http://tc.eserver.org/dir/Design/Content-Management/Information-Design A listing of the most recently indexed works about Design and Content Management and Information Design in the field of technical communication. en-us Copyright (c) 2005-08 by the EServer. All rights reserved. tclib-editorial@eserver.org (TC Library Editorial Board) webmaster@eserver.org (Geoffrey Sauer) http://tc.eserver.org/images/newlogo.gif http://tc.eserver.org/dir/Design/Content-Management/Information-Design http://tc.eserver.org/35818.html http://tc.eserver.org/35818.html This deconstruction of content is not limited to Twitter. The movement to expose underlying data and make it more actionable is gaining momentum across industries and platforms. One example is the move to report financial data in XBRL format (eXtensible Business Reporting Language). Another is the growing use of microformats and RDFa, which are small patterns of HTML that represent data on commonly published subjects on Web pages, such as people, events, blog topics, reviews, and tags. Twitter's character limit and accessibility, however, are the simplest and most recognized example of how elements of connected data can provide value both individually and in aggregate. http://tc.eserver.org/35819.html http://tc.eserver.org/35819.html There's long been something fairly unsatisfying about the relationship that enterprise architecture has had with the business side of most organizations. Recently there's a growing realization that traditional enterprise architecture as its often practiced today might be broken in some important way. What might be wrong and how to fix it are the questions du jour. http://tc.eserver.org/35770.html http://tc.eserver.org/35770.html SharePoint can neither create nor destroy organizational chaos, but does an excellent job of reflecting the level of organizational chaos that existed at the time of deployment. The “SharePoint paradox” and paths to SharePoint wickedness. The power of Issue Mapping and IBIS based collaboration. How to leverage the best of SharePoint and Issue Mapping. http://tc.eserver.org/35772.html http://tc.eserver.org/35772.html Given the pressures on firms to provide increased value at lower costs, it’s imperative that they find ways to reduce the costs of creating and managing documents and increase their value to clients and personnel. Microsoft SharePoint provides a range of features to make your firm’s documents “smarter,” from capturing rich metadata to automating workflows to intelligent search. As applied, these features can transform passive documents into active, reusable resources. In this article I’ll describe some of the ways that SharePoint can reduce the effort to create, manage and retrieve documents and increase their value, as smart documents, to both your firm and its clients. http://tc.eserver.org/35773.html http://tc.eserver.org/35773.html The SharePoint 2010 Managed Metadata feature has been my favourite topic since coming back from the SharePoint conference. I get excited about this kind of thing because metadata is a big part of all of the software we build. But some people are probably saying "Why should we get so excited about new metadata features in SharePoint? The new UI and improved capacity are really the neat things about SharePoint 2010." http://tc.eserver.org/35677.html http://tc.eserver.org/35677.html The shift in information development from a narrative to a modular writing style reflects the established shift towards modularization of source code. What can information developers learn from software developers? What are the challenges and benefits of the modular approach? http://tc.eserver.org/35333.html http://tc.eserver.org/35333.html How closely does the content in your CMS resemble the logical content you planned on? # Different systems have vastly different content modeling. http://tc.eserver.org/35310.html http://tc.eserver.org/35310.html Intelligent content is content which is not limited to one purpose, technology or output. It’s content that is structurally rich and semantically aware, and is therefore discoverable, reusable, reconfigurable and adaptable. It’s content that helps you and your customers get the job done, often automatically. http://tc.eserver.org/35297.html http://tc.eserver.org/35297.html A Content Curator is someone who continually finds, groups, organizes and shares the best and most relevant content on a specific issue online. I think that professional writers and technical writers should consider a move towards this role. We already search for and find the best content, sift through loads of content, discard poor content, and publish the most worthy content whenever a software release goes out. This description also sounds like something a content strategist would do as part of their analysis of the content. http://tc.eserver.org/35298.html http://tc.eserver.org/35298.html A Content Curator is someone who continually finds, groups, organizes and shares the best and most relevant content on a specific issue online. The most important component of this job is the word "continually." In the real time world of the Internet, this is critical. In an attempt to offer more of a vision for someone who might fill this