Case Study - Wind River - Twiki Information Architecture

In the "Case Studies" series of my posts, I describe the projects that I worked on and lessons learned from them. In this post, I am going to describe the project of re-structuring content and information architecture of a content management system based on Twiki in Wind River.

Wind River is a software engineering company that used Twiki as their content management system. TWiki is a Perl-based structured wiki application, typically used to run a collaboration platform, content management system, a knowledge base, or a team portal.

Content organization and information architecture in Twiki were such that users had difficulty in finding information they were looking for. This situation made it difficult to find, re-use, and update content.

This also discouraged further adding of the new content and thus created areas where no documentation existed and the knowledge instead of being shared was being stored in personal computers. Storing the content in personal computers presented a risk of it being lost because it was not backed-up.

There was a lot of obsolete content because no content owners have been formally identified and no retention schedule has been set up. Collaborative work on the documents and projects was accomplished by users sending links to Twiki pages. Without these links it was very difficult to find information. There was no information governance in place and so content management processes were very sporadic.

The task was to re-organize the content organization and information architecture of the system and to set up information governance to solve these problems.

I strongly believe in user-centered design, so I performed the users study. I identified stakeholders within each Wind River team and created the questionnaire for collecting users' requirements for the system re-organization and the usability issues.

Based on these requirements, I re-organized the content structure and information architecture of the system. The major key to this re-organization was that the structure is very simple and intuitive. I made navigation very simple, created very intuitive labels, made sure that there is not too much information on one page and a user does not have to scroll down a very long page, that each page has a correct breadcrumb, and created taxonomy of webs (the building blocks of Twiki). Based on this taxonomy, I re-organized the location of documents. I also enhanced the system search.

For each content type, document owners were identified and retention schedule was set up with the function to flag the content that would reach an expiration date according to the retention schedule. This flag function would send an email notification to the content administrator that a certain document reached an expiration date. This alert allowed the content administrator to contact the document owner for the decision on what should be done with this document: review and update, move to an archive, or delete.

User acceptance testing of the system was performed. Users were satisfied with the system's new information architecture and indicated that it became much easier to find information.

The system with new content structure and information architecture was deployed.

Information governance was set up. Group and individual training was conducted on ongoing basis.

The project was a success. Company management and users were very cooperative in helping to make this project a success. It helped to increase efficiency and productivity and thus saved Wind River cost because employees did not waste any time on searching for documents or recreating documents that already exist.

Lessons learned

1. User-centered design is paramount to the project success. When you design and build the system based on users’ requirements, they are going to use it. Users have the sense of ownership of the system which provides excellent starting point. They know that the system you are building will be what they need.

2. Top-down support is critical for the project success. Management support is a huge factor in employees' encouragement to use the system and in setting up and enforcing procedures for information governance.

3. Assurance of users from the very beginning that they will not be left alone with the system provided their cooperation.

4. User acceptance testing helped to encourage employees to start using the system. When they participate in this process, this gives them the feeling of ownership of the system.

5. Ongoing training after the system deployment with the new content structure and information architecture made user adoption smooth.

Content Management Systems Reviews - SDL Tridion

SDL Tridion is the leading web content management system. This solution enables organisations to deliver a consistent, interactive and highly targeted customer experience, in multiple languages, across multiple web sites and channels including email, mobile sites and print.

In addition to content creation, management, translation, delivery and archiving solutions, SDL Tridion provides brand management, targeted communication, multi-channel delivery and visitor interaction capabilities.

SDL Tridion integrations well with third-party software packages such as Google Enterprise Search and online metrics suites like WebTrends and Omniture.

Content Entities

SDL Tridion’s famous Building Blocks represent the core of this WCM solution. Building Blocks are Component and Page Templates, Component Presentations, Components, Pages and Schemas.

Content authors usually create Components based on certain Schemas (which define permissible content fields), followed by combining those Components with appropriate Component Templates, thus creating Component Presentations.

A Page may contain several Component Presentations. Every Page requires an appropriate Page Template in order to be rendered properly.

There are two types of Components: Components storing text and links and Multimedia Components handling binaries (.jpg, .gif, .swf, .doc, etc.)

Pages are created in Structure Groups (i.e., a website sections) in a corresponding Publication (i.e., website).

The system comes with a set of default Page and Component Templates. Customized Page and Component Templates will need to be developed to fit the layout and code of your particular web site.

Metadata can usually be handled either on the Structure Group/Page level, or through embeddable metadata Schemas.

From the development standpoint, all Schemas and Templates are created in a development environment and then transferred to test and production environments, using the tool called Content Porter, where they become available to end-users.

Content Versioning

Versioning is quite simple and can be used for two things: to view History and to Compare. The History feature provides data on all modifications on an item (user names and timestamps are included). Using the Compare tool, you can see the exact changes highlighted in various colors made to an item by comparing any two versions.

Workflow

The basic workflow is Ready for Editing – Ready for Publishing, with the ability to modify and add other levels of approval.

You can create and customize your workflow in MS Visio with a Tridion plug-in.

There are additional modules that allow for inline and e-mail notifications. The standard, out-of-the-box version includes commentary capabilities. Tridion’s Event System can also be used to introduce a number of automatic (vs. manual) activities in the content management process.

Workflow is natively integrated into the GUI and Microsoft Outlook allowing a user to perform various activities from his/her inbox.

