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Electronic Signature and Content Management

12/28/2020

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At this time of digital transformation, it is difficult to talk about managing content management without talking about using electronic signatures. E-signatures make it possible to create digital workflows, help to maximize ROI from content management, and enhance productivity, compliance, security, and analytics.

Quite a few content management tools include e-signature implementation such as SharePoint, Box, and other content management systems (CMS).

Electronic signatures, digital business, and content management are interdependent. Without e-signature capability, documents continue to be printed for signing, then photocopied, shipped, corrected, imaged back into the system, archived, and shredded. 90% of the time and cost of labor dedicated to managing paper can be saved by using e-signatures. There are also other benefits of using e-signatures such as faster decision making, shorter sales cycles, and improved customer experience.

In the last few years, financial services, insurance, healthcare, and government have embraced digital transformation. A major driver is compliance and risk. Many organizations are concerned about legal risk or they struggle with the constantly changing regulatory landscape in their industries, in part because manual processing is very prone to errors.

Rather than react to regulatory pressure with additional people, manual controls, and process complexity, organizations that adopt e-signatures have these benefits:
  • Leverage workflow rules to execute transactions correctly and consistently.
  • Capture a full audit trail and electronic evidence.
  • Minimize exposure to risk due to misplaced or lost documents.
  • Make the process of e-discovery easier, more reliable, and less expensive.
  • Demonstrate compliance and reduce legal risk through the ability to playback the exact process that was used to capture signatures.
Let's look at this example: the VP of compliance is asking for transaction records from 5 years ago. How helpful would it be to quickly produce all signed records, in good order and replay the entire web-based signing process for context.

According to Forrester Research, organizations and customers now recognize that e-signature is an important enabler of digital business.

Today, the business is digital and e-signature is a foundational technology enabling end-to-end digitization. Let's look at this example: a customer filled out an insurance application. When the package is ready to be signed by the customer, traditionally it would revert to paper. Instead, documents are handed off to the electronic signature solution. This solution would manage every aspect of the e-sign process, including notifying and authenticating signers, presenting documents for review, capturing intent, securing documents, collecting evidence, etc.

Once e-signed, the documents can be downloaded in PDF format and stored in any archiving system. The e-signature audit trail and the security travels seamlessly with the document, ensuring the record can be verified independently or the e-signature service.

A document centric approach to embedding e-signatures within signed records allows for greater portability and easier long term storage in an CMS solution. Additional metadata related to the e-sign transaction can be handed off to the CMS as well for analytics purpose.

Adopting electronic signatures is quick and easy and does require IT or programming resources. Companies who are looking for a more integrated automated workflow, e-signature plugins for SharePoint, Salesforce, Box are available.

Organizations can quickly and easily enhance approval workflows with a more robust e-signature solution than a checkbox on an approval routing sheet, while also automating archival.

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Headless CMS - Contentful

12/30/2019

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In the last post, we have described headless CMS. Headless CMS architecture is rising in popularity in the development world. 
This model allows breakthrough user experiences, gives developers the great flexibility to innovate, and helps site owners future-proof their builds by allowing them to refresh the design without re-implementing the whole CMS.

One of headless CMS is Contentful. Contentful platform lets you create, manage and distribute content to any platform. It gives you total freedom to create your own content model so you can decide which content you want to manage. 

With an uncluttered user interface, Contentful is an efficient tool for creating and managing your content online, either alone or in team. You can assign custom roles and permissions to team members, add validations depending on the kind of content you have to insert and add media such as images, documents, sounds or video.

Contentful has a three-step process. First, you define a content model which is independent from any presentation layer that defines what kind of content you want to manage. In a second step, you and other internal or external editors can manage all of the content in easy-to-use and interactive editing interface. In the third step, the content is served in a presentation-independent way.

Being presentation-layer agnostic is one of the strengths of Contentful because you will be able to reuse your content across any platform.

To create a web site, you will either have to code it yourself and load content from Contentful API or work with someone who can develop the web site for you. Contentful is the platform where you can update the content of your web site, a mobile app or any other platform that displays content.

Contentful runs on all browsers. Contentful offers the most powerful REST APIs and the only enterprise-grade in-production GraphQL API.

There are three steps you'll have to take in order to deliver content from Contentful to your apps and websites.

1. Create your Content Model

The Content Model is the first step to structuring your content properly. It consists of creating content types that will accept only certain types of data for entry. For example, when creating an interactive quiz, you will need to add something that is a question, multiple answers, an indicator of the correct answer and potentially an image. This can be set up in the content model, so you can then easily just add as many "Questions" to your Quiz as you want.

2. Add Entries and Assets

Entries refer to the content itself. Entries could be blog posts, product features or ingredients of a recipe or any other content. These entries will depend on your previously created content model. In this phase you can also add assets like images, sounds, videos and many other files.

3. Deliver your content with our API

The delivery part of the content may or may not be left only to developers. In this step you set up API Keys that will determine which content will go to which platform. After the delivery is set up correctly, your content is then available for consumption as soon as you hit the “Publish” button.

We have over 18 years experience with numerous CMS, so we can help you with Contentful as well. Call us today for a free, no obligation consultation.

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Headless CMS

11/30/2019

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​A headless content management system, or headless CMS, is a back-end only content management system (CMS) built as a content repository that makes content accessible via a RESTful API for display on any device.

The term “headless” comes from the concept of chopping the “head” which is the front end, i.e. the web site off the “body” (the back end, i.e. the content repository).