role, here is my crack at a short manifesto for someone who might take on this job. http://tc.eserver.org/35122.html http://tc.eserver.org/35122.html Although managing costs is important anytime, it is especially important in today's economic reality where budgets are shrinking drastically. Getting your money's worth as well as what you need to support your data should be a core factor of any data project. The two biggest cost factors are the type of conversion work you need done and how much of it you'll need. This article focuses on how your goals for your project relate to the output format you choose, and how that format impacts costs. While some outputs, like XML, provide higher capabilities, they also cost more to create. http://tc.eserver.org/35123.html http://tc.eserver.org/35123.html While I'm a big fan of XML for many purposes, it's a misconception that it's the single best solution in every scenario, and it's worthwhile to consider the alternatives in situations where the benefits of XML are not necessary. In this article, I discuss alternatives to XML, SGML, and HTML that might be suitable when budgets are more limited. While XML is perfect for highly coded information, other options can work well for many kinds of information. Markup languages are at the high end of the cost spectrum, so if you don't need the benefits they provide, you certainly should consider the alternatives discussed below. http://tc.eserver.org/35030.html http://tc.eserver.org/35030.html Usually, the one thing missing from the planning of a WCM-driven web site is what's most likely to shoot the implementation in the foot: the functional design of the CMS back-end. The form and function of how the CMS will work, look and feel for the end-user of the system, not the visitor to the web site, is too often overlooked. This is odd: isn't the rationale for getting a CMS in the first place usually based on some kind of ROI in efficiency in actually producing the content and sites? http://tc.eserver.org/35033.html http://tc.eserver.org/35033.html Web Managers must think globally (information) and act locally (Web) all the while trying to widen your universe and build the internal business relationships which will allow your organization to manage its information more holistically now or in the future. http://tc.eserver.org/34907.html http://tc.eserver.org/34907.html オンラインコンテンツは、文脈とは無関係にユーザーの目にとまることが多い。本来想定された目的とは違う目的で読まれることもよくある。そうした目的を全部予測することはできないが、テキストのさまざまな利用を考慮することはできる。 http://tc.eserver.org/34715.html http://tc.eserver.org/34715.html Technical Communication continues to change as we find new ways to meet the needs of our audiences. I have attended several conferences recently and discussed several of the latest trends with other technical communicators. This article provides a quick list of several of these trends and ideas. http://tc.eserver.org/34678.html http://tc.eserver.org/34678.html “Content types” are among the least understood, and yet most potent, aspects of user experience and web design. Most people encounter them for the first time when implementing a grand-scale content management system (CMS) because you have to define content types before building templates for each kind of content you’re going to publish. Because they associate content types so closely with CMS, some make the mistake of equating content strategy with content management. They’re not the same thing, though they are certainly related. Your content strategy specifies the content types that will then be modeled for your CMS. http://tc.eserver.org/34576.html http://tc.eserver.org/34576.html There are two camps in technical documentation. There’s the “quick web” folks who connect easily and author easily, and then there’s the “structured quality” camp that requires more thoughtful testing and time spent on task analysis and information architecture. http://tc.eserver.org/34295.html http://tc.eserver.org/34295.html Users often see online content out of context and read it with different goals than you envisioned. While you can't predict all such goals, you can plan for multiple uses of your text. http://tc.eserver.org/33913.html http://tc.eserver.org/33913.html This paper shows how topic maps can address the limitations of traditional content management systems while building on their strengths. The term ITMS (Integrated Topic Management System) is coined for a content management system based on topic maps, and the paper shows what is necessary to build such systems, as well as what benefits they bring. The use of the WebDAV protocol to layer topic maps over content stores is also considered, and an abstract topic map-to-content store protocol is sketched, which corresponds very closely to WebDAV. http://tc.eserver.org/33914.html http://tc.eserver.org/33914.html Topic maps are a new ISO standard for describing knowledge structures and associating them with information resources. As such they constitute an enabling technology for knowledge management. Dubbed “the GPS of the information universe”, topic maps are also destined to provide powerful new ways of navigating large and interconnected corpora. While it is possible to represent immensely complex structures using topic maps, the basic concepts