Current Trends in Content and Knowledge Management

Current KM trends changed the way we work in KM environment. Let’s look at these current trends and how they affect KM.

Big Data

According to Cisco study, global IP traffic will reach 1.3 zettabyes annually by 2016 which is fourfold increase from 2011. By 2016 there will be 19 billion global network connections, the equivalent of two-and-a-half connections for every person on earth. Huge amount of data needs to be moved, collected, stored, and analyzed to create value out of it.

With social networking and global depression and exponential rate of information growth, the question becomes: how are you going to store, manage, and utilize this information in a way that meets your organization objectives. You need to be able to derive value from your information.

Social Computing

During last decade, social computing has widely spread in the work place. It has emerged as integral part of enterprise productivity. Social tools changed ways people work together. The proliferation of social software in the enterprise demonstrates that users find value in this new generation of tools.

In just a few years, social media has gone from cutting-edge phenomenon to a main-stream channel that companies use to engage clients, partners, and vendors.

Gartner predicts that by 2014 social networking services will replace email for interpersonal business communication for 20% business users.

Some statistics:

• 65% of world’s top companies have an active Twitter profile.
• 23% of Fortune 500 companies have a public-facing corporate blog.
• 58% of Fortune 500 companies have an active corporate Facebook account.
• Facebook has 901 million monthly active users.
• Twitter now has more than 140 million active users, sending 340 million tweets every day.
• Enterprise social software solutions are being used in 67% of organizations surveyed in 2013, up from 43% in 2011.

This highlights the fact that social software is becoming part of business processes in the work place. Employees want to engage socially with the people they work with and build stronger relationships within their companies. Traditional content management and collaboration solutions are incorporating new features to satisfy the social and information sharing demands of the enterprise.

Enterprises are using these emerging social computing technologies to improve collaboration among employees, clients, and vendors around the globe.

Tools such as blogs, instant messaging, wikis, social tagging and bookmarking, discussion boards with comment fields. Individuals comment on case studies, exchange ideas, and contribute their own material. Employees can follow up with people, search for subject matter experts, get updates on projects, participate in conversations that are going on.

The use of social software for collaboration in a business environment is most successful when there is a business purpose. The social capabilities of enterprise applications will continue to be extended because of the value that collaboration brings to a wide variety of business activities. Meanwhile, enterprise social software products, which have matured considerably over the past 5 years, are achieving increasing acceptance by corporations.

Challenges

Emergence of social networking has been a two-edged sword for organization. On one blade rests knowledge sharing. On the other is a ton of useless information and you need to dig thought it to get to what you need. In other words, they have added to the noise, volume and diversity of information.

When it comes to social networks, the question used to be: how much you want to connect vs how much you want to collect? The new version is: how much do you want to curate vs not curate?

Non-curated content is typical unmanaged social network content. The question is: how much of it do you want to have control over?

Companies must understand how social media use may impact the company’s ability to manage risk. It is important to understand how business and employees engage in social media, develop and deploy policies and solutions necessary to stay compliant, to meet business requirements and be flexible at the same time.

Companies need to increase information control and visibility.

Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing gained significant adoption as a way for companies to shift from capital-intensive model of buying and running infrastructure and software to renting usage of shared infrastructure and applications.

With the power of cloud computing, small businesses can have the same level of IT infrastructure as Fortune 500 companies with vastly limited overhead.In addition to hosted servers, small businesses can purchase software as a service (SaaS) that is hosted online and completely scalable. Forrester predicts growth in SaaS applications.

While some companies are replacing licensed software with SaaS applications, most are using SaaS for new product categories that complement their existing on-premise software.

Benefits

With software purchased as a service, a small business no longer needs IT personnel on site to install and maintain software and hardware. SaaS allows businesses to purchase software without multi-year contracts and without painful software installation.

Rapid Deployment - with no hardware or software to install and no servers to buy, cloud content management virtually has no setup time. So, it can be deployed very quickly.

Access Anywhere - A cloud content management solution offers an application available anytime and from any internet browser. Information is always accessible and data can be shared instantly. The cloud gives the company centralized control of info while allowing users to access it from any computer or device.

Easy Collaboration - Since it can be accessed anywhere, cloud content management systems allow any authorized personnel to access and collaborate on content. Sharing lets you get information to those who need it instantly, and from anywhere in the world.

Low Cost - Cloud ECM solutions offer a highly-affordable alternative to on-premise solutions.

Speed - Cloud ECM implementations typically take 24% of the time of similar on-premise projects. That rapid time-to benefit translates directly into the higher ROI that business managers want.

Flexibility - Cloud ECM implementation gives the business this flexibility, both in terms of right-sizing capacity and in terms of aligning ECM capabilities with changing business needs.

Reduced Risk - Cloud ECM projects don’t require large outlays for uncertain results. And a variety of protections can be written into vendor contracts. For these and other reasons, the cloud fits well into today’s corporate risk mitigation strategies.