SDL Tridion offers the following products:

Content Manager (core product)

SDL Tridion’s Content Manager Solution uses proprietary BluePrinting technology that allows organizations to reuse and adapt content, layout, and other functionality for different pages and web sites. This ensures that companies can address target audiences in different regions around the world in a "same but different" manner. The technology enables the user to maintain centralized control of brand and message while allowing for local differentiation. This technology makes sharing complex content over multiple web sites fast and easy while maintaining centralized control and brand consistency.

BluePrinting technology has proven its value to organizations that have any of the following requirements:

• globalized websites;
• multi-website management;
• translation management;
• brand management;
• target audience marketing;
• multi-channel marketing.

Digital asset repository is managed through Multimedia Components that can store major binary extensions, which can be configured per your requirements.

Content Manager Explorer (main user interface to Content Manager) - provides rich functionality for basic to advanced content management tasks within a browser.

SiteEdit

Delivers key contributors with a WYSIWYG, browser-based interface and a collaborative environment for many online communication tasks. It is easy to use, ensuring lower training costs and easy adoption. There is version comparison and roll-back to previous version. It allows to perform simple actions like re-arranging content blocks, adding new content, editing existing content and spell-check.

WebDAV Connector (Windows Explorer access to SDL Tridion WCM and content)

Provides access to SDL Tridion WCM content using Windows Explorer. Contributors can add, edit, delete, and use content in the same way that they would use the Windows file system using the most appropriate desk top application for the task they need to perform.

Word Connector (Microsoft Word-based word processing tool for content creation)

For occasional content contributors who need to create simple text for the organization’s Web site in the word processing tool that they know best, Microsoft Word. Authors can open, edit, and create structured XML content using Word and to save this content directly to Content Manager.

Multilingual Support

It is represented by Translator Manager and enables companies to configure their translation needs within their existing BluePrint structure. This includes defining both the source and target language of typical translation processes. Users can set up that Translation Manager for a certain publication and specify target languages, as well as use workflow to specify the translation process.

For each translation process users can set up criteria, such as which translation agency to use. When properly configured, users can initiate a translation in one or all Child Publications using Translation Manager, which will prompt a translation job creation at a chosen agency.

Translation jobs can be seen in the GUI right below the Publishing Queue. From the translation jobs list users can send the job to the TMS (Translation Management System) and check the status of the translation.

Content Delivery Architecture

Content Delivery is mainly based on two products: Presentation Servers and Dynamic Content Broker. In addition, there are other modules that are part of Content Delivery, including Dynamic Linking, Personalization and Profiling, Content Distributor and Content Deployer.

The separation of Content Delivery from Content Management ensures that only approved content goes outside the firewall. Delivery of both dynamic and static content is possible, using either the Dynamic Content Broker or the Presentation Server approach.

Dynamic Content Broker assembles pages containing dynamic content based on configurable queries. Content Broker’s API is public and can be used to retrieve published content using custom built applications. It allows organizations to deliver online content based on page context, queries and visitor profiles. Provides the ability to create the best balance between static and dynamic web site content.

On the static side, Content Delivery System (CDS) distributes published content from the Content Manager to Presentation Servers, where it is stored in either a file system or a relational database.

Presentation Servers provide storage management, link management and cache management to manage large, complex and high-performance environments. They also manage Dynamic Linking feature responsible for resolving and rendering of links between published content items.

All environments, with a possible exception of test/acceptance, require a dedicated machine.

Content Porter

Content Porter is a Windows client used to import and export code, content and other items from one environment to another (up and down the chain). Content Porter can connect to any OLEDB or ODBC data sources. It ensures a structured quality-control process for all online content. Allows organizations to transfer any type of content managed in Content Manager between different environments.

Archive Manager

Automates web site archiving processes, providing the capability to retrieve an archived wWeb page or entire site for a specific date, time and visitor profile and view these pages with the original content and layout. Enables an organization to comply with regulatory requirements and record all versions of web site pages.

Business Connector

Integrates with other applications, thereby allowing companies to include information stored in external systems such as product catalogs and inventories.

Content Distributor

For organizations with an international infrastructure that need to ensure reliable, scheduled content distribution to all web servers. It ensures content consistency and compliance through many different secure transport providers.

Personalization and Profiling

Personalization and Profiling module (which used to be called WAI) is aimed to create personalized web sites and web pages catering to specific audiences. It works with both explicit and implicit profiles, ensuring that content is personalized based on information that visitors have provided.

Communications Statistics

Tridion Communication Statistics module provides in-site views of how your content is doing. Users can track how their content is performing by viewing web pages with stats graphs on it in a staging environment.

Content Management Systems Reviews - Documentum - CenterStage

In my last post on Documentum, I described one of its collaboration products - eRoom. In today's post, I am going to describe another collaboration product of Documentum - CenterStage.

CenterStage delivers the benefits of enterprise content management, advanced search, and collaboration tools on a single architecture.

It allows to:

• manage and visually organize project, team, and corporate work information; 
• launch projects with space and content templates; 
• work with team members on documents in public and private workspaces; 
• find information wherever it resides; 
• gain access to this information from anywhere.

Public or team workspaces where contributors can share and exchange ideas and activities. There is cross-project visibility and awareness for easy project management of simultaneous projects. Users can establish roles and permissions for their team members, set workspace and content policies, and use templates to ensure best practices.

The CenterStage community model brings people and content together with similar interests or objectives. A community member can become aware of many contributors and their activities across different workspaces.

CenterStage provides wide range of collaboration tools: wiki, blogs, inline authoring, discussion threads, tagging, ratings. These tools allow “collaboration with context” – the ability to see inter-related items and information in one view.