of the model — Topics, Associations, and Occurrences (TAO) — are easily grasped. This paper provides a non-technical introduction to these and other concepts (the IFS and BUTS of topic maps), relating them to things that are familiar to all of us from the realms of publishing and information management, and attempting to convey some idea of the uses to which topic maps will be put in the future. http://tc.eserver.org/33842.html http://tc.eserver.org/33842.html CMS is revolutionizing the way higher education handle online content. So why are most universities still managing their course catalogs by hand? Join David Cummings for an in-depth look at how XML can improve a university beyond its website. http://tc.eserver.org/33771.html http://tc.eserver.org/33771.html OK. So you have your documents in XML. How do you deliver them to readers? You've heard great things about separation of form and content, and would like different kinds of readers to see the documents styled in different ways. And in order to make the collection of documents more useful, you would like to have full-text search. The quality assurance people would like some help with tools for checking documents and finding errors and inconsistencies in existing ones. Oh, and by the way, we just took a budget cut, so can you do it without breaking the bank? http://tc.eserver.org/33654.html http://tc.eserver.org/33654.html Business integration is at the heart of many of today's industry trends. As businesses consolidate infrastructure, and look at rolling out service-oriented architectures, they are finding they need to link previously isolated applications. It's not easy. You can't link applications without some form of middleware, an extra application layer that lets their various systems communicate. Whether you use web services, or a message-based solution, there's one key feature that's at the heart of modern integration technologies: XML. http://tc.eserver.org/33273.html http://tc.eserver.org/33273.html There is a lot of mumbo-jumbo like the word "taxonomy" that is being thrown around to describe how to manage so-called unstructured content like business documents, web site pages, and old fashioned technical reports and articles. On the one hand, we want to remember what we already know about how to create a useful core catalog record to describe a content object so it can be found again later when needed. On the other hand, there are some bad habits and obsolete ideas like inverted file indexes that we need to get beyond. This talk is about what we have seen in dozens of applied information management projects over the past few years, and how you can take advantage of what you already know to solve big problems like these in your own organizations. http://tc.eserver.org/33282.html http://tc.eserver.org/33282.html Information technology has become the Trojan Horse of information overload. It has been invited into the organization as some magical gift that will bring greater efficiency and reduced cost. Once inside, it feeds on resources and spews out unimaginable quantities of low quality data. Information technology has become the problem. The solution is to invest in people again. http://tc.eserver.org/33284.html http://tc.eserver.org/33284.html Content management systems suck. Or so you would think from the strife heard from analysts and practitioners alike. And yet, many websites regularly publish vast amounts of information with superior control and ease compared to manually editing pages. So where’s the disconnect between what’s possible and the too-often failure of CMS? http://tc.eserver.org/32714.html http://tc.eserver.org/32714.html The net effect of social networking is the increasing availability of fine-grained information about locales. This information is both interesting and valuable. It is sought after by people living in these places and by advertisers who are trying to reach these people. A handful of startups are recognizing the big potential of local information - relevance. In this post we look at different aspects of the hyperlocality, from satellites to local blogs, and ponder how this information will be organized and monetized. http://tc.eserver.org/31840.html http://tc.eserver.org/31840.html A case study of a team approach to information architecture at Duke University by graduates of the Duke Continuing Studies Technical Communication Certificate program. http://tc.eserver.org/31141.html http://tc.eserver.org/31141.html In all companies, the requirements of an editorial system are worked out individually from the analysis of existing functioning and the definition of editorial and publication processes required in the future. The first important criteria for analysis are change frequencies and degree of reuse of the published information. The description of the information types as well as translation sequences constitute another starting point for the definition of a modular work process (single-source principle) and publication options (cross-media publishing). http://tc.eserver.org/30685.html http://tc.eserver.org/30685.html Behind all the questions about how to model something is a bigger question: do you model it at all? When is it obvious to structure some