For activities that involve collaboration, SasS browser access to an application is far more superior to running it behind a firewall.

It enables IT to respond quicker to business requirements. Cloud vendor often provides an effective mobile client which otherwise you would have to undertake yourself if you were to customize your on-premise platform.

Challenges

Cloud is no panacea. Even the largest cloud vendors can experience outages.

Multiple File Formats - The documents that you might like to upload into your cloud content management system may be in many different formats. The device that is being used to display the content often may not have the correct software needed to display the document or image.

A common solution is to convert the files on the server to a generic format that can be viewed by many devices. For example, most browsers and devices today can display JPEG or PNG formats for images, Microsoft Office or PDF format for documents, CAD for drawings, etc.

Document Size - It is very important to consider the size of the document, either the number of pages or the physical size of the file. Downloading the entire document can take a long time depending on available bandwidth. This is especially an issue on mobile devices with slow or crowded data connections.

A system that provides a preview of the document can help the user to determine if they want to download the document would help.

Browser compatibility - Another challenge is that there are various browsers that are used to access the Internet and not all of them work the same way. Each browser has differences in how they operate and how the code works under the covers.

Mobile viewing - With today’s on-demand business world, it is imperative to be able to support viewing documents on mobile devices. But not all the devices behave the same way, and different operating systems are used on the various devices. Without a consistent mobile viewing platform, separate viewing applications may need to be installed on each device and results will vary. Using a single technology that supports many document types is very important in a mobile environment.

HTML5-based viewers can help resolve some of the challenges associated with browsers and mobile devices. Older versions of the browsers that are used in many government, education and businesses do not support HTML5.

Understanding that these common challenges are a possibility and preparing for them before you encounter them is important. Providing a single platform with multiple viewing technologies, including HTML5, Flash and image-based presentation, can help to ensure that all users can view documents, regardless of their specific device, browser or operating system.

Responsibility for your information in the cloud still falls on you: data ownership continuity, security, compliance. Take the same test-based approach to selecting cloud solutions as you would on-premise solutions. Focus on user experience.

Mobile Computing

The workspace is becoming increasingly mobile. Mobile computing enables access from anywhere. Forrester predicts that by 2016, smart phones and tablets will be used by a billion of global customers. Looking ahead, employees and customers will expect and demand that all business applications support mobility. Need to be able to deliver mobile experience - Ability to access content from mobile devices.

Content and systems must be optimized for mobile devices. Employees working in the field must be able to access content from their mobile devices. Employees use mobile devices to collaborate on docs, take meeting notes, create presentations, and collect data in the field. Decide what content and services make the most sense for your organization mobile devices.

"Bring Your Own Device" (BYOD)

It is becoming a reality of office life these days. It is a natural consequence in a world where people bring iPads, iPhones, Androids, and Blackberrys to work. This trend is relatively new and it continues to grow. As a result, organizations have been compelled to open up their networks to a wider variety of these devices that their employees want to use.

For corporations, trying to save IT $, it is good news – employees are now paying to acquire and maintain phones, tablets, and laptops that were once funded by IT. These organizations realized that encouraging employees to bring in their own devices can be a win-win situation for them as well as for their employees.

On the downside, the ever growing variety of BYOD devices and the fact that they are owned/controlled by employees poses serious security, workflow, and IT management issues for employers.

Employees are using their own smart phones and tablets to conduct business. While the actual device belongs to an employee, business info does not. This creates new twist in info governance initiatives.

If employees upload corporate data into a consumer-based public cloud, the cloud operator has de-facto ownership of this data.

Also, there are hackers accessing corporate data through relatively insecure consumer devices, challenge of integrating BYOD platforms with enterprise-wide corporate software, and extra IT funds being required to support a myriad of BYOD platforms.

A company can’t dictate which devices are used, in which security parameters and under what conditions.

Therefore, define and control what levels of access BYOD equipment has to a company networks, applications, and corporate data.  It is vital to establish a comprehensive governance policy.

Companies need to keep their employees happy and productive while protecting and leveraging the info they create and consume.

Information - Governance, Risk and Compliance – GRC - Part 3

In part 1 and 2 of my post about governance, risk, and compliance, I have described why information governance is important, where to begin with the information governance, and I started to describe what needs to be considered in information governance polices. In this my post I will describe information governance policies as they relate to crisis management and e-discovery, and list general information governance control points.

Information Governance for Crisis Management

Crisis management is set of procedures for unplanned situation that would prevent you from doing critical functions on your job.

Such situations can be:

• Availability – illness, weather, turnover, fire, flood, severe weather, facility issues
• Technology – phone cut-off, system outage, applications is down, network problems
• Volume/Capacity – huge number of calls (in the example of call center)
• Special situations – pandemic, loss of facility, tornado, etc.

