latest developments in language frameworks, promoting a micro-services architecture.
• Cloud Scalability: the content purity and stateless APIs of headless CMSs enable high scalability, especially as the architecture fully leverages the elasticity of a cloud platform.
• System Security: since the content is typically provided through a high-performance Content Delivery Network (rather than directly from the database), the risk of distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDOS) is reduced.
• Marketing empowerment: marketers may end up relying more on developers in certain scenarios, e.g. creating a landing page with custom layout.

Disadvantages of Headless CMS

• Multiple services: managing multiple systems can be challenging and a team’s knowledge base must cover them all.
• No channel-specific support: since pure headless CMSs don’t deal with the presentation layer, developers may have to create some functionality, such as web site navigation.
• Content organization: as pure headless CMSs do not typically provide the concept of pages and web site maps, content editors need to adapt to the fact that content is organized in its pure form, independently on the web site or other channel.

Headless CMS architecture is rising in popularity in the development world. This model allows breakthrough user experiences, gives developers the great flexibility to innovate, and helps site owners future-proof their builds by allowing them to refresh the design without re-implementing the whole CMS.

In the following posts, we will look more into headless CMS and will describe specific headless CMS. Stay tuned.

Yammer and SharePoint

Enterprise social network vendor Yammer was a large and fast growing player when Microsoft acquired it in late 2012. Yammer has users in more than 150 countries, and the interface is localized into more than 20 languages.

At its core, Yammer is a micro-blogging service for employees to provide short status updates. Whereas Twitter asks, “What’s happening?” Yammer asks, “What are you working on?”

Over the years, Yammer’s functional services have expanded a bit to include the ability to express praise for co-workers, create polls, share documents and provision smaller discussion groups. In practice, however, some of those supplementary services aren’t as rich or well-integrated into SharePoint as you might find in competing products.

And you can find a lot of competing products: from collaboration suites that offer tightly integrated social networking services to supplemental “social layer” offerings that compete directly with Yammer.

For this reason, it would be good to ask this question: Is Yammer truly the best social layer for your enterprise?

When Microsoft acquired Yammer shortly before releasing SharePoint 2013, the deal sent shock waves through the marketplace. Soon Microsoft started recommending that you hide SharePoint’s native social services in SharePoint and use Yammer instead.

Microsoft now promotes Yammer as a social layer over all your Microsoft systems, especially Office 365. Yammer usage can explode within an enterprise that heretofore offered no micro-blogging services, let alone any enterprise social network. People happily check in and often find new or long-lost colleagues in the first few days and weeks.

Yammer boasts a huge customer community. Customers get access to the quite sizable Yammer Community Network, where licensees share their successes, problems, questions and tips with the community as a whole. A small but growing apps marketplace rounds out the picture of a vibrant ecosystem around Yammer.

Smaller departments use Yammer to stay in touch, but enterprise-wide conversations typically decrease. Usage also drops off when employees struggle to place the service within the regular flow of their daily work. Yammer becomes yet another place you have to go, rather than a service you exploit as part of your regular workflow.

In a mobile environment, Yammer and SharePoint usage entails at least two separate native clients.

Yammer has key application: social questions and answers. When a user starts to type a question, Yammer uses a real-time search to auto-suggest already asked questions. That is useful and helps to eliminate duplication in content.

However, there are no ratings for answers and the original questioner cannot declare an authoritative answer. Search is not really ideal, so as answers build, they become harder to leverage, especially given the scarcity of curation services. Yammer works less for knowledge management and more for really simple, quick responses to simple questions.

Another Yammer key social application: communities of practice. Groups are either public or private. You might also have separate groups in Exchange and SharePoint (via Delve), as well as Communities in SharePoint.

There is single sign-on to Yammer with Office 365.

Larger enterprises find Yammer better suited as a supplement to formal collaboration and social networking efforts rather than as the center. Its simplistic handling of files and limited search facilities limit Yammer’s ability to serve as much more than a simple micro-blogging service.

If you are looking for pure micro-blogging services to communicate across your enterprise and are not looking for ready-to-use applications tailored for specific goals and processes, Yammer offers an obvious alternative to consider, especially for those whose SharePoint plans rest primarily on the Office 365 edition.

Galaxy Consulting has experience with all versions of SharePoint and with Yammer. Please contact us today for a free consultation.

What is New in SharePoint 2016?

Microsoft releases a new version of SharePoint every three years. SharePoint 2016 public Beta version is available. The full version is expected in Spring 2016. Here is what is new in SharePoint 2016 version.