Whereas a traditional CMS typically combines the content and presentation layers of a web site, a headless CMS is just the content component which focuses entirely on the administrative interface for content creators, the facilitation of content workflows and collaboration, and the organization of content into taxonomies.

It doesn’t include presentation layers, templates, site structure, or design, but rather stores its content in pure format and provides access to other components (e.g. delivery front ends, analytics tools, etc.) through stateless or loosely coupled APIs.

The headless CMS concept is one born of the demands of the digital era and a business’s need to focus on engaging customers with personalized content via multiple channels at all stages of the customer journey. As the content in a headless CMS is considered “pure” (because it has no presentation layer attached) just one instance of it can be used for display on any device; web site, mobile, tablet, smart watches, etc.

There is some confusion around what makes a headless CMS truly “headless”, as vendors use the term somewhat loosely to label their decoupled or hybrid CMS systems. But a true headless CMS is one that was built from the ground up to be API-first, not a full monolith CMS with APIs attached afterwards.

Cloud-first headless CMSs are those that were also built with a multi-tenant cloud model at their core and whose vendor promotes Software as a Service (Saas), promising high availability, scalability, and full management of security, upgrades, and hot fixes, etc. on behalf of clients.

Coupled CMS vs. Headless CMS

Most traditional (monolithic) CMS systems are “coupled”, meaning that the content management application (CMA) and the content delivery application (CDA) come together in a single application, making back-end user tools, content editing and taxonomy, web site design, and templates inseparable.

Coupled systems are useful for blogs and basic web sites as everything can be managed in one place. But this means that the CMS code is tightly connected to any custom code and templates, which means developers have to spend more time on installations, customization, upgrades, hot fixes, etc. and they cannot easily move their code to another CMS.

There is a lot of confusion around the differences between a decoupled CMS and a headless one because they have a lot in common.

A decoupled CMS separates the CMA and CDA environments, typically with content being created behind the firewall and then being synchronized and pushed to the delivery environment.

The main difference between a decoupled CMS and a headless CMS is that the decoupled architecture is active. It prepares content for presentation and then pushes it into the delivery environment, whereas a headless CMS is reactive. It sits idly until a request is sent for content.

Decoupled architecture allows for easier scalability and provides better security than coupled architecture, but it does not provide the same support for omni-channel delivery. Plus, there are multiple environments to manage, this increasing infrastructure and maintenance costs.

Advantages of Headless CMS
  • Omnichannel readiness: the content created in a headless CMS is “pure” and can be re-purposed across multiple channels, including web site, mobile applications, digital assistant, virtual reality, smart watches, etc., in other words, anywhere and at any time through the customer journey.
  • Low operating costs: headless CMSs are usually cheaper to install and run than their monolith counterparts, especially as they are typically built on a cloud model where multi-tenant options keep the running costs low.
  • Reduces time to market: a headless CMS promotes an agile way of working because content creators and developers can work simultaneously, and projects can be finished faster.
  • Easy to use: traditional CMSs tend to be cumbersome and complex as vendors attempt to offer every available feature in one box. Headless systems focus on content management, keeping things simple for those who use it on a daily basis. The entire user experience can usually be managed from within one back end.
  • Flexibility: content editors can work in whichever headless CMS they like and developers can build any kind of front end they want in their preferred language (e.g. Ruby, PHP, Java, or Swift) and then simply integrate the two via APIs (like JSON or XML) over RESTful communication. This allows for polyglot programming where multiple programming paradigms can be used to deliver content to multiple channels, and enables a company to benefit from the latest developments in language frameworks, promoting a micro-services architecture.
  • Cloud Scalability: the content purity and stateless APIs of headless CMSs enable high scalability, especially as the architecture fully leverages the elasticity of a cloud platform.
  • System Security: since the content is typically provided through a high-performance Content Delivery Network (rather than directly from the database), the risk of distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDOS) is reduced.
  • Marketing empowerment: marketers may end up relying more on developers in certain scenarios, e.g. creating a landing page with custom layout.
Disadvantages of Headless CMS
  • Multiple services: managing multiple systems can be challenging and a team’s knowledge base must cover them all.
  • No channel-specific support: since pure headless CMSs don’t deal with the presentation layer, developers may have to create some functionality, such as web site navigation.
  • Content organization: as pure headless CMSs do not typically provide the concept of pages and web site maps, content editors need to adapt to the fact that content is organized in its pure form, independently on the web site or other channel.
Headless CMS architecture is rising in popularity in the development world. This model allows breakthrough user experiences, gives developers the great flexibility to innovate, and helps site owners future-proof their builds by allowing them to refresh the design without re-implementing the whole CMS.

In the following posts, we will look more into headless CMS and will describe specific headless CMS. Stay tuned.

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Yammer and SharePoint

5/16/2018

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​Enterprise social network vendor Yammer was a large and fast growing player when Microsoft acquired it in late 2012. Yammer has users in more than 150 countries, and the interface is localized into more than 20 languages. 

At its core, Yammer is a micro-blogging service for employees to provide short status updates. Whereas Twitter asks, “What’s happening?” Yammer asks, “What are you working on?”

Over the years, Yammer’s functional services have expanded a bit to include the ability to express praise for co-workers, create polls, share documents and provision smaller discussion groups. In practice, however, some of those supplementary services aren’t as rich or well-integrated into SharePoint as you might find in competing products.

And you can find a lot of competing products: from collaboration suites that offer tightly integrated social networking services to supplemental “social layer” offerings that compete directly with Yammer.

For this reason, it would be good to ask this question: Is Yammer truly the best social layer for your enterprise?