Standalone tables

CenterStage provides standalone data tables to facilitate the management of content collections. A structured arrangement of related content organized into fields, columns, and data tables provide a way for teams to manage such information as list of planned projects, contact information, action items, etc. Data tables organize information into a series of related entries making them a useful way to manage such simple items as to-do lists or more complex items as inventory tracking data. With standalone data tables, information is easy to manage, track, and update.

Search and discovery

CenterStage includes advanced search feature. Users can search with one query an unlimited number of information repositories such as SharePoint, file shares, email archives, ERP systems, ECM systems. The results are filtered, merged, and organized into logical groupings so that users can navigate to the most relevant search results.

The search and discovery features are further enhances by different viewing capabilities, providing the ability to determine contents of any file or folder without opening it. In addition to the regular thumbnail view, users can hover their mouse over any file to display its metadata or employ the slides view to grasp the actual content of any file. Search and discovery enables rapid access to the most relevant content by extracting metadata such as company name, place, and topic, and then dynamically filtering the results.

Governance, risk, and compliance

Documentum Content Server is the back end to the CenterStage solution and addresses the need to ensure that all information is compliant with regulations, legal stipulations, and best practices. The content server provides a rich set of content management services and a comprehensive infrastructure for all content applications, so implementation and administration is simplified. It also provides the scalability, robust functionality, and service orientation for global enterprise deployments.

With the content server, companies can store and manage all types of content including HTML and XML, graphics, multimedia, and traditional documents created with desktop applications. All content can be safely managed and archived. There is full audit at all stages of content creation, approval, and use while enforcing information retention and disposal. This in turn ensures optimum network performance by eliminating isolated pockets of data and content stranded across the enterprise.

Other benefits

Branch office caching services – provides quick access to any type of content regardless of bandwidth constraints or network latency.

Content storage services – allocate content across storage tiers based on its changing value and access requirements.

Media transformation services – transform and manage content such as images, video, and other rich media.

Information rights management – secure information no matter where it travels to maintain control over that information.

Transactional content management – accelerate business processes such as invoice processing or case management.

Web content management – manage the content, underlying structure, and publishing process for web sites and portals.

CenterStage Key Features

Team and community workspace	Wiki, blogs, discussion forums, tagging, RSS feeds
Organization of structured content	Standalone data tables to manage content collections
Workspace and page templates	Lifecycles
Component-based UI and composition model	Advanced search and discovery
Policy-based configuration	Federated Search
Access control	Guided navigation
Lifecycles	Content analytics

Knowledge Centered Support

Knowledge Centered Support (KCS) is a methodology and a set of practices and processes that focus on knowledge as a key asset of the customer/technical support organization. Unlike the traditional add-on process of knowledge engineering, KCS is an integral part of day-to-day operation in support centers. KCS becomes the way people solve problems and creates knowledge as a by-product of problem solving.

While KCS is enabled by technology, KCS is primarily about people. People are the source of knowledge. KCS has proven that the best people to capture and maintain support knowledge are the people who create and use it every day - the support analysts.

Goals of KCS are:

1. Create content as a by-product of solving problems, which is also known as incident management process, as well as the problem management process. As support analysts capture information related to an incident, they create knowledge that can be reused within the support process by other support analysts as well as customers with access to a self-service knowledge base.

2. Evolve content based on demand and usage. As people interact with the knowledge base within the incident management process, they should review it before delivering the knowledge to a customer. If they discover the need to correct or enhance the knowledge, they will fix it at that time or flag it for another person to fix it if they do not have the access authority to the knowledge base. Under this model, knowledge is evolved just-in-time based on demand instead of just-in-case. This lowers the cost of knowledge management.

3. Develop a knowledge base from an organization's collective experience to date. New knowledge capture within the incident management process is an experience resulting from one interaction. This knowledge has not been validated or verified beyond the initial incident. Thus the initial knowledge is not as trusted in this state, which is referred to as Draft knowledge.

It is not until reuse occurs that trust is increased. At some point the knowledge will be marked as trusted and either approved for internal use or published for self-service. The knowledge base under the KCS methodology includes knowledge that is at different states of trust and visibility. The collective experiences to date challenges the traditional thinking that all knowledge in a knowledge base must be perfect, validated, and highly trusted.

4. Reward learning, collaboration, sharing and improving. The culture of the organization should change to recognize the value of an individual based on the knowledge they share that enables the organization to be more effective and efficient.

KCS breaks through the limitations of current support strategies and enables support organizations to deliver greater value with more efficiency. The secret? Capitalizing on what they already have - knowledge. This increased value is created and managed by capturing the collective experience of solving problems and answering questions, making it reusable, and evolving it to reflect organizational-level knowledge.

KCS takes teamwork to a new level. The organization must shift to a perspective that sees knowledge as an asset owned and maintained by the team, not by an individual or a small group of dedicated content creators. The focus of the team is to capture and improve the collective knowledge, not only to solve individual customer issues, but also to improve organizational learning.

For optimum performance, KCS practices and the tools that support them must be integrated with other support and business systems, including incident management, change management, and service level management processes and systems.

Companies that have implemented KCS in both their internal and external support organizations are reporting dramatic improvements in incident resolution, training times, in customer satisfaction, and in analyst job satisfaction. As a result, they are realizing substantial savings in operating costs at the same time they are seeing improvements in service levels.

Information Architecture Components - Search Systems

In my previous posts on information architecture components, I mentioned that information architecture components can be divided into four categories: organization systems, labeling systems, navigation systems, and search systems. I described organization systems, labeling systems, and navigation systems in my previous posts. In today's post, I am going to describe search systems.