SharePoint 2016’s main goal is to bring the best of Office 365 Cloud technology to on-premises solutions. In this truly effective Hybrid model, organizations will be able to have the best of the Cloud, whilst keeping all their important information and data stored on-premises.

SharePoint Server 2016 has been designed to reduce the emphasis on IT and streamline administrative tasks, so that IT professionals can concentrate on core competencies and mitigate costs. Tasks that may have taken hours to complete in the past have become simple and efficient processes that allow IT to focus less on day-to-day management and more on innovation.

Main Focus

User Experiences

• Mobile experiences
• Personalized insights
• People-centric file storage and collaboration

Infrastructure

• Improved performance and reliability
• Hybrid cloud with global reach
• Support and monitoring tools

Compliance

• New data protection and monitoring tools
• Improved reporting and analytics
• Trusted platform

MinRoles

You can now install just the role that you want on particular SharePoint 2016 servers. This will only install what’s required there, and it will make sure that all servers that belong to each role are compliant. You will also be able to convert servers to run new roles if needed. You can look at the services running on the SharePoint 2016 server and see if they are compliant.

Downtime for Updates

Downtime previously required to update SharePoint servers has been removed.

Mobile and touch

Making decisions faster and keeping in contact are critical capabilities for increasing effectiveness in any organization. The ability for end users to access information while on the go is now a workplace necessity. In addition to a consistent cross-screen experience, SharePoint Server 2016 provides the latest technologies and standards for mobile push and information synchronization. With deep investment in HTML5, SharePoint 2016 provides capabilities that enable device-specific targeting of content. This helps to ensure that users have access to the information they need, regardless of the screen they choose to access it on.

SharePoint 2016 further empowers users by delivering a consistent experience across screens, whether using a browser on the desktop or a mobile device. Through this rich experience, users can easily transition from one client to another without having to sacrifice features.

App Launcher

The App Launcher provides a new navigation experience where all your apps are easily available from the top navigation bar. You can quickly launch your application, browse sites and access your personal files.

Improved Controls

Based on SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business, SharePoint 2016 document libraries inherit the improved control surface for working with content, simplifying the user experience for content creation, sharing and management.

Content Sharing

SharePoint 2016 improves the sharing experience by making it more natural for users to share sites and files. You can just click the "Share" button at the top right corner of every page, enter the names of people you want to share with, and press Enter. The people you just shared with will get an email invitation with a link to the site.

SharePoint still uses powerful concepts like permission levels, groups and inheritance to provide this experience. Part of sharing is also understanding who can see something. If you want to find out who already has access to a particular site, you can go to the "Settings" menu in top right corner, click "Shared with", and you will see the names and pictures of people who have access to the site.

Large File Support

SharePoint 2016 provides support for uploading files up to 10GB.

Compliance Tools

Preventing data loss is non-negotiable, and over-exposure to information can have legal and compliance implications. SharePoint 2016 provides a broad array of features and capabilities designed to make certain that sensitive information remains that way, and to ensure that the right people have access to the right information at the right time.

New In-Place Hold Policy and Document Deletion Centers will allow you to manage time-based, organization-wide in-place hold policies to preserve items in SharePoint and OneDrive for Business for a fixed period of time, in addition to managing policies that can delete documents after a specified period of time.

Cloud Hybrid Search

Cloud hybrid search offers users the ability to seamlessly discover relevant information across on-premises and Office 365 content. With the cloud hybrid search solution, you index all your crawled content, including on-premises content, in your search index in Office 365. When users query your search index in Office 365, they get unified search results from both on-premises and Office 365 cloud services with combined search relevancy ranking.

Cloud hybrid search provides some key benefits to customers of both SharePoint 2013 and early adopters of SharePoint 2016 IT preview, such as:

• the ability to reduce your on-premises search footprint;
• the option to crawl in-market and legacy versions of SharePoint, such as 2007, 2010 and 2013, without requiring upgrade of those versions;
• avoiding the cost of sustaining large indexes, as it is hosted in Office 365.

With this new hybrid configuration, this same experience will also allow users to leverage the power of Office Graph to discover relevant information in Delve, regardless of where information is stored. You will not only be able to get back to all the content you need via Delve, but also discover new information in the new Delve profile experiences and even have the ability to organize content in Boards for easy sharing and access.

You will have to use the Office 365 Search for this to work. If SharePoint 2016 On-Premises users query against their On-Premises Search service, it will continue to give them local results only.