When Microsoft acquired Yammer shortly before releasing SharePoint 2013, the deal sent shock waves through the marketplace. Soon Microsoft started recommending that you hide SharePoint’s native social services in SharePoint and use Yammer instead. 

Microsoft now promotes Yammer as a social layer over all your Microsoft systems, especially Office 365. Yammer usage can explode within an enterprise that heretofore offered no micro-blogging services, let alone any enterprise social network. People happily check in and often find new or long-lost colleagues in the first few days and weeks.

Yammer boasts a huge customer community. Customers get access to the quite sizable Yammer Community Network, where licensees share their successes, problems, questions and tips with the community as a whole. A small but growing apps marketplace rounds out the picture of a vibrant ecosystem around Yammer.

Smaller departments use Yammer to stay in touch, but enterprise-wide conversations typically decrease. Usage also drops off when employees struggle to place the service within the regular flow of their daily work. Yammer becomes yet another place you have to go, rather than a service you exploit as part of your regular workflow.

In a mobile environment, Yammer and SharePoint usage entails at least two separate native clients.

Yammer has key application: social questions and answers. When a user starts to type a question, Yammer uses a real-time search to auto-suggest already asked questions. That is useful and helps to eliminate duplication in content. 

However, there are no ratings for answers and the original questioner cannot declare an authoritative answer. Search is not really ideal, so as answers build, they become harder to leverage, especially given the scarcity of curation services. Yammer works less for knowledge management and more for really simple, quick responses to simple questions.

Another Yammer key social application: communities of practice. Groups are either public or private. You might also have separate groups in Exchange and SharePoint (via Delve), as well as Communities in SharePoint.

There is single sign-on to Yammer with Office 365.

Larger enterprises find Yammer better suited as a supplement to formal collaboration and social networking efforts rather than as the center. Its simplistic handling of files and limited search facilities limit Yammer’s ability to serve as much more than a simple micro-blogging service.

If you are looking for pure micro-blogging services to communicate across your enterprise and are not looking for ready-to-use applications tailored for specific goals and processes, Yammer offers an obvious alternative to consider, especially for those whose SharePoint plans rest primarily on the Office 365 edition.

Galaxy Consulting has experience with all versions of SharePoint and with Yammer. Please contact us today for a free consultation.

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What is New in SharePoint 2016?

11/23/2015

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Microsoft releases a new version of SharePoint every three years. SharePoint 2016 public Beta version is available. The full version is expected in Spring 2016. Here is what is new in SharePoint 2016 version.

SharePoint 2016’s main goal is to bring the best of Office 365 Cloud technology to on-premises solutions. In this truly effective Hybrid model, organizations will be able to have the best of the Cloud, whilst keeping all their important information and data stored on-premises.

SharePoint Server 2016 has been designed to reduce the emphasis on IT and streamline administrative tasks, so that IT professionals can concentrate on core competencies and mitigate costs. Tasks that may have taken hours to complete in the past have become simple and efficient processes that allow IT to focus less on day-to-day management and more on innovation.

Main Focus

User Experiences
  • Mobile experiences
  • Personalized insights
  • People-centric file storage and collaboration
Infrastructure
  • Improved performance and reliability
  • Hybrid cloud with global reach
  • Support and monitoring tools
Compliance
  • New data protection and monitoring tools
  • Improved reporting and analytics
  • Trusted platform
MinRoles

You can now install just the role that you want on particular SharePoint 2016 servers. This will only install what’s required there, and it will make sure that all servers that belong to each role are compliant. You will also be able to convert servers to run new roles if needed. You can look at the services running on the SharePoint 2016 server and see if they are compliant.

Downtime for Updates

Downtime previously required to update SharePoint servers has been removed.

Mobile and touch

Making decisions faster and keeping in contact are critical capabilities for increasing effectiveness in any organization. The ability for end users to access information while on the go is now a workplace necessity. In addition to a consistent cross-screen experience, SharePoint Server 2016 provides the latest technologies and standards for mobile push and information synchronization. With deep investment in HTML5, SharePoint 2016 provides capabilities that enable device-specific targeting of content. This helps to ensure that users have access to the information they need, regardless of the screen they choose to access it on.

SharePoint 2016 further empowers users by delivering a consistent experience across screens, whether using a browser on the desktop or a mobile device. Through this rich experience, users can easily transition from one client to another without having to sacrifice features.

App Launcher

The App Launcher provides a new navigation experience where all your apps are easily available from the top navigation bar. You can quickly launch your application, browse sites and access your personal files.

Improved Controls

Based on SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business, SharePoint 2016 document libraries inherit the improved control surface for working with content, simplifying the user experience for content creation, sharing and management.

Content Sharing

SharePoint 2016 improves the sharing experience by making it more natural for users to share sites and files. You can just click the "Share" button at the top right corner of every page, enter the names of people you want to share with, and press Enter. The people you just shared with will get an email invitation with a link to the site.

SharePoint still uses powerful concepts like permission levels, groups and inheritance to provide this experience. Part of sharing is also understanding who can see something. If you want to find out who already has access to a particular site, you can go to the "Settings" menu in top right corner, click "Shared with", and you will see the names and pictures of people who have access to the site.

Large File Support

SharePoint 2016 provides support for uploading files up to 10GB.

Compliance Tools

Preventing data loss is non-negotiable, and over-exposure to information can have legal and compliance implications. SharePoint 2016 provides a broad array of features and capabilities designed to make certain that sensitive information remains that way, and to ensure that the right people have access to the right information at the right time.