An approaching storm or disaster does not provide much leeway to assess your disaster recovery preparations.

For example, if your CMS is down, what happens to those departments who need to use critical documents?

Solutions:

What you need to do is to develop a plan for each crisis situation. It should be designed to implement disaster recovery. Planning is very important.

Prioritize requirements – short, medium, long-term. Assess business needs. For example, how do you want to handle spike of calls (if you are in the call center)? Short term plan could be such as – re-route calls for live answer where there are people. Medium to long term could be such as plan for alternative site, work from home.

Make your plan flexible. Have incident coordinator. Create communication plan which should include who is responsible for coordinating the recovery process. Create crisis team which could include IT, QA, management, business partners. Outline responsibilities and procedure in the document.

Test this procedure at least once a year. Do post-analysis – timing, access gaps, communications of results, recommend changes and training plan for next testing, maybe next quarter, not next year. Evaluate your systems when you have no crisis.

Other points:

• Address disaster recovery in addressing planned and unplanned downtime.
• Virtualize your data center.
• Ensure swift restoration of content items following corruption or accidental deletion.
• Maintain all metadata during and after recovery events.
• Ensure seamless transition to a warm stand-by system should the main system fail.
• Plan what to do if outage happens.
• Maximize platform up-time and swift restoration of platform following a disaster event.
• Users need to feel confident that the system will protect content and will be available regardless of any disaster, otherwise user adoption will fail – users will go back to their old habits essentially halting KM effort in its tracks.

Information Governance for E-Discovery

E-Discovery preparedness makes it imperative for organizations to develop an enterprise wide strategy to manage the volume of electronic information. The discovery process affects many individuals in an organization, not just lawyers and others involved in discovery, but also IT professionals and records managers, who have to be prepared to produce electronic content for discovery and litigation.

You need to have an ability to respond to legal request, to solve litigation issue, mitigate the risk of sanctions, reduce impact and cost associated with future litigation.

For legal counsel, it means having a review process to determine what discovered content is relevant to the case. For an IT person, it means restoring backup tapes to show evidence on file shares, content management systems, e-mail systems, or other applications. But for records managers, this work will have begun long before any lawsuit with managing records for retention, placing legal holds, and finalizing disposition.

E-discovery could be costly because it requires organizations to retrieve content from servers, archives, backup tapes, and other media.

In some cases, an organization is unable to execute a discovery order because it is unable to locate all content in a timely manner, or it is unable to place holds on all content and some of it is deleted during the lawsuit. The inability to do this correctly also has a cost, and it can be considerable.

To address these costs, many organizations are looking at e-discovery solutions that will enable them to review the found content and take it through litigation.

But organizations can also lower costs for archiving and restoring, legal review, and sanctions by simply cutting down how much content it retains. Less stored content means less content on which to perform discovery.

Developing a strategy and a plan of action for handling e-discovery will help organizations mitigate their risk and save them a significant amount of money in the event of litigation. Organizations need to have a retention policy to determine which content can be destroyed and at what time and which content should be kept and for how long. The key is to have a retention program that is flexible enough to keep content for the right retention period.

By categorizing content, creating a catalog of the content, creating a retention plan, implementing a hold methodology, and having disposition procedures, an organization will benefit in many ways.

Solutions: Integrate e-discovery into information governance practice. Include key capabilities:

• understand and secure – identify and categorize docs; docs are distributed globally; find and correctly identify them
• automate and enforce - extend policies to docs within unmanaged repositories such as file shares, SharePoint, etc. Automate processes in a transparent manner to manage and control docs. Retention and disposition policies that can be enforced within ECM.
• protect and control – regulate how docs accessed and used; security controls over docs; control who can access protected docs
• discover and produce – ability to produce relevant docs upon demand is a mandatory requirement.

Develop retention programs. Create committees within your organizations and bring their expertise together with legal counsel and IT to prepare for e-discovery and litigation.

General Governance Controls

• Understand your data topology – holistically across the enterprise: how much, where, who owns it, and what value does it provide.
• Employ real-time indexing of content – to keep track of its changes.
• Store the intelligence about your content (metadata).
• Create an information intelligence service center and include data analysis, governance analysis.
• Employ change management to stay current of new forms of content and new business requirements.
• Become proactive in deploying policies for securing data, storing data, sharing data and enforcing compliance.
• Remove obsolete or unnecessary content.
• Define content life cycle and retention policies.
• Tier your access to enable relevant data to be closer to users and devices that are local.
• Educate the organization on the value of good governance; it is less about control and more about raising the intelligence and health of information.
• Categorize your information and determine its value and rank.
• Use content approval function in your CMS.
• As deployments grow, organizations must also find ways to efficiently store records in compliance with retention of records management policies.
• Create retention schedule, content controls, consistent disposition of content in accordance with records management policies for content preservation, remediation, retention.
• Keep track of what info is created, stored, and accessed.
• Use auto-classification and semantic tools within the search engines.
• Move relevant documents from desktops and shared drives to your central docs repository.
• Create efficient document versioning and check-in/check-out management for information consistency.
• Create robust administration of users to ensure that each as access rights for only documents that they are authorized to have access to.