content, and when do you just throw it into the 'WYSIWYG pile'? http://tc.eserver.org/30258.html http://tc.eserver.org/30258.html Organizations today face the challenge of two important enterprise architecture requirements: the need for agility and the overhead of regulatory governance. These requirements can be seen as mutually antagonistic -- if business processes must be flexible, then governance of those processes may be difficult. This article, part six in a six-part series, explores the notion of using manageability as a key enterprise architecture (EA) quality attribute to solve this problem. EA development is an ongoing process, and the central idea of this article is that by applying manageability as an EA attribute, the organizational processes, systems, and software become manageable. http://tc.eserver.org/29995.html http://tc.eserver.org/29995.html We hear the term knowledge management bandied about. It sounds suspiciously like a trendy new phrase for what we used to call 'documentation.' In truth, knowledge management is more than documentation. It encompasses documentation, data management, library management, and information design. Knowledge management is increasingly important; as the amount of content has increased, the task of locating the information in the content has become more difficult. You see, information is different from content. And knowledge is something that derives from information. http://tc.eserver.org/29913.html http://tc.eserver.org/29913.html Information models are a critical component of single sourcing, enterprise content management, and dynamic content management. The information model is your blueprint for the effective writing, structuring, and delivery of reusable content. This session explains how to design information models, including information product models and element models. It also explains the role of metadata and how to effectively design it. http://tc.eserver.org/29742.html http://tc.eserver.org/29742.html A weblog or 'blog' is a Web site with content consisting of a series of discrete postings added sequentially and presented in reverse chronological order. Historically used for personal Web sites, blogs in fact represent a form of lightweight content management that can be adapted to virtually any topic, including technical communication. The recent explosion of blogs is in part a result of the availability of publishing tools that simplify their creation. These tools vary significantly in capability, setup, and ease of use, and each offers advantages and disadvantages. http://tc.eserver.org/29397.html http://tc.eserver.org/29397.html Cisco Systems recognizes a need to move from creating and delivering large inflexible training courses, to database driven objects that can be reused, searched, and modified independent of their delivery media. This effort is called the Reusable Information Object Strategy. This strategy defines the standards and process for designing and developing Reusable Information Objects (RIOs) at Cisco Systems. http://tc.eserver.org/28933.html http://tc.eserver.org/28933.html Content Management Systems promise so much: content is easier to publish, easier to update, and easier to find and use. Lots of promises, but do CMSs really deliver? Masood Nasser examines why Content Management Systems often fail and shows how Information Architecture can come to the rescue. http://tc.eserver.org/28562.html http://tc.eserver.org/28562.html As other areas within organizations begin to consider structured content for the same reasons as technical communication departments, technical communicators have a golden opportunity to assist others in their move toward structured CM. http://tc.eserver.org/28184.html http://tc.eserver.org/28184.html A major topic among information development managers these days is single sourcing--writing information once and using it many times. Structured documents are critical for single sourcing. So, let's explore: what we mean by structuring documents; why structuring is useful; some of the concerns that writers have about structuring documents. http://tc.eserver.org/26742.html http://tc.eserver.org/26742.html Almost one-third of the users reported that more than 40 percent of the storage spending is for unstructured documents and information--I think that percentage will continue to grow annually. Further, AIIM President John Mancini, who prepared the report, found that larger organizations especially are aggressively pursuing consolidation and rationalization of their storage and archiving strategies--but that cost is not the prime motivation behind those activities. http://tc.eserver.org/25981.html http://tc.eserver.org/25981.html This white paper discusses the role of an XML repository into today’s enterprise infrastructure. Virtually every database and repository provide some degree of XML support; however, there are important distinctions between support for XML as a data type and the role of a repository whose architecture and operations are optimized to support the broad family of XML recommendations and standards. Specifically, this white paper will explore: The nature and extent of XML use across the enterprise, cost and quality of service implications