New In-Place Hold Policy and Document Deletion Centers will allow you to manage time-based, organization-wide in-place hold policies to preserve items in SharePoint and OneDrive for Business for a fixed period of time, in addition to managing policies that can delete documents after a specified period of time.

Cloud Hybrid Search

Cloud hybrid search offers users the ability to seamlessly discover relevant information across on-premises and Office 365 content. With the cloud hybrid search solution, you index all your crawled content, including on-premises content, in your search index in Office 365. When users query your search index in Office 365, they get unified search results from both on-premises and Office 365 cloud services with combined search relevancy ranking.

Cloud hybrid search provides some key benefits to customers of both SharePoint 2013 and early adopters of SharePoint 2016 IT preview, such as:
  • the ability to reduce your on-premises search footprint;
  • the option to crawl in-market and legacy versions of SharePoint, such as 2007, 2010 and 2013, without requiring upgrade of those versions;
  • avoiding the cost of sustaining large indexes, as it is hosted in Office 365.
With this new hybrid configuration, this same experience will also allow users to leverage the power of Office Graph to discover relevant information in Delve, regardless of where information is stored. You will not only be able to get back to all the content you need via Delve, but also discover new information in the new Delve profile experiences and even have the ability to organize content in Boards for easy sharing and access.

You will have to use the Office 365 Search for this to work. If SharePoint 2016 On-Premises users query against their On-Premises Search service, it will continue to give them local results only.

However, once available, this will allow users to fully embrace experiences like Delve in Office 365 and more to come in the future.

OneDrive Redirection

With SharePoint 2016, you can redirect your My Sites to your Office 365 subscription’s OneDrive for Business host. In other words, if a user clicks on OneDrive, he will be redirected to his Office 365 My Site and no longer to his On-Premises. Although you can use document libraries in on-premises SharePoint, Microsoft's larger strategy pushes users to use OneDrive to manage files across all devices. This creates the ability to integrate that OneDrive cloud storage into your on-premises SharePoint.

Follow Sites

Now users can click on “Follow” both On-Premises and on their Office 365 and see them all in one place under the “Sites” app in the App Launcher.

Site Folders

The OneDrive for Business area aims to bring users to one place to help them work with their files regardless of where they are. You will also be able to navigate your Sites and their libraries from there.

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Content Management Systems Review - Vasont

11/7/2015

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Vasont is a component content management system. It has powerful capabilities to store, update, search, and retrieve content. It offers version control, integrated workflows, project management, collaborative review, translation management, and reporting to manage content and business processes.

Vasont provides opportunities for multi-channel publishing and editing in your favorite applications. In addition, it provides an advanced editorial environment built to maximize, manage, and measure content reuse. Unicode support enables multi-language implementations. It also integrates the ability to process content with reusable, event driven business logic as an integral part of the system.

Content is stored in an underlying Oracle database and can be imported, exported, and stored in a variety of formats, including XML, SGML, HTML, as well as other formats that are required as input documents or deliverable formats. This is possible because Vasont can store content separately from any specific tagging structure.

Vasont can be used to store and manage embedded multimedia in structured content. It can also be used to provide a consistent organization and hierarchy to unstructured business documents and other digital assets to provide an overall document management solution. Vasont stores both component-level graphics and unstructured business documents as multimedia components.

Content can be stored at a document or sub-document level and with any content assets such as graphics and references. Vasont has great power at the component level with content organized using XML as input and output. Content can be manipulated and reused at any level of granularity. It is easy to add metadata to existing content and take advantage of the richness that metadata can provide.

Vasont also excels at integrating XML and non-XML traditional document content to provide powerful content applications that can cross departmental or functional boundaries. It is effective in a variety of content scenarios or in combined scenarios, including:
  • highly structured XML or SGML content.
  • structuring unstructured information assets such as in regulatory environments.
  • documents, especially linked to workflow and business logic.
  • digital assets such as graphics.

Vasont allows the building of content within and among these content relationships and content scenarios. It provides the power to model information in an organization and share it across different divisions. It stores all types of content in one repository. For example, structured content (i.e. XML, HTML, SGML, text and pointers), multimedia files, unstructured documents (i.e., Word, Excel, PDF files, graphics).


In Vasont Administrator, an administrator can set up the rules of structure and apply any processing options needed to transform, validate, or redirect data. The administrator can store settings for loading, extracting, editing and viewing data; user permissions; and workflow. Administrative responsibility can be assigned to specific Associate Administrators so that multiple groups or departments can share the system and yet control their own setups.

The system includes Vasont Universal Integrator (VUI) for Arbortext Editor, Adobe FrameMaker, JustSystems XMetaL, Quark XML Author, or Microsoft Word. The VUI allows authors to work in a familiar environment and provides a frequently used subset of functionality available in Vasont to simplify the editing process.

Vasont High-Level Application Architecture

Main parts are User Navigator and Content Navigator. Users, their roles and permissions are set up using User Navigator. Content Navigator includes content definitions, content instances, workflow definitions, load and extract views, and business logic which is processing options.

There is Vasont Application Programming Interface (API) for advanced customization and integration. The Vasont API allows for development of:
  • custom user interfaces;
  • web access to Vasont;
  • processing options;
  • Daemons.
Vasont Daemon Programs provides background processing routines that automate repetitive tasks such as extracting and loading content. Some customization is required to implement it.

Content Model

The content model and the corresponding rules of structure are defined by the administrator in the Vasont Administrator. These rules usually correspond closely to the structure rules defined in a Document Type Definition (DTD) or schema, but they may differ somewhat or may support multiple DTDs for different outputs. Structures may also be defined in Vasont, independent of a DTD, which is useful when storing documents and other digital assets that may need to be organized in a specific way but are not structured XML or SGML content. The rules of structure help guide you through the editing process by allowing you to place components in only the appropriate locations in a collection.