Information - Governance, Risk and Compliance – GRC - Part 2

In my last post about governance, risk, and compliance, I have described why information governance is important and where to begin with the information governance. Today, I will describe what needs to be considered in information governance polices and will give some recommendations.

What needs to be considered in information governance polices?

Government mandates - If you are in a regulated industry, you need to consider first and foremost government mandates such as GMP/GxP, ISO 9001. You need to make sure that your documents management and IT are compliant with these requirements.

Proliferation of content - there has been explosive growth in the creation and collection of content by organization and individuals. Content is stored in CMS, data warehouses, physical warehouses, desktop computers, file shares, back-up archives, mobile devices, cloud services, employees personal computers and other devices such as tablets, smart phones, etc. To complicate matters this information is also geographically disbursed.

In SharePoint, for example, you get a small department that has a site, other departments take notice and start their own sites. Suddenly you have small SharePoint instances pervading everywhere. What organization should do instead is take those separate silos of SharePoint and combine them into one centrally managed environment. It is the matter of having a plan in place first, then applying the technology to achieve those business goals.

Information governance policies should cover desktops and shared drives, CMSs, databases and data warehouses, email systems, cloud based apps, social media platforms, physical warehouses. Content may be stored with the 3rd party, this needs to be considered.

Employees send email with documents attachments. This email and attachments have significant value to the business whether they contain contract terms, meeting notes or even employees opinions on a given topic. Email requires governance and so it needs to be included in your information governance policies.

Big data – are you prepared? What measures your IT has taken to help with this issue?

Cloud computing – If you use cloud computing, you need to create governance policy for it.

Mobile Devices - Employees use mobile devices to do their job. Many companies don’t have policies that cover things like tablets and handhelds. They are starting to, but it is just a beginning. You need to create polices for mobile devices and a mechanism to enforce those policies. And in the regulated environment, you would need to prove that you are enforcing those policies.

Social media - effectively leveraging social media while protecting the organization from non-compliance.

Create comprehensive social media governance plan. It should include compliance, supervision to interactive social content; perform conceptual search and policy-based monitoring of all info, inside and outside the firewall; establish social media usage policies and procedures and then train staff on them; preserve and collect relevant social media content for compliance and litigation purposes.

Consider all content and access methods involved as users connect via smartphones and tablets.

Employ solutions that capture additional approval on a site-by-site basis to verify assent for capturing and monitoring.

Wherever possible create separate business identities for social media to minimize capture of personal or private information.

Govern employees interactions. Most regulated organizations are taking a measured approach to social media, starting with small number of employees and approved social media sites.

Monitor and capture inside-based interactions within a corporate networks. Moderate inside-based interactions. Be mindful of legal and regulatory guidelines.

BYOD phenomena – “bring your own device”. People bring their iPads, iPhones, etc. to conferences, work, taking notes, making presentations, responding to email, updating pipeline, etc. All this content belongs to the organization but the device is not. What happens when this employee leaves the company? Or that employee loses the tablet? What happens to information?

I read about the case where a doctor had all his patients’ medical records unencrypted on his laptop. The laptop was stolen.

It could also be that there are multiple versions of documents floating around, gets passed from one person to another person, may be tweaked a little along the way. And they each are legally discoverable.

Be sure that the official version of the document is stored in your CMS and managed by your governance program.

It is imperative to have a policy to protect this information and to enforce that policy across all those devices.

Security – sensitive information must be protected – encrypted. LinkedIn got hacked and all passwords got stolen. What are you going to do that this does not happen to your organization?

Intellectual property - What about a pharmaceutical company developing a new drug, not yet under patent protection, and an employee takes that information to a competitor?

Of special importance is information related to future revenue. For example, a pharmaceutical company should place a high priority on protecting information related to future products which are not covered by patents.

It is vital for companies to have a system in place to protect sensitive content such as for example product roadmaps, manufacturing plans, vendor supply lists, marketing and promotional strategies.

In my next post, I will describe information governance for crisis management and e-discovery.

Information - Governance, Risk and Compliance – GRC - Part 1

Governance is about securing the information and also about using information for greater value. People don’t talk much about value of information but information is strategic asset of a company.

What makes a company great among other things is the ability to take information and use it as an asset. Information is what drives an organization, whether it is through development of new drugs, new products, looking into new geographic regions to expand to, etc.