Before creating a search system for your site, consider the following questions:

Does your site have enough content? - Consider the volume of content, balancing the time required to set up and maintain a search system with payoff it will bring to your site users. If your site includes many pages with information, then search probably makes sense.

Will investing in search systems divert resources from navigation systems? - If your navigation systems do not work properly and you are trying to solve this problem, do not implement your search system until you fixed your navigation system's problems.

Do you have the time and know-how to optimize your site's search system? - If you don't plan on putting some significant time into configuring your search engine properly, reconsider your decision to implement it.

Are there better alternatives? - If you don't have a technical expertise or money to configure the search engine, consider creating a site index instead.

Will your site's users bother with search? - for example, users of greeting cards site may prefer to browse thumbnails of cards instead of searching.

Choosing What to Search

Indexing everything does not serve users well. The creation of search zones, pockets of homogeneous content, allows users to focus their searches. For example, users of e-commerce site would be interested to search products. You could later create another search option covering the whole site.

Search zones are subsets of a web site that have been indexed separately from the rest of the site's content. You can create search zones in as many ways as you can logically group them. The decisions you made in selecting your site's organization schemes often helps you to determine search zones as well. Search zones could be: content type, audience, role, subject/topic, geography, chronology, author, department/business unit. Like browsing systems, search zones allow a large body of content to be divided in new ways, providing users with multiple views of the site and its content.

Web sites contain at least two major types of pages: navigation pages and destination pages. Destination pages contain actual information you want from a web site. Navigation pages include main pages, search pages, and pages that help to browse the site. Search should take users to destination pages. Navigation pages should not be included in the search results.

It is valuable to allow users to search specific components of your documents. This would allow users to retrieve more specific, precise results. This can also make search results more meaningful.

Presenting Results

A guideline to display search results is to display less information to users who know what they are looking for (for example, only author and title), and more information to users who are not sure what they looking for (for example, summary, abstract, keywords). You can also provide users with a choice of what to display. Consider your users information needs when making this decision. If in doubt, show more information.

Regardless of how many ways you indicate that there are more results than fit on one screen, many if not all users will not go past that first screen. So, don't provide too much content per result, as the first few results may obscure the rest of the retrieval. However, let users know the total number of retrieved documents so that they have a sense of how many documents remain as they browse through the search results. Also, provide a navigation system to move through these search results.

If there are too many results, provide an option of revising and narrowing search results. Locate "revise search" link next to the number of search results. Too many or to few search results are both good opportunities to allow users to revise their searches. Allow users to modify the search without re-entering it.

There are three methods for the listing search results: sorting, ranking, and clustering.

Retrieval results can be sorted chronologically by date or alphabetically by any content type - title, author, department. Sorting is helpful to those users who are looking to make a decision or to take an action (for example, list of products). Sort option should be the one that would help them to accomplish this task. Chronological sorting is useful if content is time sensitive, for example, press releases. It is very useful for presenting historical data.

Ranking is more useful when there is a need to understand information or learn something. It is typically used to describe retrieved documents' relevance, from most to least. Approach ranking carefully as users will assume that the top results are the best. Retrieval results can be ranked by relevance, by popularity, by users or experts rating, and by pay-for-placement.

Alternative approach to sorting and ranking is clustering retrieved results by some common aspect, for example, by category or by a ranked list. These clusters provide context for search results by providing the folder that seems to fit users' interest best. In addition, they are working with a significantly smaller retrieval set and a set of documents that come from the same topical domain. There are two types of clusters: automatically derived clusters and cluster based on categories created by human "experts".

Explain to users what they did and where results came from. Describe what content was searched, what filters were applied, any current settings, like sort order, etc.

Present users with the ability to save, print or email results. A type of "shopping cart" can be used to store selected search results.

Search Interface

It is best to keep your search interface as simple as possible: present users with a simple search box and search button. A good place to place the search box is next to site-wide navigation system at the top of the page. Be consistent in placing the search box. Determining what your users' assumption are should drive the default settings that you set up when designing the simple search interface.

You may also have advanced search interface. It should allow the manipulation of search results. This interface is typically used by advanced searchers and frustrated searchers.

Search is iterative process. Allow users to move back and forth between browsing and searching.

Adopt a "no dead ends" policy. It means that users always have another option even if they retrieve zero results. The option can consist of means of revising the search, search tips or other advice on ow to improve the search, means for browsing, a human contact of searching and browsing does not work.

SharePoint Architecture

The SharePoint platform is a flexible, n-tier service-oriented architecture (SOA). It can be scaled down to operate entirely from one machine, or scaled up to be managed across hundreds of machines.

There are few parts in SharePoint architecture: farms, web applications, site collections, service applications, administration and security.

Farms

A SharePoint farm is a group of SharePoint servers that share common resources. A farm can operate stand-alone or it can also subscribe to functionality from another farm, or provide functionality to another farm. Each farm has its own central configuration database, which is managed through a either a PowerShell interface, or a Central Administration website (which relies partially on PowerShell's infrastructure).

Each server in the farm is able to directly interface with the central configuration database. Servers use this to configure services (e.g. Internet Information Services (IIS), windows features, database connections) to manage the requirements of the farm, and to report server health issues, resource allocation issues, etc.

Web Applications

Web Applications (WAs) are top-level containers for content in a SharePoint farm, and are typically the interface through which a user interacts with SharePoint. A web application is associated with a set of access mappings or URLs which are defined in the SharePoint central management console, then automatically replicated into the IIS configuration of every server configured in the farm. WAs are typically independent of each other, have their own application pools, and can be restarted independently in IIS.