The Vasont Administrator is also used to define the big picture of how collections will be organized in Vasont, through the creation of content types and collection groups. These categories are represented in a tree or list view in Vasont and have symbols that represent them. This screen of a tree view shows the sequencing and grouping of collections.

The detailed items in a collection are called components. The top component in each tree view is called the primary. Normally a collection will contain many primaries.

Vasont has several classes of components and components can be broken down into smaller chunks, depending on the needs of the organization. The level of chunking is called granularity. It is essential to understand how your Vasont system has been configured so that you can find and edit the relevant material and maximize reuse. Granularity describes the smallest chunk of content stored in Vasont. A high level of granularity means that content is stored in large chunks. For example, you may have Book, Chapter, and Section components with no components defined at a level lower than Section. On the other hand, a very granular setup stores content in very small chunks, typically broken down into paragraph-level components or the equivalent.

Content types are the highest level of organization in Vasont and often serve as major divisions in content. Typically, different content types store content with very different content models, such as content used in different divisions or groups within a corporation. Content types are set up in the Vasont Administrator.

Content in each content type is organized into collections and optional collections groups. Inside of a content type called Publication, a collection such as Manuals is a grouping of similar content that follows the same structure. Depending on how similar the content model is, collections and collection groups within a single content type may share content. Collections in the same content type have similar content models so that content can be reused, moved, and referenced. Content in collections from different content types may be reused if the content types share similar raw components. Pointers are allowed from components in one collection to components in another collection and the collections can be in different content types.

Components are reusable chunks of content defined in the rules of structure for each collection. Although not required to, components usually correspond to elements in a document type definition (DTD). The three types of components are: text, multimedia, and pointer.

Metadata, or information about your content, helps you automate business logic and categorize, locate, filter, and extract content. Traditional types of metadata for topics include index entries that describe content or identifiers that can be used for cross-referencing or mapping context-sensitive help in software applications. Other examples of metadata include labeling content that applies to a particular customer or vendor, whether content should be published to an online help system or a printed manual, or other types of classifications. Metadata can be information that helps perform automated business logic through the use of Vasont Processing Options.

The Vasont Navigator provides an intuitive way to view, edit, reuse, and search content within a collection. Its hierarchical structure represents the organization of content in the system and icons indicate the state of items, including whether they have been included in a log. Components may be opened and closed individually or in groups. Open multiple Navigator windows to drag and drop content easily from one location to another, either within or across collections, rather than scrolling up and down the tree view.

Vasont provides powerful search capabilities to find and reuse content across the entire organization. The search function allows to search for content across collection boundaries. When performing a cross-collection search, you are prompted to select the collections to search and then specify query criteria for the content desired.

The Vasont Content Ownership feature gives a designated user the right to assign ownership to an individual user, or a group of users which provides the exclusive right to alter specified content. The designated user will have the right to assign ownership to a Primary component. Once ownership is assigned, the Vasont CMS then recognizes users who have permission to perform add/delete/change actions to the content, and prevents those who do not have ownership permissions from making changes to the content.

Each and every piece of unique content is stored in the raw material only once. Vasont compares content in the same raw component or in aliased raw components to determine if the content has been used in more than one instance. If the text of the components is the same, it is stored in the raw material as a single component. Vasont's ability to automatically reuse content where it can, without any specific setup, is called implicit reuse.

Depending on your setup, you may explicitly reuse content by referencing or “pointing to” relevant content from different contexts. For example, you may have a collection of shared procedure components that you can point to rather than storing the entire procedure in multiple locations.

Vasont can be used to store and manage embedded multimedia in structured content. It can also be used to provide a consistent organization and hierarchy to unstructured documents and other digital assets to provide an overall document management solution. Vasont stores both component-level graphics and unstructured documents as multimedia components.

Vasont offers a Translation Package that enables users to lower their overall translation costs by minimizing the amount of content that needs to be translated. This is possible because it keeps track of content that has already been translated and insures it is not re-translated. It also measures the amount of savings for each translation project by identifying the percentage of words that have already been translated. 

It offers Translation Management that helps users manage projects and sub-projects by tracking dates, vendors, languages and status information. A translation project is a module of content that is being translated into multiple languages (i.e., a topic that is being translated into French, German, and Chinese). The sub-projects are each individual language to which the module is being translated (i.e., the specific French translation is a sub-project of the topic translation project).You can submit your projects for quote or send them for translation directly from Vasont's translation window. This window also provides word counts for each translation project.

Integration with translation vendors can be used with this package for an automated content delivery back and forth from Vasont. The translation package is used to consolidate the status information for all your translation projects in one place so you can keep your projects on schedule and lower your costs.

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SharePoint 2013 Improvements

11/30/2014

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In this post, I will describe few improved features in SharePoint 2013.

Cross-Site Publishing

SharePoint 2013 has cross-site publishing. In the previous versions of SharePoint, it was not possible to easily share content across sites. Using cross-site publishing, users can separate authoring and publishing into different site collections: authored content goes into an indexable "catalog", and you can then use FAST to index and deliver dynamic content on a loosely coupled front end.

This feature is required for services like personalization, localization, metadata-driven topic pages, etc. An example of its use is a product catalog in an e-commerce environment. It can be used more generally for all dynamic content. Note that cross-site publishing is not available in SharePoint Online.