However, once available, this will allow users to fully embrace experiences like Delve in Office 365 and more to come in the future.

OneDrive Redirection

With SharePoint 2016, you can redirect your My Sites to your Office 365 subscription’s OneDrive for Business host. In other words, if a user clicks on OneDrive, he will be redirected to his Office 365 My Site and no longer to his On-Premises. Although you can use document libraries in on-premises SharePoint, Microsoft's larger strategy pushes users to use OneDrive to manage files across all devices. This creates the ability to integrate that OneDrive cloud storage into your on-premises SharePoint.

Follow Sites

Now users can click on “Follow” both On-Premises and on their Office 365 and see them all in one place under the “Sites” app in the App Launcher.

Site Folders

The OneDrive for Business area aims to bring users to one place to help them work with their files regardless of where they are. You will also be able to navigate your Sites and their libraries from there.

Content Management Systems Review - Vasont

Vasont is a component content management system. It has powerful capabilities to store, update, search, and retrieve content. It offers version control, integrated workflows, project management, collaborative review, translation management, and reporting to manage content and business processes.

Vasont provides opportunities for multi-channel publishing and editing in your favorite applications. In addition, it provides an advanced editorial environment built to maximize, manage, and measure content reuse. Unicode support enables multi-language implementations. It also integrates the ability to process content with reusable, event driven business logic as an integral part of the system.

Content is stored in an underlying Oracle database and can be imported, exported, and stored in a variety of formats, including XML, SGML, HTML, as well as other formats that are required as input documents or deliverable formats. This is possible because Vasont can store content separately from any specific tagging structure.

Vasont can be used to store and manage embedded multimedia in structured content. It can also be used to provide a consistent organization and hierarchy to unstructured business documents and other digital assets to provide an overall document management solution. Vasont stores both component-level graphics and unstructured business documents as multimedia components.

Content can be stored at a document or sub-document level and with any content assets such as graphics and references. Vasont has great power at the component level with content organized using XML as input and output. Content can be manipulated and reused at any level of granularity. It is easy to add metadata to existing content and take advantage of the richness that metadata can provide.

Vasont also excels at integrating XML and non-XML traditional document content to provide powerful content applications that can cross departmental or functional boundaries. It is effective in a variety of content scenarios or in combined scenarios, including:

• highly structured XML or SGML content;
• structuring unstructured information assets such as in regulatory environments;
• documents, especially linked to workflow and business logic;
• digital assets such as graphics.

Vasont allows the building of content within and among these content relationships and content scenarios. It provides the power to model information in an organization and share it across different divisions. It stores all types of content in one repository. For example, structured content (i.e. XML, HTML, SGML, text and pointers), multimedia files, unstructured documents (i.e., Word, Excel, PDF files, graphics).

In Vasont Administrator, an administrator can set up the rules of structure and apply any processing options needed to transform, validate, or redirect data. The administrator can store settings for loading, extracting, editing and viewing data; user permissions; and workflow. Administrative responsibility can be assigned to specific Associate Administrators so that multiple groups or departments can share the system and yet control their own setups.

The system includes Vasont Universal Integrator (VUI) for Arbortext Editor, Adobe FrameMaker, JustSystems XMetaL, Quark XML Author, or Microsoft Word. The VUI allows authors to work in a familiar environment and provides a frequently used subset of functionality available in Vasont to simplify the editing process.

Vasont High-Level Application Architecture

Main parts are User Navigator and Content Navigator. Users, their roles and permissions are set up using User Navigator. Content Navigator includes content definitions, content instances, workflow definitions, load and extract views, and business logic which is processing options.

There is Vasont Application Programming Interface (API) for advanced customization and integration. The Vasont API allows for development of:

• custom user interfaces;
• web access to Vasont;
• processing options;
• Daemons.

Vasont Daemon Programs provides background processing routines that automate repetitive tasks such as extracting and loading content. Some customization is required to implement it.

Content Model

The content model and the corresponding rules of structure are defined by the administrator in the Vasont Administrator. These rules usually correspond closely to the structure rules defined in a Document Type Definition (DTD) or schema, but they may differ somewhat or may support multiple DTDs for different outputs. Structures may also be defined in Vasont, independent of a DTD, which is useful when storing documents and other digital assets that may need to be organized in a specific way but are not structured XML or SGML content. The rules of structure help guide you through the editing process by allowing you to place components in only the appropriate locations in a collection.

The Vasont Administrator is also used to define the big picture of how collections will be organized in Vasont, through the creation of content types and collection groups. These categories are represented in a tree or list view in Vasont and have symbols that represent them. This screen of a tree view shows the sequencing and grouping of collections.