Site Collections

A site collection is used to provide a group of SharePoint Sites. Each web application will typically have at least one site collection. Site collections may be associated with their own content databases, or they may share a content database with other site collections in the same web application.

Service applications

Service Applications (SAs) provide granular pieces of SharePoint functionality to other web and service applications in the farm. Examples of service applications include the User Profile Sync service, and the Search Indexing service. An SA can be turned off, exist on one server, or be load-balanced across many servers in a farm. SAs are designed to be as independent as possible, so depending on the SA, restarting an SA, experiencing an SA failure, or misconfiguring an SA may not necessarily prevent the farm from operating.

Each SA enabled on the farm typically has its own process that requires a certain amount of RAM to operate, and typically also has its own configuration database and Active Directory (AD) service account. SharePoint Server and SharePoint Enterprise include all the SharePoint Foundation SAs, as well as additional SAs.

Administration and security

The modular nature of SharePoint's architecture enables a secure least-privileges execution permission.

SharePoint Central Administration (the CA) is a web application that typically exists on a single server in the farm, however it can also be deployed for redundancy to multiple servers. This application provides a complete centralized management interface for web and service applications in the SharePoint farm, including AD account management for web and service applications.

In the event of the failure of the CA, Windows PowerShell is typically used on the CA server to reconfigure the farm. The structure of the SharePoint platform enables multiple WAs to exist on a single farm. In a shared (cloud) hosting environment, owners of these WAs may require their own management console. The SharePoint Tenant Administration (TA) is an optional web application used by web application owners to manage how their web application interacts with the shared resources in the farm.

In my next post on SharePoint, I am going to describe the SharePoint parts that a user interfaces with: site collections, sites, libraries, lists.

Business Analysis in Content Management

Content management initiative starts with the analysis of the current situation and coming up with a solution and the strategy for this solution. This process is called business analysis. Business analysis can be defined as the discipline of identifying business needs and determining solutions to business problems.

The usual problem in content management arena is that employees spend a lot of time searching for information, re-creating information and while they are doing it, they are not being efficient and productive, and so the company looses money. Employees also use obsolete documents in their work and so the integrity of work and compliance is at risk.

How is this problem solved? By implementing a content management initiative. The first step of it is business analysis. It involves requirements gathering and development process. During this process you identify the specific needs of the business and then develop and implement the solutions to meet them. This could be for example a new content management system deployment, modification of a current content management system, integrating few content management systems, designing a search solution, etc.

Business analysis techniques are applied to develop an appropriate plan and then put it in to action. One has to take the big picture and break it into smaller parts. Business analysis always focuses upon goals, but in a bi-directional fashion.

Business analysis can be implemented to both set goals, and to achieve them. These goals will cover strategic business practices encompassing IT, business processes, and corporate policies. For example, what support would IT provide to the project and if a CMS is implemented, would IT be able to support it? What vendors should be included in the selection list? What business processes need to be included in the system selection and deployment, and its governance? What corporate policies should be in place? What are legal and compliance policies? and etc.

The Three Phases of Business Analysis

Every time that business analysis techniques are applied, there is a natural three phase progression, which can be explained in this way:

Phase 1 - Why? - This phase is purely about fact finding. Normally, this will involve the formulation of a feasibility study to examine the business case put forward for changes.

Phase 2 - Work - In this phase the business analyst will develop a project or requirements plan, which will need to be agreed with all stakeholders, and then implemented.

Phase 3 - Working? - This is the final phase, where any changes implemented need to be proven as working. Additionally, at this phase the business analyst needs to confirm that all requirements have been met.

Business Analysis Techniques

Depending upon the market sector the enterprise sits within, different business analysis techniques will be applied. Different techniques may also be applied at project level. Some of the most common of these techniques are:

PESTLE - (Political, Economic, Sociological, Technological, Legal and Environmental) - it is a technique which is suitable for evaluating external factors and the effects they have upon the business.

SWOT - (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) - it is used to identify possible opportunities and any threats to the business by evaluating its strengths and weaknesses.

MOST - (Mission, Objectives, Strategies and Tactics) - it enables the organization to perform internal analysis and identify the best way to achieve its goals.

CATWOE - (Customers, Actors, Transformation Process, World View, Owner and Environmental Constraints) - it is used to identify the main processes and entities which may be affected by any changes the business makes.

MoSCoW - (Must or Should, Could or Would) - it is used to prioritize both proposed changes and business goals.

Methods used in business analysis are: focus groups, documentation analysis, surveys, user task analysis, process mapping, stakeholders interviews, use cases, user stories, personas, storyboards, etc.

As the result of this business analysis, you would have a clear picture of what your company needs and how to achieve this goal.

Based on gathered requirements, the business analyst would produce a document called either "Business Requirements Document for ABC Project" or "Project Requirements Document". This document should outline the background of the problem and the proposed solution. This document usually is being handed to major project sponsors for approval.

If the project is approved, the document becomes "Functional Specification" and handed to IT for the implementation. If the business analyst is a project manager and content manager, he/she would continue working with IT to put the project into action and complete it.

I will continue this subject in my future posts.

DITA, Metadata, and Taxonomy

Component-oriented content creation enables more efficient content re-use and dynamic publishing at more languages at a lower cost. XML authoring is required for the component content creation.

Research shows that organizations that use XML authoring are more mature than their peers with respect to the adoption of best practices for search and metadata. However, the use of native DITA (the Darwin Information Typing Architecture) metadata capabilities is rare, and many are also missing out on opportunities to use taxonomy for reuse and improved findability.