Here is how it works. First, you designate a list or a library as a "catalog". FAST then indexes that content and makes it available to publishing site collections via a new content search web part (CSWP). There are few good features put into creating and customizing CSWP instances, including some browser-based configurations. Run-time queries should execute faster against the FAST index than against a SharePoint database.

Cross-site publishing feature could significantly improve your content reuse capabilities by enabling you to publish to multiple site collections.

Templates

Creating templates still begins with a master page which is an ASP.NET construction that defines the basic page structure such as headers and footers, navigation, logos, search box, etc. In previous versions, master pages tended to contain a lot of parts by default, and branding a SharePoint publishing site was somewhat tricky.

SharePoint 2013 has new Design Manager module, which is essentially a WYSIWYG master page/page layout builder. Design Manager is essentially an ASP.NET and JavaScript code generator. You upload HTML and CSS files that you create and preview offline. After you add more components in the UI (for example, specialized web parts), Design Manager generates the associated master page. Page layouts get converted to SharePoint specific JavaScript that the platform uses to render the dynamic components on the page.

You can generate and propagate a design package to reuse designs across site collections. There are template snippets that enable you to apply layouts within a design package, but they are not reusable across design packages.

This process is more straight forward than the previous versions, but it still would likely involve a developer.

Contributing Content

SharePoint 2013 enables contributors to add more complex, non-web part elements like embedded code and video that does not have to be based on a specific web part. This feature is called "embed code". Note that if you are using cross-site publishing with its search based delivery, widget behavior may be tricky and could require IT support.

With respect to digital asset management, SharePoint has had the ability to store digital assets. However, once you got past uploading a FLV or PNG file, there was scant recourse to leverage it. SharePoint 2013 brings a new video content type, with automatic and manual thumbnailing.

Creating image renditions capability has also improved. It allows you to contribute a full fidelity image to a library, and then render a derivative of that image when served through a web page.

Other added features include better mobile detection/mobile site development and an improved editing experience.

Metadata and Tagging Services

SharePoint 2013 has solid metadata and tagging services with improved and simplified the term store. However, there is still no versioning, version control or workflow for terms.

Big improvement is that using FAST, you can leverage metadata in the delivery environment much more readily than you could in previous versions. You can use metadata-based navigation structures (as opposed to folder hierarchies), and deploy automated, category pages and link lists based on how items are tagged.

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Managed Metadata in SharePoint - Part Two

9/6/2014

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In part one of this post, I described metadata in SharePoint. In this part two, I will describe metadata management.

Managed metadata makes it easier for Term Store Administrators to maintain and adapt your metadata as business needs evolve. You can update a term set easily. And, new or updated terms automatically become available when you associate a Managed Metadata column with that term set. For example, if you merge multiple terms into one term, content that is tagged with these terms is automatically updated to reflect this change. You can specify multiple synonyms (or labels) for individual terms. If your site is multilingual, you can also specify multilingual labels for individual terms.

Managing metadata

Managing metadata effectively requires careful thought and planning. Think about the kind of information that you want to manage the content of lists and libraries, and think about the way that the information is used in the organization. You can create term sets of metadata terms for lots of different information.

For example, you might have a single content type for a document. Each document can have metadata that identifies many of the relevant facts about it, such as these examples:
  • Document purpose - is it a sales proposal? An engineering specification? A Human Resources procedure?
  • Document author, and names of people who changed it
  • Date of creation, date of approval, date of most recent modification
  • Department responsible for any budgetary implications of the document
  • Audience
Activities that are involved with managing metadata:
  • Planning and configuring
  • Managing terms, term sets, and groups
  • Specifying properties for metadata
Planning and configuring managed metadata

Your organization may want to do careful planning before you start to use managed metadata. The amount of planning that you must do depends on how formal your taxonomy is. It also depends on how much control that you want to impose on metadata.

If you want to let users help develop your taxonomy, then you can just have users add keywords to items, and then organize these into term sets as necessary.

If your organization wants to use managed term sets to implement formal taxonomies, then it is important to involve key stakeholders in planning and development. After the key stakeholders in the organization agree upon the required term sets, you can use the Term Store Management Tool to import or create your term sets. You can also use the tool to manage the term sets as users start to work with the metadata. If your web application is configured correctly, and you have the appropriate permissions, you can go to the Term Store Management Tool by following these steps:

1. Select Settings and then choose Site Settings.
2. Select Term store management under Site Administration.

Managing terms, term sets, and groups

The Term Store Management Tool provides a tree control that you can use to perform most tasks. Your user role for this tool determines the tasks that you can perform. To work in the Term Store Management Tool, you must be a Farm Administrator or a Term Store Administrator. Or, you can be a designated Group Manager or Contributor for term sets.

To take actions on an item in the hierarchy, follow these steps:

1. Point to the name of the Managed Metadata Service application, group, term set, or term that you want to change, and then click the arrow that appears.
2. Select the actions that you want from the menu.

For example, if you are a Term Store Administrator or a Group Manager you can create, import, or delete term sets in a group. Term set contributors can create new term sets.

Properties for terms and term sets

At each level of the hierarchy, you can configure specific properties for a group, term set, or term by using the properties pane in the Term Store Management Tool. For example, if you are configuring a term set, you can specify information such as Name, Description, Owner, Contact, and Stakeholders in pane available on the General tab. You can also specify whether you want a term set to be open or closed to new submissions from users. Or, you can choose the Intended Use tab, and specify whether the term set should be available for tagging or site navigation.

