OpenText Portal (formerly Vignette Portal) is a part of OpenText ECM Web Content Management Solution. It enables you to create web sites with rich content and applications, enabling customized users interactions. It provides a highly scalable and efficient means of aggregating content and applications for use across a variety of initiatives inside and outside the firewall. 

It enables users to combine web services, repository data, and user interfaces in meaningful ways to create valuable business applications without IT help. Users can create web pages by simply selecting portlets from OpenText’s library of over 200 portlets.

Portal layout management allows users to easily apply a variety of page layouts via visually intuitive tools. There is interaction between portlets. Pages refresh only as needed. Portlets load separately, so the end user does not have to wait until the entire page loads. Pages are dynamic and load quickly.

Users can create a template from an existing site to be used later to create similar sites. Portlets can be embedded at any web site. User can utilize pre-defined portlets that allow rapid site creation of portals with common functionality that is integrated with existing applications and data. There are portlets that enable teams to share and publish portal documents as part of any business processes.

Social platforms such as blogs, wikis, rating, ranking, tagging could be integrated. Out-of-box federated search and taxonomy management tools are also available. There is an ability to custom connect 3rd party search engines.

All portals could be managed from a unified permissions-based management console while allowing delegated administration to individual portals which allows diverse multi-dialect administrators to manage virtually all of their portal objectives.

Content could be delivered to customer's PDA, cell phone or other device of choice. Content could be targeted from different repositories based on dynamic user segments.

User experience can be improved by enabling inter-portlet communications, web services integration and display of 3rd party portlets in an integrated, contextual way.

One can enhance security and auditing of the site activity via a native reporting interface that reports on site modifications.

Web presence is globalized with extensive internationalization for portal users and administrators to support diverse audiences.

Live sites could be updated faster via incremental item changes instead of import/export of the entire navigation tree. Import/export components or versions of components, categories of components or versions of components using batch processes. 

The following products deliver the Web Content Management component of the OpenText ECM Suite:

OpenText Web Experience Management is a comprehensive solution for managing content in high performance, scalability, and transaction-oriented web applications.

OpenText Portal works in tandem with OpenText Web Experience Management to allow you to rapidly create mashups and composite applications built on Web services, repository data, and user interfaces.

OpenText Dynamic Portal for Third-Party Portals works in tandem with OpenText Web Experience Management to allow you to publish content directly into portals such as Liferay, IBM WebSphere, or Oracle WebCenter.

OpenText High Performance Web Delivery provides a unique, integrated combination of real-time caching and intelligent cache management capabilities. It improves Web site performance, makes Web sites more scalable, and in many cases reduces costs and manual overhead.

OpenText Semantic Navigation is a powerful and engaging technology, OpenText Semantic Navigation combines content analytics with information retrieval to automatically present Web site visitors with content that is relevant to what they’re looking for or viewing.

OpenText's Web Experience Optimization products give you the capabilities to optimize each phase of your on-line marketing campaign lifecycle and provide customers with a more relevant Web experience.

OpenText Campaign Management helps deliver highly personalized content to individual recipients through online and offline touch points. From simple campaigns to more sophisticated marketing programs, it enables the easy design, execution and measurement of multipart, results-driven communications across a variety of channels.

OpenText Business Integration Studio is a graphical development environment for rapidly integrating business applications, processes and information that facilitates the integration of OpenText's Web content management, social media, and portal management applications with disparate applications and content repositories inside and outside the enterprise.

Today's post is about OpenText Web Experience Management.

OpenText Web Experience Management (formerly Vignette Content Management) is a solution for creating and managing content for enterprise Internet, extranet, or intranet applications.

Users can:

create new sites from site templates derived from their existing sites or launch a sample site with out-of-the-box content types, workflows, and presentation assets;

apply graphical themes, page and region layouts to pages, layouts or whole sites;

browse content in contextual, multi-dimensional workspaces by site, content type, folder, category or explorer views.

It offers user-friendly console, branded themes, and preferences that empower its content owners to easily create and manage web content while automatically adjusting to day-to-day authoring actions. This enables users to edit pages and content with no experience and non-intrusive toolbars, improve productivity with contenxtual views that present information users need when and where they need it, and publish in one click.

Powerful and easy to use site layout, theme, and content templating interface enables users to control how site content is presented and helps ensure consistent branding and communication to a variety of audiences, while reducing site development and maitenance cost.

Users can manage all content through intuitive and configurable role-based management console. The console includes ribbon menu and properties toolbar for commonly used items, content tracker, task inbox, and content search with saved queries. There are ergonomic controls for faster editing including language, time zone, filters, page and content settings.