In this post, I am going to describe metadata capabilities within DITA, discuss two major benefits that can be achieved by using descriptive metadata and taxonomy, and recommend some best practices for getting started with metadata for component-oriented content.

Finding content in your file system or content repository is hard enough when you’ve got simple text documents to deal with. When you are using DITA and other component-oriented XML standards, you increase the difficulty by two or three orders of magnitude, because you’re looking for smaller needles in bigger haystacks. Having thousands of media-independent content objects that can be shared and reused across multiple deliverables allows you to create more sophisticated knowledge products, but it definitely poses a challenge in findability for content authors.

Among its many features for content reuse, DITA provides content creators with a facility for tagging content objects with metadata. Metadata (data about the data) lets content authors and others who manage content describe what the content is about ("descriptive metadata"), as well as assign properties like who created the content, when, in what language, and for which audience ("administrative metadata").

A taxonomy is a hierarchical structure that organizes concepts and controls vocabulary. Taxonomies allow organizations to create and centrally manage important terms that can be applied to content as metadata. For example, a telecommunications manufacturer might have a taxonomy that includes concepts such as product categories (Mobile Phones, Wireless Routers, and so on), industries (Healthcare, Utilities, Transportation, and so on), or product models.

Once applied, this metadata and taxonomy can be leveraged by a search application to help users find and use content. Search engines can use taxonomy to organize search results in meaningful ways, such as refining search based upon certain properties ("faceted search") and suggesting related searches based upon relationships between search terms and other concepts in the taxonomy.

It is a natural fit — DITA and taxonomy. DITA creates a multitude of reusable components, and taxonomy helps describe and organize the components so that they may be readily found and reused by content authors and users.

Taxonomies and descriptive metadata is also a natural fit since metadata-based search would improve findability of content objects.

DITA Support for Metadata

Compared to other XML standards, DITA provides a relatively rich and extensible framework for embedding metadata directly within the XML objects themselves. The embedded metadata can be used by processing tools like the publishing tools in the DITA Open Toolkit (DOTK) to conditionally publish content or to create metadata in the final outputs, like HTML.

DITA objects, both topics and maps, have a prolog section in which metadata can be specified. Within the prolog, the metadata section can define metadata about the topic itself such as the intended audience, the platform (for defining the applicability of the topic to specific hardware or operating systems), and so on. This metadata can be used for conditional publishing. For example, you can automate the production of a Linux version of your documentation by only outputting topics and maps that set platform to "Linux" in the metadata.

DITA objects can also embed administrative metadata about the author, copyright holder, source, publisher, and so on. Metadata can also contain descriptive keywords for the topic or map. Keywords or index terms are output to HTML or XHTML as metadata keywords to support search engines. Authors can also define index terms for the generation of back-of-book indices.

DITA also enables users to define custom metadata fields within the "othermeta" element. Like keywords, metadata defined as "othermeta" are output as HTML metadata elements but ignored for other types of output like PDF. Metadata is a powerful tool in helping to manage and publish DITA content.

Dynamic Publishing of Content

A major benefit of DITA is creating content that is media-independent. It also enables content objects to be organized by DITA maps, so that content can be recombined and re-sequenced into different deliverables. DITA maps provide flexibility.

Dynamic publishing lets content be chosen and presented to meet the unique needs of a user or situation. To best illustrate dynamic publishing, let’s compare it with static publishing of a help system.

In a statically published help system, the hierarchy of topics is fixed by the author and the selection of content is limited to what is in the DITA map at publish time. All of the related topics are manually linked. If an author wants to add a related topic, the author needs to manually add the link (or update the related-links table) and republish. The publishing process creates a deliverable that—while interactive—is static with respect to its contents and the relationships among them.

To create the same help system with dynamic publishing, the author would publish his/her content to a server, but he/she would not create the structure and relationships between topics at publish-time. Instead, a taxonomy would specify the relationship between concepts and properties that are defined in metadata. The relationships among topics are generated at run-time, based upon metadata on the topics. The richer the metadata and the more complete the taxonomy, the more sophisticated the user experience.

If you have experienced faceted search on consumer web sites, where we can refine search results by selecting specific values for different attributes, such as the number of megapixels for a camera. This experience is driven by metadata. With rich metadata on DITA content, we can create very sophisticated electronic content browsers, where metadata-based search creates browser-like user experiences.

Best Practices

Start by identifying all your taxonomy use cases. You will be using taxonomy not only for authors to search content objects for reuse but also potentially for serving up content to users dynamically or in a faceted interface. These perspectives will provide you with the framework for your taxonomy.

Reuse existing vocabulary. Many organizations already use controlled vocabularies for some metadata fields such as organization, audience, platform, and product. Look to existing sources for tagging your content such as hierarchical product or system models (from engineering), or hierarchical task models (from instructional/task analysis from the training organization) as places to start building hierarchical descriptive taxonomies.

Authors are the best people to apply descriptive metadata. After all, they do the analysis to determine what content was required in the first place, so they have the best context for classifying it. However, don’t expect authors to tag a lot: automate tagging when possible, especially for administrative metadata (author, organization, creation date, language).

Leverage the technology. Many content management systems can integrate third-party classification servers for automating descriptive metadata. These servers can automatically apply metadata from a taxonomy or controlled vocabulary when content topics are checked-in, then automatically populate subject metadata fields in the CMS. The metadata can in turn be reviewed and manually adjusted by authors. This metadata can be embedded into your DITA content for use in conditional publishing or to generate HTML tags in the final output to support search or dynamic publishing.