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Managed Metadata in SharePoint - Part One

9/6/2014

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Using metadata in SharePoint makes it easier to find content items. Metadata can be managed centrally in SharePoint and can be organized in a way that makes sense in your business. When the content across sites in an organization has consistent metadata, it is easier to find business information and data by using search. Search features such as the refinement panel, which displays on the left-hand side of the search results page, enable users to filter search results based on metadata.

SharePoint metadata management supports a range of approaches to metadata, from formal taxonomies to user-driven folksonomies. You can implement formal taxonomies through managed terms and term sets. You can also use enterprise keywords and social tagging, which enable site users to tag content with keywords that they choose. SharePoint enable organizations to combine the advantages of formal, managed taxonomies with the dynamic benefits of social tagging in customized ways.

Metadata navigation enables users to create views of information dynamically, based on specific metadata fields. Then, users can locate libraries by using folders or by using metadata pivots, and refine the results by using additional key filters.

You can choose how much structure and control to use with metadata, and the scope of control and structure. For example:
  • You can apply control globally across sites, or make local to specific sites.
  • You can configure term sets to be closed or open to user contributions.
  • You can choose to use enterprise keywords and social tagging with managed terms, or not.
The managed metadata features in SharePoint enable you to control how users add metadata to content. For example, by using term sets and managed terms, you can control which terms users can add to content, and who can add new terms. You can also limit enterprise keywords to a specific list by configuring the keywords term set as closed.

When the same terms are used consistently across sites, it is easier to build robust processes or solutions that rely on metadata. Additionally, it is easier for site users to apply metadata consistently to their content.

Metadata Terms

A term is a specific word or phrase that you associated with an item on a SharePoint site. A term has a unique ID and it can have many text labels (synonyms). If you work on a multilingual site, the term can have labels in different languages.

There are two types of terms:

Managed terms are terms that are pre-defined. Term Store administrators organize managed terms into a hierarchical term set.

Enterprise keywords are words or phrases that users add to items on a SharePoint site. The collection of enterprise keywords is known as a keywords set. Typically, users can add any word or phrase to an item as a keyword. This means that you can use enterprise keywords for folksonomy-style tagging. Sometimes, Term Store administrators move enterprise keywords into a specific managed term set. When they are part of a managed term set, keywords become available in the context of that term set.

Term Set

A Term Set is a group of related terms. Terms sets can have different scope, depending on where you create the term set.

Local term sets are created within the context of a site collection, and are available for use (and visible) only to users of that site collection. For example, when you create a term set for a metadata column in a list or library, then the term set is local. It is available only in the site collection that contains this list or library. For example, a media library might have a metadata column that shows the kind of media (diagram, photograph, screen shot, video, etc.). The list of permitted terms is relevant only to this library, and available for use in the library.

Global term sets are available for use across all sites that subscribe to a specific Managed Metadata Service application. For example, an organization might create a term set that lists names of business units in the organization, such as Human Resources, Marketing, Information Technology, and so on.

In addition, you can configure a term set as closed or open. In a closed term set, users can't add new terms unless they have appropriate permissions. In an open term set, users can add new terms in a column that is mapped to the term set.

Group

Group is a security term. With respect to managed metadata, a group is a set of term sets that share common security requirements. Only users who have contributor permissions for a specific group can manage term sets that belong to the group or create new term sets within it. Organizations should create groups for term sets that will have unique access or security needs.

Term Store Management Tool

The Term Store Management Tool is the tool that people who manage taxonomies use to create or manage term sets and the terms within them. The Term Store Management tool displays all the global term sets and any local term sets available for the site collection from which you access the Term Store Management Tool.

Managed Metadata column

A Managed Metadata column is a special kind of column that you can add to lists or libraries. It enables site users to select terms from a specific term set. A Managed Metadata column can be mapped to an existing term set, or you can create a local term set specifically for the column.

Enterprise Keywords column

The enterprise Keywords column is a column that you can add to content types, lists, or libraries to enable users to tag items with words or phrases that they choose. By default, it is a multi-value column. When users type a word or phrase into the column, SharePoint presents type-ahead suggestions. Type-ahead suggestions might include items from managed term sets and the Keywords term set. Users can select an existing value, or enter a new term.

Social Tags

Social tags are words or phrases that site users can apply to content to help them categorize information in ways that are meaningful to them. Social tagging is useful because it helps site users to improve the discoverability of information on a site. Users can add social tags to information on a SharePoint site and to URLs outside a SharePoint site.

A social tag contains pointers to three types of information:
  • A user identity
  • An item URL
  • A term
When you add a social tag to an item, you can specify whether you want to make your identity and the item URL private. However, the term part of the social tag is always public, because it is stored in the Term Store.

When you create a social tag, you can choose from a set of existing terms or enter something new. If you select an existing term, your social tag contains a pointer to that term.

If, instead, you enter a new term, SharePoint creates a new keyword for it in the keywords term set. The new social tag points to this term. In in this manner, social tags support folksonomy-based tagging. Additionally, when users update an enterprise Keywords or Managed Metadata column, SharePoint can create social tags automatically. These terms then become visible as tags in newsfeeds, tag clouds, or My Site profiles.

List or library owners can enable or disable metadata publishing by updating the Enterprise Metadata and Keywords Settings for a list or library.

In the second part of this post, I will describe managing SharePoint metadata.

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Information Governance With SharePoint

10/31/2013

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The goals of any enterprise content management (ECM) system are to connect an organization's knowledge workers, streamline its business processes, and manage and store its information. 

Microsoft SharePoint has become the leading content management system in today's competitive business landscape as organizations look to foster information transparency and collaboration by providing efficient capture, storage, preservation, management, and delivery of content to end users.