Cotent items can be reused across multiple sites. For example, one article can be published on 100+ sites with a single management workflow.

Vanity URLs can be completely automated or manually defined to help increase site rankings in major search engines and support marketing campaigns, promotions, and messaging that can help increase the number of visitors to your site.

It integrates well with social and collaboration sites.

Users can create content using their favorite tools and web forms. Content from other repositories can be dynamically integrated or migrated for full cycle workflow and publishing management. Images, podcasts, Adobe Flash files and video metadata management allows editors to streamline approval, metadata tagging, and publishing of these assets.

Support for roles allows organizations to customize access to content creators, approvers, developers, and other users. This allows individulas to participate in selected processes automatically while standardizing and enforcing business practices that are exposed to users through delegated administration.

There are good workflows and content types modeling and the best practices template in the sample site. The content type modeler provides an intuitive interface to create and modify content objects such as articles, products, news, etc. Content type evolution allows you to make common modifications.

Content could be in any data format including files, database records, XML documents, rich media assets such as images, videos, and podcasts. There are library services such as check-in and check-out, version control, rollback, content history, security, content classification, metadata indexing, and search. Content could be in any language.

There are tools to optimize the staging and delivery of managed content through web sites, portals, and other applications. The application streamlines the retrieval of content items according to their multi-faceted taxonomies and then transforms the items to suit the intended delivery context, application or device.

User can publish content through automated workflows that deliver content to multiple delivery applications (web servers, databases, application servers). The publishing engine manages content dependencies, so content retains its context throughout content lifecycle.

Search capabilities allow parametric search across content, content attributes, and metadata, both within the management console and for the site search features as well as framework for 3rd party search, enabling high degrees of search accuracy.

There is an ability to manage user access centrally including delegated administration based on LDAP standards.

I will continue describing other products of web content management component of the OpenText ECM Suite in my next posts. Follow me and stay tuned!

Joomla is a free and open source content management framework (CMF) for publishing content on the World Wide Web and intranets. It includes features such as page caching, RSS feeds, printable versions of pages, news flashes, blogs, polls, search, and support for language internationalization.

Over 9,200 free and commercial extensions are available from the official Joomla! Extension Directory, and more are available from other sources. It is estimated to be the second most used CMS on the Internet after WordPress. Joomla won the Packt Publishing Open Source Content Management System Award in 2006, 2007, and 2011.

You can think of a Joomla! website as bringing together three elements:

• your content, which is mainly stored in a database;
• your template, which controls the design and presentation of your content (such as fonts, colors and layout);
• Joomla! which is the software that bring the content and the template together to produce webpages.

A Joomla template is a multifaceted Joomla extension which is responsible for the layout, design and structure of a Joomla powered web site. While the CMS itself manages the content, a template manages the look and feel of the content elements and the overall design of a Joomla driven web site.

The content and design of a Joomla template is separate and can be edited, changed and deleted separately. The template is where the design of the main layout for a Joomla site is set. This includes where users place different elements (components, modules, and plug-ins), which are responsible for the different types of content. If the template is designed to allow user customization, the user can change the content placement on the site, i.e. putting the main menu on the right or left side of the screen.

Template Components

Layout

The template is the where the design of the main layout is set for a Joomla site. This includes where users place different elements (components, modules, and plug-ins, which are responsible for different types of content.

Color Scheme

Using CSS within the template design, users can change the colors of the backgrounds, text, links or just about anything that they could using (X)HTML code.

Images and Effects

Users can also control the way images are displayed on the page and even create flash-like effects such as drop-down menus.

Fonts

The same applies to fonts. They are set within the template's CSS file(s) to create a uniform look across the entire site, which makes it easy to change the whole look just by altering one or two files rather than every single page.

Joomla! is composed of a Platform and extensions.

Joomla! extensions

Joomla! extensions help extend the Joomla web sites' ability. There are five types of extensions for Joomla: components, modules, plugins, templates, and languages. Each of these extensions handles a specific function.

Components: they are the largest and most complex extensions. They can be seen as mini-applications. Most components have two parts: a site part and an administrator part. Every time a Joomla page loads, one component is called to render the main page body. Components are the major portion of a page because a component is driven by a menu item and every menu item runs a component.

Plugins: they are more advanced extensions and are, in essence, event handlers. In the execution of any part of Joomla, a module or a component, an event can be triggered. When an event is triggered, plugins that are registered with the application to handle that event execute. For example, a plugin could be used to block user-submitted articles and filter out bad words.

