Go to page: 1 2   Printer Friendly Version

Avoiding and Surviving Content Pack Rats

Most of us who have had to deal with junk around the house come up with one of two solutions: throw it away or hide it. Unfortunately, the "out of sight, out of mind" solution doesn't work. You can't simply hide things because, sooner or later, you're going to have to deal with it. And when that time comes, the more you have to clean up, the less you'll want to do it.

The effort required to deal with extraneous or expired content in the future is entirely dependent on what you do now:

Perform the occasional intranet content audit and delete or archive old content to prevent it from piling up.

Time stamp content and have your technical staff implement automatic housekeeping jobs that can clean up expired content with little-to-no human intervention.

Conduct an intranet user survey and review the system's logs to identify what types of content is be accessed most and what isn't even being looked at. If you know that users aren't looking at certain types of content, you'll know not to include them in the future.

The best way to avoid having to clean up years worth of junk is not to collect it in the first place. Try to be more selective about what you post. It will take a little more time to review each piece of content, but you'll save yourself a lot of work in the long run.

Make sure that the people you task with managing your intranet content actually want to do it. If you pull someone in to fill that role against their will, don't be surprised if they just mechanically save every piece of content in front of them.

If your intranet is new, extra care must be taken as to what content to include. During an intranet's infancy, content owners might be a little trigger-happy, loading up the empty system with everything they come across in an attempt to populate the system as quickly as possible. This can set the tone, and an unwanted precedent, for future content submissions.

People have a tendency to fill things to capacity just because they have the space. The bigger the house, the more junk you put in it. The bigger the intranet, the more content you store. Just because you can doesn't mean you should. The true worth of an intranet is not measured by how much content it has, it's how much quality content it has.

While you might think that you're doing your users a favor by providing them with mounds of information, that superfluous content will do nothing but detract from the system and the truly valuable content. All that content is going to stay locked up in some dusty old corner of your intranet until one day you'll have deal with it. Let's just hope you don't strain something when you do.

Paul Chin (www.paulchinonline.com) is a freelance writer and IT consultant. He has previously worked in the aerospace and competitive intelligence industries as a software developer and intranet specialist. He currently writes on a wide range of IT topics, including systems development and security, digital communications and media, content management and web design.

Go to page: 1 2   Printer Friendly Version