The next frontier of DITA adoption is leveraging semantic technologies (taxonomies, ontologies and text analytics) to automate the delivery of targeted content. For example, a service incident from a customer is automatically matched with the appropriate response, which is authored and managed as a DITA topic.

Content Management Systems Reviews - Documentum - eRoom

Collaboration has become very important in a work place. It increases efficiency and productivity of employees. Documentum eRoom is one of collaboration tools available on the market.

It is a web-based shared workspace where team members can store project content, communicate and share ideas, assign task, and manage deliverables using a shared project context. It improves knowledge sharing, decision making, and problem solving.. eRoom integrates well with Microsoft Office, Microsoft Project, and other desktop applications. Files can be imported from Microsoft Project into eRoom.

Project Planning

You can kick off a project by selecting people from the enterprise directory and inviting them into the eRoom workspace. eRoom sends an email invitation with the hyperlink to this workspace. Users can leverage the workspace by saving their business files in this workspace for others to view.

eRoom includes project scheduling engine to organize, manage, and report on project tasks and milestones.

eRoom has dashboard feature which provides users the ability to see such information as events, tasks, and status across multiple eRoom workspaces and so to manage and coordinate multiple projects in one place. Users can create personalized views. Within the dashboard, project data can be rolled up from multiple eRoom workspaces, providing detailed real-time visibility into the status of multiple projects at once.

You can create a project plan with tasks and milestones, assign owners and deadlines. You can also view tasks relationships and interdependencies with Gantt chart views and enable project team members to update their own tasks as well as report on the status of task groupings or the entire project.

You can hold real-time on-the-fly meetings to deal with issues, plan, and group edit documents. You can create a discussion to deal with issues. You can use polling to get consensus on open issues.

There are instant notifications and alerts to keep users updated. Users can access project information remotely and work on it offline.

Users Interface

Users can see their tasks list on the left side of screen while working on a task detail in the main window. User interface can be customized. There is a real-time summary view across multiple eRooms of project milestones, issue resolution, or project status information. There is top-down visibility into a larger portfolio of connected project records.

There is full-text search with relevance ranking to locate and re-use documents and data. This search can performed no matter where users are within the larger site environment. Users can initiate full-text search for content within eRooms to which they have access.

There is version tracking to maintain a history of changes for each document without losing iterative versions. The multi-step approval process can be configured to get sign-off on documents and deliverables.

Items can be copied and pasted or dragged and dropped from any eRoom to any other eRoom within the same community. Database templates can also be copied and pasted from any eRoom to any other eRoom.

There are standard templates to create new workspaces. Existing workspaces can also be used to create new workspaces. You can leverage saved repository of plans, procedures, discussions, and solutions.

Files can be downloaded and shared via email or portable media like a CD or USB drive.

Documents can also be expired to make sure that the most current version of documents is available for use.

My eRoom feature provides users with the single interface where they can visit all their accessed in the past rooms. Users can access it from any location.

Security

eRoom has robust security. Every item has its own access control which includes an ability to restrict control who may open it, edit, or view it. For example, a discussion thread about a new product under development could be hidden from everyone on a team except those who need to see it.

Security can be integrated with the third-party authentication products.

Information Rights Management

Information Rights Management is included to these security controls. Users can prohibit printing a document, disable copy/paste, prevent screen capture, and watermark pages if printing privileges are granted. The security is enforced if the file is accessed while the user is offline.

A copy of the document inherits the permissions of the original document. It is very useful in a situation when an access to the document needs to be revoked, the access permissions of that document can be modified and enforced on all copies no matter where they are located. There is also a complete audit trail that reflects all activity on protected documents.

The IRM server uses cryptography with symmetric ciphers. With a symmetric cipher the same key used to encrypt information is also used to decrypt it. After a user connects to the server and selects desired security parameters, the IRM server generates a random encryption key for each page of content, records a local copy of the keys and policies, and sends these keys to the user. They user encrypts the content using these keys.

The system ensures that even authorized users cannot get direct access to encryption keys. Keys and policies are kept only on the server to prevent offline security breach. All time-based decisions are made based on the server clock and not on a user’s clock which could be a subject to unauthorized users.

User Management

User selection within a large list of users can be managed in a tabbed, alphabetically sorted selection interface. This reduces the number of clicks needed to select users for addition to eRoom members lists, access control lists, notification alerts, and other areas.

It is a full-feature collaboration solution and is the foundation of eRoom Enterprise, a companion product integrated with Documentum Content Management Platform.

eRoom Enterprise

eRoom Enterprise integrates collaboration and content management features. Teams can work on projects, resolve issues, make decisions, and engage external participants. At the same time, the content is stored in the enterprise repository which allows team members to search for, reference, re-use or publish information.

eRoom Enterprise provides an environment in which people from different organizations and different time zones can work together on projects, programs, and processing while managing content which is generated during this process as an end result.

eRoom Enterprise provides enterprise repository across collaborative workspaces. It includes content management features such as library services, life cycles, renditions, virtual documents, workflows, records policy management, retention, etc.

Discussions, data tables, notes, and calendars are available throughout the repository. In this way, they can be tracked, audited, and archived. This is especially important as companies look to ensure that content created by teams is managed within corporate governance guidelines.

Users can leverage this framework to securely interact with external participants while protecting internal content from unauthorized access.

It includes the support for the classification of collaborative content according to corporate taxonomies and categorization strategies. Companies that have developed custom content properties based on document types or other criteria can use these properties in eRoom Enterprise, enforcing classification of content according to corporate standards.

Centrally managed content can be delivered to multiple applications and projects. Collaborative content, including file templates, can be shared across multiple eRoom workspaces without duplication, reducing human errors, and eliminating time spent searching for or recreating existing information.