Governance is like an insurance policy that you feel like you are paying for nothing, until you need it. You don’t know when and if an “accident” will happen and you don’t know how big it will be, but when it does happen, you are very happy that you have that insurance policy. Until then you resent having to pay for it. Governance which is controls is your insurance policy.

KM can be costly in terms of fines, brand reputation, legal fees. In case of a legal discovery, the lack of documents means a disaster. Absence of document control in place will result in violating regulatory compliance.

To an increasing extent, organizations are focusing on risk management as a central issue in GRC equation. Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) is now a bigger driver for GRC than Sarbanes-Oxley or other compliance requirements. Organizations want a top-down viewpoint on risk, whether it is resulting from non-compliance or operational issues and want to know what is being done to mitigate it. ERM is increasingly considered as a strategic tool to support governance and improve business performance.

Governance and compliance are essential business functions. Risks need to be understood and managed. Risk management does not mean that every risk can be anticipated but it can plan for the risk and have alternatives ready.

Information governance – effective content controls, allowing all info to be securely and properly shared across departments, geographic locations, and systems.

Organizations need a closed loop environment for assessing business risks, documenting compliance and automating control monitors to sift through their business systems.

For example, SharePoint is widely adopted system for knowledge management. According to a recent AIIM report, more than 60% of organizations have yet to bring their SharePoint deployment into existing compliance, retention, and long-term archive policies.

To prevent potential exposure of sensitive or classified information, it is imperative for organizations to bring their SharePoint in line with existing compliance policies.

Benefits of information governance: helps management to enforce focus on business mission, employees have information that is accurate, current and is in suitable format for their use; employees are more efficient and productive; removing duplicate and unnecessary content reduces the time needed to find information, derive higher profits; operational cost is lowered; retention management optimizes cost-effectiveness of storage platforms; legal fees are reduced in case of litigation.

Where to begin?

To start information governance initiative, create steering committee – CIO, legal officer, compliance officer, other main stakeholders.

Outline the scope, timeline, and budget.

It should be rolled out from the top. This way everybody will be on the same page.

Have a strategy. Strategy should drive what is measured and monitored for compliance and performance.

Information governance strategy must account for the value of information and how it is classified and accessed.

Information governance policies should support all of the organization’s governance controls – retention, disposition, legal hold, data privacy and security.

Policies need to be scalable, enforceable, and measurable. It is better not to have a policy than to have a policy which can’t be enforced.

Policies should change depending on new business requirements, regulatory demands, rising costs, litigation. Companies must have a process to update, validate, deploy, and enforce these policies. They should be deployed without negatively impacting users and operations.

Rank the value of information depending on its type and where it is coming from. For example, information created by VP of sales should be ranked higher that information created by a marketing intern.

More about governance in the next post.

Knowledge Management - 5 Steps to Do IT Right the First Time

A strategically implemented knowledge management solution is the answer to the growing need to do more with less. It can reduce costs and increase efficiency and productivity.

But while a carefully implemented knowledge management initiative can transform employees experiences and organizational efficiency, a poor implemented initiative can have a negative impact.

Here are five steps for optimizing customer service and support with an effective, best practice led knowledge management initiative.

1. Define and phase your knowledge management initiative.

Start with clear goals and objectives, and roll out your implementation in stages. Implementing knowledge management in only few departments at a time, offers a chance to fine-tune knowledge management in few departments before expanding to the rest of your organization.

2. Target and tailor your employees interactions.

Be sure you understand the context and intent of your employees queries for information. Choose knowledge management tools that enable you to avoid overloading your employees with information and would deliver tailored, interactive, accurate answers to their queries.

3. Foster collaborative knowledge creation.

Encourage collaboration during knowledge creation making sure that your knowledge capitalizes on the collective knowledge of your organization employees. This collective knowledge might be included in social networks of your organization.

4. Analyze the Performance.

Powerful analytics are vital to optimizing your knowledge management initiative. They should be used on an ongoing basis to identify opportunities for improvement, emerging questions trends, and common employees information seeking behavior. You should monitor the performance of your knowledge management initiative and adjust practices accordingly.

5. Think enterprise-wide.

But where do you begin? Start with one group or department but think enterprise-wide. During early stages, be sure to involve all those who would benefit from future roll-outs. Knowledge management can ultimately deliver benefits across enterprise - from expanding the scope of marketing campaigns and supporting the development of departmental intranets and portals, to enhancing relationship with partners and vendors.

Comprehensive knowledge management solution helps organizations strategically transform the customer service and support experience - and drive customer satisfaction, competitive advantage, increased sales and reduced costs.

10 Signs Your Search Engine is Stalling

An integral part of your content management strategy is enterprise search. Your users need to be able to find information and documents they are looking for. However, enterprise search does not always work properly. Users have to get more creative to compensate for the lack of good search but is this what you really want?

Creative ways which users use to find information is a sign that your search engine is stalling. If you recognize any of these symptoms below in your content management system, take it as a call to action: your search engine needs a tune-up!