The detailed items in a collection are called components. The top component in each tree view is called the primary. Normally a collection will contain many primaries.

Vasont has several classes of components and components can be broken down into smaller chunks, depending on the needs of the organization. The level of chunking is called granularity. It is essential to understand how your Vasont system has been configured so that you can find and edit the relevant material and maximize reuse. Granularity describes the smallest chunk of content stored in Vasont. A high level of granularity means that content is stored in large chunks. For example, you may have Book, Chapter, and Section components with no components defined at a level lower than Section. On the other hand, a very granular setup stores content in very small chunks, typically broken down into paragraph-level components or the equivalent.

Content types are the highest level of organization in Vasont and often serve as major divisions in content. Typically, different content types store content with very different content models, such as content used in different divisions or groups within a corporation. Content types are set up in the Vasont Administrator.

Content in each content type is organized into collections and optional collections groups. Inside of a content type called Publication, a collection such as Manuals is a grouping of similar content that follows the same structure. Depending on how similar the content model is, collections and collection groups within a single content type may share content. Collections in the same content type have similar content models so that content can be reused, moved, and referenced. Content in collections from different content types may be reused if the content types share similar raw components. Pointers are allowed from components in one collection to components in another collection and the collections can be in different content types.

Components are reusable chunks of content defined in the rules of structure for each collection. Although not required to, components usually correspond to elements in a document type definition (DTD). The three types of components are: text, multimedia, and pointer.

Metadata, or information about your content, helps you automate business logic and categorize, locate, filter, and extract content. Traditional types of metadata for topics include index entries that describe content or identifiers that can be used for cross-referencing or mapping context-sensitive help in software applications. Other examples of metadata include labeling content that applies to a particular customer or vendor, whether content should be published to an online help system or a printed manual, or other types of classifications. Metadata can be information that helps perform automated business logic through the use of Vasont Processing Options.

The Vasont Navigator provides an intuitive way to view, edit, reuse, and search content within a collection. Its hierarchical structure represents the organization of content in the system and icons indicate the state of items, including whether they have been included in a log. Components may be opened and closed individually or in groups. Open multiple Navigator windows to drag and drop content easily from one location to another, either within or across collections, rather than scrolling up and down the tree view.

Vasont provides powerful search capabilities to find and reuse content across the entire organization. The search function allows to search for content across collection boundaries. When performing a cross-collection search, you are prompted to select the collections to search and then specify query criteria for the content desired.

The Vasont Content Ownership feature gives a designated user the right to assign ownership to an individual user, or a group of users which provides the exclusive right to alter specified content. The designated user will have the right to assign ownership to a Primary component. Once ownership is assigned, the Vasont CMS then recognizes users who have permission to perform add/delete/change actions to the content, and prevents those who do not have ownership permissions from making changes to the content.

Each and every piece of unique content is stored in the raw material only once. Vasont compares content in the same raw component or in aliased raw components to determine if the content has been used in more than one instance. If the text of the components is the same, it is stored in the raw material as a single component. Vasont's ability to automatically reuse content where it can, without any specific setup, is called implicit reuse.

Depending on your setup, you may explicitly reuse content by referencing or “pointing to” relevant content from different contexts. For example, you may have a collection of shared procedure components that you can point to rather than storing the entire procedure in multiple locations.

Vasont can be used to store and manage embedded multimedia in structured content. It can also be used to provide a consistent organization and hierarchy to unstructured documents and other digital assets to provide an overall document management solution. Vasont stores both component-level graphics and unstructured documents as multimedia components.

Vasont offers a Translation Package that enables users to lower their overall translation costs by minimizing the amount of content that needs to be translated. This is possible because it keeps track of content that has already been translated and insures it is not re-translated. It also measures the amount of savings for each translation project by identifying the percentage of words that have already been translated.

It offers Translation Management that helps users manage projects and sub-projects by tracking dates, vendors, languages and status information. A translation project is a module of content that is being translated into multiple languages (i.e., a topic that is being translated into French, German, and Chinese). The sub-projects are each individual language to which the module is being translated (i.e., the specific French translation is a sub-project of the topic translation project).You can submit your projects for quote or send them for translation directly from Vasont's translation window. This window also provides word counts for each translation project.

Integration with translation vendors can be used with this package for an automated content delivery back and forth from Vasont. The translation package is used to consolidate the status information for all your translation projects in one place so you can keep your projects on schedule and lower your costs.