of an infrastructure with, and without, an XML repository, the evolution of XML repositories from both a technology and a market segment perspective, criteria to determine when an XML repository would add significant value to an existing infrastructure, and capability and packaging recommendations for XML repository functionality that can be used to evaluate specific offerings. http://tc.eserver.org/23636.html http://tc.eserver.org/23636.html When people think about content management, they generally think about it from a systems perspective, focusing primarily on tools and technology. While it is true that content management usually requires a technological solution, it also requires that content be designed for reuse, retrieval, and delivery to meet your authors' and customers' needs. Content management requires that tools be configured to support authoring, reviewing, and publishing tasks, but first, those tasks must be designed. Designing content and the processes to create, review, and publish it is what information architecture is all about. The Information Architecture section of The Rockley Report will focus on the different aspects of information architecture for content management. This article introduces you to some of the components of information architecture that we will cover in The Rockley Report over time. http://tc.eserver.org/22443.html http://tc.eserver.org/22443.html CMS Wiki is a knowledge base for Content Management. http://tc.eserver.org/22441.html http://tc.eserver.org/22441.html Content management is information architecture writ large. http://tc.eserver.org/22414.html http://tc.eserver.org/22414.html The process of content management begins when an organization comes to the realization that it needs a system to manage content. While the interpretation of the term content management (CM) can be as simple as a set of guidelines for organizing and maintaining content, more typically today it means a sophisticated software-based system. A full-featured content management system (CMS) takes content from inception to publication and does so in a way that provides for maximum content accessibility and reuse and easy, timely, accurate maintenance of the content base. http://tc.eserver.org/20294.html http://tc.eserver.org/20294.html Many in-house information development groups are redefining their role (or seeking to justify their existence) around the concept of 'value-adding work.' But which tasks are value-adding? Finding an answer to this question is critical for the survival of information development groups. Unfortunately, there is no easy, 'one size fits all' answer, because the response depends largely on your point of view. Thus, deciding what is and isn't value-adding may require technical communicators to do more project-by-project task, audience, and media analysis than ever before. http://tc.eserver.org/19153.html http://tc.eserver.org/19153.html At a basic level, implementing a content management system (CMS) is like deploying any other large software package. Fundamental project management principles must be followed, along with best practice technical guidelines. Beyond this, however, a CMS project presents a number of unique challenges. These must be recognised and addressed for the project to be successful. http://tc.eserver.org/18985.html http://tc.eserver.org/18985.html Information models are a critical component of single-sourcing, enterprise content management, and dynamic content management. This session explains how to design information models, including information product models and element models. It also explains the role of metadata and how to effectively design it. http://tc.eserver.org/14175.html http://tc.eserver.org/14175.html Effective communication is a top priority for most businesses. To help create, manage, and access information that is used to conduct e-business, technologies such as content management (CM) and enterprise information portals (EIP) are dominating IT and CIO discussions. We will review how these rapidly evolving technologies come together to provide benefits for enterprise implementers. Given the historical deployment of these technologies, many associate the application of content management solutions to externally facing sites, serving transactional e-business needs; and the application of portals to internally facing sites for general employee access to a wide range of information sources and applications. However, both technologies can provide support for the complete information lifecycle, from information creation to management to delivery. http://tc.eserver.org/13602.html http://tc.eserver.org/13602.html This article first reviews the current literature that addresses the value of the technical communicator. Whereas those discussions focus on what is delivered to the user (reader), this article examines the value the technical communicator adds by creating organization (internal) knowledge. The article then examines the philosophical underpinnings that support any discussion of knowledge and defines the role of technical communicators as creators of knowledge. Finally, it offers an expanded value proposition for technical communicators and examines its practical implications.