A recent study by the Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) found that 53% of organizations currently utilize SharePoint for ECM. SharePoint's growth can be attributed to its ease of use, incorporation of social collaboration features, as well as its distributed management approach, allowing for self-service. With the growing trends of social collaboration and enhancements found in the latest release of SharePoint 2013, Microsoft continues to facilitate collaboration among knowledge workers.

As SharePoint continues to evolve, it is essential to have a solution in place that would achieve the vision of efficiency and collaboration without compromising on security and compliance. The growing usage of SharePoint for ECM is not without risk. AIIM also estimated that 60% of organizations utilizing SharePoint for ECM have yet to incorporate it into their existing governance and compliance strategies. It is imperative that organizations establish effective information governance strategies to support secure collaboration.

There are two new nice features in SharePoint 2013 version that would help you with compliance issues. E-discovery center is a SharePoint site that allows to get more control of your data. It allows to identify, hold, search, and export documents needed for e-discovery. "In Place Hold" feature allows to preserve documents and put hold on them while users continue working on them. These features are available for both on-premises and in-cloud solutions.

2013 SharePoint has been integrated with Yammer which provides many social features. This presents new challenge with compliance. Yammer is planning to integrate more security in future releases. But for now, organizations need to create policies and procedures for these social features. Roles like "Community Manager", "Yambassadors", "Group Administrators" might be introduced.

There are 3rd party tools that could be used with SharePoint for compliance and information governance. They are: Metalogix and AvePoint for Governance and Compliance, CipherPoint and Stealth Software for Encryption and Security; ViewDo Labs and Good Data for Yammer analytics and compliance.

In order to most effectively utilize SharePoint for content management, there are several best practices that must be incorporated into information governance strategies as part of an effective risk management lifecycle. The goal of any comprehensive governance strategy is to mitigate risk, whether this entails downtime, compliance violation or data loss. In order to do so, an effective governance plan must be established that includes the following components:

Develop a plan. When developing your plan, it is necessary for organizations to understand the types of content SharePoint contains before establishing governance procedures. It is important to involve the appropriate business owners and gather any regulatory requirements. These requirements will help to drive information governance policies for content security, information architecture and lifecycle management. 

When determining the best approach to implement and enforce content management and compliance initiatives, chief privacy officers, chief information security officers, compliance managers, records managers, SharePoint administrators, and company executives will all have to work together to establish the most appropriate processes for their organization as well as an action plan for how to execute these processes. During the planning phase, your organization should perform an assessment, set your organization's goals, and establish appropriate compliance and governance requirements based on the results of the assessment to meet the business objectives.

Implement your governance architecture. Once your organization has developed a good understanding of the various content that will be managed through SharePoint, it is time to implement the governance architecture. In this phase, it is important to plan for technical enforcement, monitoring and training for employees that address areas of risk or noncompliance. It is important to note that while SharePoint is known for its content management functionality, there are specific challenges that come with utilizing the platform as a content management system for which your governance architecture must account: content growth and security management.

In order to implement effective content management, organizations should address and plan to manage growth of sites, files, storage, and the overall volume of content. Organizations without a governance strategy often struggle with proliferation of content with no solutions to manage or dispose of it. This is a huge problem with file servers. Over time, file servers grow to the point where they become a bit like the file cabinet collecting dust in the corner of your office. It is easy to add in a new file, but you will not find it later when you need it. The challenge comes from the planning on how to organize and dispose of out-of-date content. 

SharePoint offers the technology to address these challenges, but only if it is enabled as part of your governance plan. Information management policies can be used to automatically delete documents, or you may be using third-party solutions to archive documents, libraries and sites. By default in SharePoint 2013, Shredded Storage is enabled to reduce the overall storage of organizations that are utilizing versioning. Remote BLOB Storage (RBS) can also be enabled in SharePoint or through third-party tools to reduce SharePoint's storage burden on SQL Server.

Tagging and classification plays a key role in information governance. Proper classification can improve content findability. Organizations can utilize SharePoint's extensive document management and classification features, including Content Types and Managed Metadata to tag and classify content. Third-party tools that extend SharePoint's native capabilities can also filter for specified content when applying management policies for storage, deletion, archiving, or preservation. Ultimately, however, the people in your organization will play the biggest role here. As such, your plan should identify who the key data owners are and the areas for which they are responsible. This role is often filled by a "site librarian" or those responsible for risk management in the enterprise.

In order to minimize risk to the organization, it is imperative to ensure information is accessible to the people that should have it, and protected from the people that should not have access. SharePoint has very flexible system of permissions that can accommodate this issue.

Ongoing assessments. In order to ensure that established governance procedures continue to meet your business requirements ongoing assessment is required. Conduct ongoing testing of business solutions, monitoring of system response times, service availability and user activity, as well as assessments to ensure that you have complied with your guidelines and requirements for properly managing the content. The content is essentially your intellectual property, the lifeblood that sustains your organization. 

React and revise as necessary. In order to continue to mitigate risk, respond to evolving requirements, and harden security and access controls, we must take information gathered in your ongoing assessments and use that to make more intelligent management decisions. Continue to assess and react and revise as necessary. With each change, continue to validate that your system meets necessary requirements. 

The risk has never been higher, especially as more data is created along an growing regulatory compliance mandates requiring organizations to ensure that its content is properly managed. 

If you develop a plan, implement a governance architecture that supports that plan, assess the architecture on an ongoing basis, and react and revise as necessary, your organization will have the support and agility necessary to truly use all of the content it possesses to improve business processes, innovation, and competitiveness while lowering total costs.

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