Although far from my favorite topic, document and content management is a key focus in the world of business today. In fact, at my day job I am currently working on a huge document management initiative that no matter how I try I cannot extricate myself. In a general sense, what is document management? My definition would be that document management is the way in which a business creates, revises, publishes, retains, and purges electronic information assets. In this case, I am considering information assets to include any type of document that contains business critical information. I do not include Information Technology assets like code, applications, and databases here because although these assets have similar conceptual requirements, they should be handled in different ways such as source code control systems and through database and application management procedures. What is required to successfully manage your documents? Obviously, it can be accomplished in a number of different ways running the gamut from completely manual to entirely electronic processes and from "plain jane" software packages to full blown automated enterprise solutions. The decision really rests on several factors including: the number of documents your company has, the size of your company in terms of number of people creating documents, and the all important monetary and resource constraints to name a few.
In my environment, I am working with a full-fledged
automated document management system (Documentum
4i) that will serve tens of thousands of people and requires significant budget and support resources. However, I think the principles and concepts I present here can apply to other document management systems as well.
Document Management versus NT File Shares
Currently, in most companies, documents are stored in a number of different places: individual PC hard drives, public and private network drives, disks, web servers, zip drives, paper documents in file cabinets, and more. This typical paradigm results in documents being stored in multiple places and islands of unorganized information that is difficult to manage. The result is being unable to find information, potentially using out of date or inaccurate information, and limiting the ability to leverage existing information. In addition, access control on regular file servers is typically administered only by an information technology department or help desk, thus resulting in an additional layer someone must go through in order to access the information they need in order to do their job.
How a Document Management System Solves the Problem
A document management system can coordinate the changes, access, and availability of business critical information on a global scale. People can share and leverage each other's work (permissions determine access). The most current version of any document is always the one that is presented so they know they are using the "right" document. In addition, a version history is available to provide access to previous versions from any point in time during the document life cycle as well provide for an audit trail. At any step of the process you can find out:
Who made changes
What changes were made and why
When the changes were made
Also, it prevents two people from editing the same document simultaneously by "locking" the current document whenever someone has it checked out for editing. It even lists which user locked the document so you can yell at them if they keep it checked out for too long. With this type of system, a company can manage documents through the entire lifecycle from creation through disposal (and even use automated retention schedules to purge stuff no longer needed).
Searching for information you need when you need it can be a real challenge. A document management system can improve this as well. In the system I am using, every document has an associated document type. These types are standard and centrally managed in the corporation. Each type has a predefined set of attributes. I explain this confusing concept to befuddled users as follows: a document is an object of a specific type which means it is like a noun whereas an attribute is a descriptor of that object or an adjective. So think - I have a presentation (document type) that has an "author as person" equal to Joe Schmoe (descriptor or attribute). These different types and attributes can then be used in search scenarios to refine your search to any combination of folders, document types, attributes and keywords. So, you can see how this can create a much more powerful search across a large number of documents.
Benefits for the Web
Besides the benefits of regular document management, this type of system can make publishing to and maintaining an Intranet much easier. The technical web staff creates web pages that use code to query the document management system and publish the latest and greatest information. You can create programmatic links to specific documents, all documents in specific folders, all documents of a particular document type, or all documents with a particular attribute and value (for example, publish all documents where the attribute publish to the website equals True). This creates a more "hands-off" publishing scheme for the Intranet, as the technical staff does not need to be involved on a day-to-day basis. If users can be convinced (or coerced) to use the document management system in this way, it can create Intranet content that is much more dynamic, accurate, and up to date.
As you can see, there are a number of potential benefits to a document management system. For a more comprehensive list of vendors encompassing a wide range of functionality and price ranges, you can visit http://www.documentmanagement.org.uk/pages/vendors.htm.
Last time ( A PDF Primer Part I)I told you all about why you would want to use PDFs in the course of your work. I know you’ve been waiting for the how…. so without any ado, let’s cut to the chase and create some PDFs!
What I learned in my last job is that many people aren’t sure when is the best time to use a PDF versus an HTML file versus some native application file for given web content. In addition, people aren’t always sure how to create them and some people wouldn’t know how to view them if the tech support staff didn’t already configure their computer properly so it “just happened” in the background. In this two article series, I plan to give you some rules of thumb for when to use PDFs versus other types of files as well as a quick primer of the different ways available to create PDFs and when to use what.
Your Webmaster delivers the news that she is leaving for new challenges. Are you prepared? Do you have any clue whatsoever what she does? Have you had any cross training with other Web talent in your organization? For that matter, do you even have other web talent in your organization?