1. Querying With Magic Cookies: If your users are memorizing document IDs or using some other "magic" unrelated to natural search queries to find content, your search has a problem.

2. Off-Roading to Google: If your users are proudly (or surreptitiously) resorting to Google to get answers, take a hard look at your search tools. Google is good. But if your search engine can't outperform a generic Web search engine, given it has a much tighter domain of content and context and can be tuned to your goals -you can do better.

3. Gaming Learning: Today's search engines are "smart". No doubt-click-stream feedback is a powerful tool for improving search relevance. But, if users are expending time repeatedly running the same search and clicking on the "right" document to force it to the top of the results list, your search engine isn't learning, it has a learning disability. Search engines should not have to be gamed.

4. Using Cliff Notes: If users use everything from note cards to the back of their hands to scribble titles and key phrases for frequently utilized content, if your users have taken to cliff-noting content to prime their searches, the search engine is not working.

5. Paper Chasing: Are your users printing out content, littering their cubes with hard copies? That is just another form of cliff-noting. Using functioning search is easier than a paper chase, not to mention more reliable.

6. Doing the Link Tango: Badly tuned search engines tend to "fixate" on certain content, especially content with lots of links to other content. Smart users often take advantage of this tendency to click through on anchor articles and then ricochet through the link structure to find the actual content they need. If your users are doing the "link tango" for information, you know that your users are great, but your search does not work.

7. Lots of "Game Over" Search Sessions: When search strings bring back large amount of content that is not earning click-through (document views), your users are having the "game over" experience. Unable to identify what is relevant in this sea of material, they are forced to cheat to stay in the game. Smart search engines provide navigation, faceted guidance or clarifying questions to prevent "game over" interactions.

8. Dumbing it Down: Your users are verbally adept, and they would love to ask questions "naturally". If your analytics are telling you that most users' searches have disintegrated into 1-2 word queries, take it as a direct reflection of your search engine's lack of intelligence. A search engine competent in natural language typically receives 20% of queries in seven words or more and about half in three, with fewer than 20% as 1-2 word queries.

9. Easter Eggs: If your users tell you they often find interesting new content by stumbling upon it, your search engine is delivering "Easter Eggs." Finding good content by accident, especially good content, signals a poorly tuned search engine. New content is usually highly relevant content and ought to be preferred by smart retrieval algorithms.

10. Taxi Driver Syndrome: Taxi drivers will tell you that they don't want a map, that they don't need a map because they memorized the map. Unlike a city topography, a knowledge base changes frequently. So, if your users are saying they don't want or need search, it's not because they have memorized all your content. What they are realy saying is: we don't need search that doesn't work.

If your users have to get more and more creative to get the job done, thank them. And then reward them and your business by tuning or upgrading your search engine. It will pay off in efficiency, customer satisfaction, and employees and customers retention.

Website Usability

Web usability is an approach to make a web site easy to use for a user, without the requirement that any specialized training is undertaken or any special manual is read. Users should be able to intuitively determine the actions they need or can perform on the web page s, e.g., press a button to perform some action.

Some broad goals of usability could be: present the information to the user in a clear and concise way, give the correct choices to the users in an obvious way, remove any ambiguity regarding the consequences of an action (e.g. clicking on delete/remove/purchase), place important items in an appropriate area on a web page or a web application.

When you designed your web site, you want to promote it everywhere with big bold letters saying, "Hello everybody! Come and look at my web site! It is just great!" When you submit your web site to forums for web site reviews, you may write, "What do you think of my web site?"

This is the big mistake to ask someone to look at your web site. There is never a single answer. To understand if your web site meets its usability requirements, ask people to try it out. They should be able to answer the following questions: what is the purpose of this web site? what can I do here? what needs does it fulfill?

The 5 seconds test tool is one way to explore immediate impressions of the web site users. You can experiment by asking them what the site is about, to see if the site’s purpose is communicated clearly.

The biggest mistake is to believe that web site appearance matters the most. How it looks is only one part of the process. How it performs is another. What it can give back to site visitors and how effectively it conveys that information will matter even more.

Writing content for web users is an important task. The main goal of this task is the ease with which the web site content is read and understood by your users. When your content is highly readable, your audience is able to quickly digest the information you share with them.

Keep the web site content as concise as possible. Users have very short attention spans and they are not going to read articles thoroughly and in their entirety. So, get to the point as quickly as possible. Place your most important content high on the page. Think of a newspaper: the top story is always prominently displayed above the fold. Use headings to break up long text. Use bulleted lists where possible.

Format the text in such a way that it is easy to read it and just to scan a web page.Keep colors and typefaces consistent. Visitors should never click on an internal link in your site and wonder if they've left your web site. Choose your colors and fonts carefully and use them consistently throughout the site.