Templates: this describes the main design of the Joomla web site and is the extension that allows users to change the look of the site. Users will see modules and components on a template. They are customizable and flexible. Templates determine the style of a website.

Modules: rendering pages flexibly in Joomla requires a module extension, which is then linked to Joomla components to display new content or new images. Joomla modules look like boxes – like the search or login module. However, they don’t require HTML to Joomla to work.

Languages: they are very simple extensions that can either be used as a core part or as an extension. Language and font information can also be used for PDF or PSD to Joomla conversions.

Joomla also has built-in extensions which include: component (Banner, Contacts, Joomla! Update, Messaging, Newsfeeds, Redirect, Search, Smart Search), Content, Menus, ect.

OpenText Knowledge Management (formerly Livelink ECM - Knowledge Management) is a comprehensive knowledge management solution that enables organizations to search, classify, navigate, and collect all of their corporate knowledge in a single, secure, web based repository. 

OpenText Knowledge Management works with OpenText Document Management or OpenText Content Lifecycle Management, leveraging the power of these content repositories and adding functionality that manages all knowledge from a single interface, regardless of originating source. Open Text Knowledge Management is a completely integrated, web based solution that delivers end-to-end, closed-loop management for all of your corporate knowledge assets.

Knowledge Management enables employees to perform their daily work more efficiently and accurately. The benefits of a centralized knowledge repository and library services ensures that you are working with the most up-to-date information. Specialized tools enable you to identify topic experts; quickly finding the best information resources from anywhere in your organization.

Powerful search, classification and navigation tools to help you find and manage an unlimited number of documents: from files, documents and objects, to project logs, search queries, discussion items, tasks, workflow maps and more in an organized, hierarchical structure.

You can identify subject matter experts and harvest their knowledge from the centralized knowledge repository. Open Text Knowledge Management extends the functionality of Open Text document management foundations - Open Text Document Management and Open Text Content Lifecycle Management. Open Text document management solutions fit your existing security framework, ensuring protection of content through permissions based access rules. Authorized users benefit from full access to all functionality from a single, secure web browser, and the flexibility of Open Text document management foundations allows for configuration of permissions on a group or individual level.

Features

Organize and share knowledge: Knowledge Management manages any type of electronic document in any file format. You can organize electronic documents into hierarchies of folders and compound documents within three types of workspaces that reflect the different ways in which people work: the Enterprise Workspace; Project Workspaces; and Personal Workspaces.

Capture knowledge automatically: Knowledge Management allows you to associate metadata with documents. Metadata is indexed and can be used to more easily find, retrieve, and generate reports on documents based on your custom criteria. Each piece of metadata information is an attribute, and sets of attributes can be grouped into categories that can be associated with any document.

Classify and categorize knowledge assets: multiple taxonomic classifications can be associated with documents in their original locations. This enables you to browse and search documents in the knowledge management repository according to taxonomies that differ from the one implied by the folder structure without having to create multiple copies of documents. You can organize information placed in Open Text Document Management or Open Text Content Lifecycle Management repositories via manual, assisted, or automatic means. Streamline browsing and improve search precision.

Automate knowledge management processes: Knowledge Management's graphical Workflow Designer tool enables you to automate document management processes, such as document change requests and document review and approval processes, to ensure that they are carried out accurately and consistently. You can design processes according to your own requirements or those imposed by regulatory agencies.

Discover knowledge with prospective queries: Knowledge Management provides prospective searching capabilities. You can create special queries to monitor various data sources, including the OpenText Document Management or OpenText Content Lifecycle Management repositories, shared network drives, external web sites and any integrated databases. When new information is discovered, you are immediately notified.

Single point of information access: federated search enables you to query multiple repositories and brings disparate information sources together. Use powerful search tools to quickly information access locate the right information. View results on a single page in a sorted, clustered format. Show hit highlights, document summaries, relevance rankings and result themes to improve fidelity.

Dynamic, multi-dimensional navigation: create dynamic, virtual folder structures built on pre-defined information taxonomies and document attributes; no pre-defined hierarchy is required. Often, metadata is not visible or navigable when you browse for information. Using taxonomies for browsing and additional context, you can decide which dimension is best to find required documents. Drill down the hierarchy using associated metadata to refine values and corresponding documents.

Optimize taxonomy creation and maintenance: analyze and cluster related documents, and extract and generate key concepts. Create suggested taxonomy nodes based on analyses; import and export in many common formats.

Automatically collect and extract information: crawl multiple Web-based information sources including intranets, extranets, web sites, and more. Create personal entries for crawling, search specific sites and search from the Document Management or Content Lifecycle Management user interface. 