Content Management Systems Reviews - Documentum - Content Transformation Services

In my last post on Documentum, I described Digital Asset Manager and mentioned that Content Transformation Services product of Documentum is very useful in conjunction with Digital Asset Manager. Content Transformation Services product of Documentum is useful also for other content management goals. In this post, I am going to describe Documentum Content Transformation Services (CTS).

Content is typically authored in one formal (such as Microsoft Word) then converted or transformed into a different format (such as HTML or PDF) that is more appropriate for the content reuse. This is a slow process and requires specialized knowledge not possessed by every user. Documentum CTS automates the creation of re-use ready content through pre-defined format transformations that can occur on demand or systematically.

The CTS suite enhances these processes and improves efficiencies by providing additional content intelligence, such as thumbnail and storyboard support, while shielding business users from the technical complexities of converting files from one format to another.

The full CTS suite includes:

• Document Transformation Services (DTS) 
• Advanced Document Transformation Services (ADTS) 
• Media Transformation Services (MTS) 
• Audio Video Transformation Services (AVTS) 
• XML Transformation Services (XTS) 

Document Transformation Services (DTS)  includes the following features:

• HTML support: automatically renders HTML from formats including Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Corel WordPerfect, and Adobe PDF. 
• PDF support: generates PDF format for documents, providing access to engineering and architectural drawings, graphics, and publishing files. 
• Rendition management: links PDF or HTML versions to the original document so that changes automatically update the web-ready version. 
• Extensibility/configurability: adds server-side support for additional transformations and property extraction for any document format. 

Advanced Document Transformation Services (ADTS)

Advanced Document Transformation Services (ADTS) extends the capabilities of DTS by providing additional PDF rendering for multi-page TIFF, AutoCAD, Microsoft Visio, and Microsoft Project. ADTS also provides additional format and metadata extraction support, a necessity for content authors who use advanced features such as template styles, hyperlinks, and URLs in their source documents and wish to preserve these features in their PDF documents.

ADTS also provides support for the electronic common technical document (eCTD) specification submission process.

ADTS includes the following features:

• Document thumbnail and storyboard support: automatically generates thumbnails and storyboards for popular document formats. 
• Hyperlink and bookmark support: leverages the styles, bookmarks, and hyperlinks contained in files such as Microsoft Word to create bookmarks within the PDF output. It automatically converts ail URL text to clickable links, including internal cross-references within the document. 
• XMP round-tripping: allows the extraction of Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) attributes on import into the Documentum repository and indexes them for searching and categorization. When content is exported from the repository, the content and metadata stay together. 
• PDF assembly: merges multiple files into a single PDF with the ability to auto generate a table of contents. Watermarks and overlays: applies a watermark content overlay when transforming content to PDF. 
• Header and footer support: automatically adds header and footer information such as date, filename, or object metadata values when performing PDF transformations. 
• PDF manipulation: enables you to modify the security settings, add watermarks, or web optimize existing PDF content with predefined and configurable transformations. 
• E-mail to PDF support: transforms MSG and EML files to PDF and RTF formats. 
• Embedded PDF attachments: embeds PDF transformations as attachments (visible in the "attachments" tab of Acrobat Reader). 
• CAD support: supports DWG, DWF, and DXF CAD formats. 

Media Transformation Services (MTS) delivers transformation and analysis for rich media content such as photographs, presentations, and graphics and includes the following features:

• file transformation: transforms media automaticity when adding it to the repository, on demand, or through workflow. PowerPoint assembly: saves time by dynamically creating new Microsoft PowerPoint presentations using individual slides from existing files.
• rich media attribution: quickly locates content that has been checked into the Documentum repository by searching for media properties.
• thumbnail/storyboard support: automatically generates low resolution thumbnails and storyboards. XMP round-tripping: extracts extensible metadata platform (XMP) attributes on check-in and indexes them for searching and categorization.
• server-side support: adds server-side support for thumbnails, transformations, and property extraction for any document format.

Audio Video Transformation Services (AVTS) is an add-on tool to Media Transformation Services. It delivers enhanced support for audio, video, and Flash content and includes the following features:

• format transformations: easily converts popular audio and video formats through a web browser, without any additional applications, eliminating the need to download audio and video to the desktop.
• dlosed caption extraction: automaticity extracts closed caption text and associates it with the content in the Documentum repository.
• streaming server support: integrates with popular streaming servers providing support for all of the major audio and video file formats.
• thumbnail support: provides frame-by-frame viewing of low resolution video so that you don’t need to export your files.
• storyboard support: automatically extracts storyboard frames based on scene changes or at specified intervals.
• flash support: allows you to thumbnail and storyboard SWF files and convert them to other web-ready video formats using built-in Flash transformation capabilities.

XML Transformation Services (XTS)

XTS is built for customers who would like to leverage the power behind authoring and managing their content in XML. It transforms and renders XML documents into a variety of formats. It includes an eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT) engine, a style sheet tool kit and the following features:

• extensive format transformations: easily converts XML content into popular web formats, mobile formats, PDF, help file formats, Rich Text Format (RTF), and Postscript.
• XSLT engine: leverages the eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformation (XSLT) engine with full extensible Stylesheet Language Formatting objects (XSL FO) support.
• stylesheet toolkit: supports Darwin information Typing Architecture (DITA) and DocBook standards.
• XML schema transformation support: Converts XML from one schema to another and involves these transformations via workflows, lifecycles, user-based actions, and other applications.

More Documentum products descriptions are coming up.