Keep page layout consistent. Use a Web site template to enforce a uniform page structure. Visitors should be able to predict the location of important page elements after visiting just one page in your site.

Design a clear and simple navigation system. a good navigation system should answer three questions: Where am I? Where have I been? Where can I go?

The navigation system should be in the same place on every page and have the same format. Visitors will get confused and frustrated if links appear and disappear unpredictably. Don't make your visitors guess where a link is going to take them. Visitors should be able to anticipate a link's destination by reading the text in the link or on the navigation button. Users don't have time or patience to guess.

Large or complex sites should always have a text-based site map in addition to text links. Every page should contain a text link to the site map. Lost visitors will use it to find their way, while search engines spiders will have reliable access to all your pages.

Include a home page link inside your main navigation system. Visitors may enter your site via an internal page, but hopefully they will want to head for the home page. Link the site logo to the home page. Most sites include their logo somewhere at the top of every page - generally in the top, left-hand corner. Visitors expect this logo to be a link to your site's home page. They'll often go there before looking for the home link in the navigation system.

Include a site search box. A robust site search feature helps visitors quickly locate the information they want. Make the search box prominent and be sure that it searches all of your site, and only your site.

Check your page display at in a number of different screen resolutions to make sure that your most important content is visible when the page loads.

Include a form for users' feedback on your site.

A good brand creates or reinforces a user's impression of the site. When your site is strongly branded, that means that visitors will think of you first when they go shopping for your product or service.

Conduct usability testing. Usability testing helps you to replicate the experience of the average web site user and correct problems before real users find them.

Content Management Systems Review - Confluence

Confluence means "a coming together" and has been helping workers do just that since 2004. Starting out as an enterprise wiki, it has evolved through the years into an all-round collaboration tool. Confluence is available as a SaaS or hosted product, powered by Java. It is the Atlassian product and it is designed to work with other Atlassian products.

Confluence has the widest spread application of Atlassian's products, it could be applied in almost any environment. It is free to open source institutions and non-profits. Pricing starts at just a charity donation of US$ 10 for hosted smaller installations for less than 10 users.

Price breaks go neatly up through the ranks until you are only paying US$ 1 per user, if you have 2,000 of them for the Hosted version.

Features

Confluence offers the ability to create one or many sites, for the whole company, different teams, groups or classes of worker. Managing them is done through an elegant set of administration tools and dashboards.

Setting permissions is very easy.

Sites can be styled and formatted as needed. With styles for the most typical areas such as human resources, design projects, along with templates for common tasks like meetings, project plans, intranet or team project page can be created very quickly.

Communities are presented through bios, pictures, home pages. Users can find each other by holding the cursor over someone's name. To see a brief bio, they need to click on that name and they visit the main page.

Users can chart work progress through blogs, their status updates can be seen by other users in the group and home pages. There are also YouTube videos and Twitter-style updates.

Users will also get notifications (or can create an RSS feed) when someone edits an entry or changes a file.

All documents can be kept in one place accessible to all relevant users.

When combined with Atlassian's JIRA, users can create step-by-step workflows that will see tasks completed in a by-the-numbers fashion and everyone's contributions and input can be tracked.

The site has search function. Searches, updates and other entries can also be filtered to limit the search. There is autocomplete feature for the search.

Confluence has the ability to connect to applications like SharePoint. Confluence has a SharePoint connector. It also has full MS Office compatibility and smartphone access.

Confluence has Sandbox where you can try its features.

Content Management Systems Reviews - Open Text - ECM Suite - Auto Classification

For records managers and others responsible for building and enforcing classification policies, retention schedules, and other aspects of records management plan, the problem with traditional, manual classification methods can be overwhelming.

Content needs to be classified or understood in order to determine why it must be retained, how long it must be retained, and when it can be dispositioned. Managing the retention and disposition of information reduces litigation risk, reduces discovery and storage costs, and ensures that organizations maintain regulatory compliance.

Classification is the last thing end-users want (or are able) to do. Users see the process of sorting records from transient content as intrusive, complex, and counterproductive. On top of this, the popularity of mobile devices and social media applications has effectively fragmented the content authoring market and has eliminated any chance of building consistent classification tools into end-user applications.

However, if classification is not being carried out there are serious implications when asked by regulators or auditors to provide reports to defend the organization’s records and retention management program.

User concerns aside, records managers also struggle with enforcing policies that rely on manual, human-based approaches. Accuracy and consistency in applying classification is often inadequate when left up to users, the costs in terms of productivity loss are high, and these issues, in turn, result in increased business and legal risk as well as the potential for the entire records management program to quickly become unsustainable in terms of its ability to scale.

So what is the answer? How can organizations overcome the challenges posed by classification?

The answer is a solution that provides automatic identification, classification, retrieval, archival, and disposal capabilities for electronic records as required by the records management policy.