P.G. Daly found getting the decentralized businesses in her company to accept intranet standards akin to herding cats, but less enjoyable. In response to never ending inquiries about what skills are required to author web pages, get access to do so, training, and the like, she revamped her standards and guidelines. Given the environment at her company, the limited authority afforded intranet professionals, and the need to lay down the law at least on certain issues, she created a basic framework by which content authors must work. The following article takes a glimpse at the guidelines she setup.
Can you imagine a sales force roaming the countryside selling products without access to up to date customer information? Well, then you can imagine P.G. Daly's reaction when one division explained to her that a third party vendor maintained all the customer data for their division and that the only way salespeople could get this information was to phone the third party vendor, have them run a report, and then have it sent via fax or mail. Certainly not the most efficient or cost-effective process on the planet. Why not use the Intranet?
After much ado and a very long wait, I recently gave my Intranet a new look and feel. Originally, the project was supposed to encompass a number of process and procedural changes as well, but these got sidelined in light of a number of political and resource roadblocks. Nevertheless, I decided there were enough improvements to be had with just updating the look, feel, and navigation of the Intranet, so I forged ahead.
After her last column, people asked P.G. Daly about other big success stories from her intranet, so she thought she'd share another "real big one" with you. One of the most sure-fire ways of driving traffic to your site is putting something employees absolutely need on the site and making that the only way they can get it. Sound simple? It can be (at least sometimes).
About a year ago, one division of P.G Daly's company came to her with the problem of disseminating weekly sales reports. The problem was that they had about 60 sales people across 2 different sales forces (product lines) that had to submit sales reports to the corporate office on a weekly basis. These reports needed to be distributed to an audience of 40 or more people from regional sales managers to upper management. The process in place was to have everyone e-mail their weekly report (in a Microsoft Word Format that had a common template) to an Administrative Assistant who would photocopy and assemble packets that got sent through the regular inter-office mail. Needless to say, this occupied a good piece of this assistant's time the beginning of each week and wasn't the most timely distribution of information. This article shows how P.G. Daly and the company's Intranet came to the rescue.
Recently, a number of people have asked P.G Daly questions about directory structure for Intranets. Namely, what is the best way to structure folders and files for my site? This question is valid both in the macro sense of an entire Intranet as well as for each individual author creating their own little piece of the pie. So, she got to thinking about how effectively she set things up on her company's Intranet many moons ago. What does she recommend as good practices? What would she suggest avoiding?
Many readers want to know how P.G. Daly designed and administered her intranet usage survey. Rather than answering a number of e-mails privately, she thought it would be best to share these details on the survey experience with everyone, so as to help readers implement their own intranet survey and put this knowledge to good use.
In her last column, P.G. Daly shared with you the key conclusions from her recent Intranet survey. This time, she'd like to address the answers to the important questions of -- What do users want to see? What would encourage them to use the Intranet more often? And, most critical, what recommendations and actions does she have planned to address some of the biggest issues?
After over 18 months since the intranet was "officially rolled out", it was time to formally ask users if they were using the intranet or not and to find out what they found useful or useless as well as determine what would get them to use it more. Here's how I asked went about sending out and intranet survey and the type of feedback I recieved in return.
Your Company just formed an E-Business. What
technical skills does this organization need to be successful? Even if
most of the large technical projects are outsourced, surely the group
needs a core of technical skills to do some development and maintenance
in-house, and even more importantly, to understand what systems are
being implemented by these vendors and how it all fits together.
Unless you are in a high-tech company, or just plain
got lucky, there is a reasonable chance that upper management is not
quite as active in their support as you might like. So you're building
the success of your intranet one "worker bee" at a time with some degree
of grassroots effort at play. Can you truly grow an intranet
organization-wide one person at a time? Maybe not quite that slowly, but
you can increase usage and usefulness one niche at a time.
P.G. Daly's recent articles on creating and managing
intranet content ("Creating and Managing Content" and "Authoring Tool
Standards: Critical? or Form Over Function?") generated an overwhelming
response from readers. In this column, She shares some of the most
helpful comments and insights.
No matter how flashy the design, advanced the technology, or just plain cool your intranet is, the question still remains: are people using it? Although all companies have users on both ends of the PC savvy scale, overall, how would you rate your company's Technology IQ?
What about new authors or PC savvy folks in an MIS Department that want to publish content? Should they be forced into the "old" standards or allowed to branch out and try a new approach?
Content is king for an intranet. Yet if content is so important, and users desire it, why is it so difficult to create and maintain large amounts of information on a company-wide scale?
As Intranet professionals, we tend to think most about technology (if we are techies), design (if we are designers or artists) or functionality (if we deal with the business users). But how often do we consider the basic organizational dynamics of our company?
"Build It, And They Will Come". It may have worked for
Kevin Costner in the movie "Field of Dreams", but chances
are this philosophy alone won't work for your company's
Intranet.
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