OpenText Auto-Classification is the solution that combines records management with cutting edge semantic capabilities for classification of content. It eliminates the need for users to manually identify records and apply requisite classification. By taking the burden of classification off users, records managers can improve consistency of classification and better enforce rules and policies.

OpenText Auto-Classification makes it possible for records managers to easily demonstrate a defensible approach to classification based on statistically relevant sampling and quality control. Consequently, this minimizes the risk of regulatory fines and eDiscovery sanctions.

It provides a solution that eliminates the need for users to sort and classify a growing volume of content while offering records managers and the organization as a whole the ability to establish completely transparent records management program as part of their broader information governance strategy.

Auto-Classification uses OpenText analytics engine to go through documents and codifies language-specific nuances identified by linguistic experts.

Features

Automated Classification: Automate the classification of content in OpenText Content Server inline with existing records management classifications.

Advanced Techniques: Classification process based on a hybrid approach that combines machine learning, rules, and content analytics.

Flexible Classification: Ability to define classification rules using keywords or metadata.

Policy-Driven Configuration: Ability to configure and optimize the classification process with an easy step-by-step tuning guide.

Advanced Optimization Tools: Reports make it easy to examine classification results, identify potential accuracy issues, and then fix those issues by leveraging the provided optimization hints.

Sophisticated Relevancy and Accuracy Assurance: Automatic sampling and benchmarking with a complete set of metrics to assess the quality of the classification process.

Quality Assurance Workbench: Advanced reports on a statistically relevant sample to review and code documents that have been automatically classified to manually assess the quality of the classification results when desired.

Auto-Classification works with OpenText Records Management so existing classifications and documents can be used during the tuning process.

OpenText Auto-Classification was developed in close partnership with customers using the OpenText ECM Suite, and works in conjunction with OpenText Records Management so that existing classifications and classified documents can be used in the tuning process.

Viewing Documents in the Cloud Repository

More and more organizations are moving to solutions where documents are stored in cloud-based systems. Implementing a solution in which documents are stored in a cloud-based system, such as a content management system, engineering drawing repository or a technical publication library, can present some challenges. You need to consider these challenges carefully so that you could provide the optimal experience for your users.

These are most important challenges to consider when implementing a cloud-based documents repository: working with multiple file formats; variations in document size; browser-compatibility with HTML5; and viewing documents on mobile devices.

Multiple File Formats

The documents that you might like to upload into your cloud content management system may be in many different formats. They may be PDF, TIFF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, CAD or many others. The device that is being used to display the content often may not have the correct software needed to display the document or image.

This issue is further complicated by the varying number of devices that the content will be viewed on. A common solution is to convert the files on the server to a generic format that can be viewed by many devices. For example, most browsers and devices today can display JPEG or PNG formats for images, Microsoft Office or PDF format for documents, CAD for drawings, etc.

Document Size

It is very important to consider the size of the document, either the number of pages or the physical size of the file. Downloading the entire document can take a long time depending on available bandwidth. This is especially an issue on mobile devices with slow or crowded data connections.

A system that provides a preview of the document can help the user to determine if they want to download the document. The system can also provide quick initial view of the first few pages of the document allows a user to begin reading content while the rest of the document downloads. This increases worker productivity and can even reduce traffic if the user quickly determines that they do not wish to continue reading the document.

Browser compatibility

Another challenge is that there are various browsers that are used to access the Internet and not all of them work the same way. The four major browsers are Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari. Each browser has differences in how they operate and how the code works under the covers.

Document viewing technology is dependent on some level of support within the browser. For example some browsers support Flash and some do not. HTML5 is only supported on recently updated versions of some browsers, so older browsers can create problems. Even where HTML5 is supported, different browsers have different levels of support. Sometimes the differences are subtle and only cosmetic, while others, like complex formatting, can cause significant display issues.

Mobile viewing

With today’s on-demand business world, it is imperative to be able to support viewing documents on mobile devices. But not all the devices behave the same way, and different operating systems are used on the various devices. Without a consistent mobile viewing platform, separate viewing applications may need to be installed on each device and results will vary. Using a single technology that supports many document types is very important in a mobile environment.

Is HTML5 the Answer?

HTML5-based viewers can help resolve some of the challenges associated with browsers and mobile devices. However, there is a misconception that the adoption of HTML5 is the answer to all problems. It is not. The four major browsers have been implementing HTML5 over time and how much of the standard that is supported varies greatly with the version of the browser. Older versions of the browsers that are used in many government, education and businesses do not support HTML5.

Understanding that these common challenges are a possibility and preparing for them before you encounter them is important. Providing a single platform with multiple viewing technologies, including HTML5, Flash and image-based presentation, can help to ensure that all users can view documents, regardless of their specific device, browser or operating system. With that knowledge you can successfully promote a good experience for your users and overcome the major pitfalls faced by so many organizations today.