FatWire Software is web content and experience management software which powers web presence for organizations, allowing them to deliver relevant customer content, build community engagement and drive site stickiness and loyalty.

FatWire Software was a privately held company selling web content management system software. It was acquired by Oracle Corporation in 2011, and its products rolled up into Oracle's WebCenter product lines.

FatWire solutions are powered by content server, which combines complete business user control over the creation and presentation of content with a scalable architecture for dynamic content delivery and multi-site deployment.

FatWire Key Strengths

• FatWire provides web content management (WCM) solutions that enable organizations to deliver a rich online experience to users and to simplify management of their web presence.
• FatWire offers a comprehensive web experience management (WEM) portfolio including WCM and targeted marketing technologies, plus enterprise 2.0 collaboration and content integration capabilities.
• Organizations can harness the power of FatWire solutions to rapidly and cost effectively deploy large numbers of web sites and deliver a compelling web experience to customers and partners.
• With FatWire, customers can optimize the web experience while increasing customers loyalty and sales.

FatWire Technology

The product has a strong Java foundation and is J2EE-based, relying on servlet engine support from market leading J2EE application servers. FatWire Content Server supports management of both content and code, allowing organizations to not only manage and deploy content but also stage and deploy an entire Web site. The product provides comprehensive Web services API for the development of dynamic, personalized sites in JSP and ASP.NET.

Products

FatWire includes the following products:

• FatWire Content Server
• FatWire TeamUp
• FatWire Analytics
• FatWire Engage
• FatWire Community Server
• FatWire Gadget Server
• FatWire Mobility Server
• FatWire Content Integration Platform

FatWire Content Server

• Empowers business users to manage content with powerful, easy-to-use interfaces including in-context content editing, drag-and-drop page layout, time-based site management, and more.
• Ensures consistency and accuracy with central management of multiple sites in multiple languages.
• Delivers a personalized web experience for site visitors with high-speed dynamic delivery of targeted and multi-lingual content.
• Organizes and manage large volumes of content including extensive product catalogs, with flexible tools for managing complex product taxonomies and hierarchies.
• Supports high volume, enterprise-class deployments with a highly scalable infrastructure and robust enterprise security and access control.
• Automates the entire process of managing web content, including authoring, site design, content publishing and deployment, content targeting, web content analytics, and user participation.

FatWire TeamUp

• Facilitates both internal collaboration and external website communities.
• Helps organizations to dramatically improve the productivity of internal creative teams, and to build and strengthen interactions with customers and other stakeholders.
• Strikes the perfect balance between freeform collaboration and enterprise needs for scalability, security, and monitoring.

FatWire Analytics

• Offers tracking and reporting on individual assets, promotions, and visitor segments.
• Gives editors and marketers the ability to immediately determine whether a given piece of content is effective for a customer segment.
• Works with FatWire Content Server and FatWire Engage to enable real-time tracking and optimization.

FatWire Engage

• Empowers marketers to set up and manage targeted online campaigns.
• Gives marketers easy-to-use interfaces for defining what content will be delivered to each customer segment online, and to tweak those recommendations as needed, based on the effectiveness of content.

FatWire Community Server

FatWire Community Server offers user generated content (UGC) features to create an engaging website experience. These capabilities integrated with the rest of the WEM suite, for robust manageability and scalability. With FatWire Community Server, organizations can:

• easily implement social features such as comments, ratings, reviews and blogs on new or existing websites;
• employ user generated ratings or reviews to influence and change the content of dynamic sites;
• harness UGC for the benefit of the business by using and re-using UGC assets throughout the site to deliver value for site visitors;
• easily moderate and manage UGC with flexible tools to meet enterprise standards.

FatWire Gadget Server

Web site visitors expect to receive information that is tailored to their needs and can change as their interests change. Gadgets are an important tool for delivering this. Gadgets are small applications that can be placed on web sites to provide a specific function or type of information, and can be personalized by site visitors. FatWire Gadget Server uses the power of gadgets to help organizations:

• enable site visitors to quickly and easily create their own gadget dashboards by selecting the gadgets they would like to use from a list made available to them by the organization;
• offer end user personalization of gadgets so site visitors can tailor gadget content to meet their specific needs;
• enable business users to easily set up their own gadgets made of internal content, based on out-of-the-box gadgets provided with Gadget Server;
• add their gadgets or third-party gadgets to any page of their web presence;
• syndicate their gadgets to third-party sites for enterprise content syndication.

FatWire Gadget Server is built on the OpenSocial/Google Gadget standards so that any compliant third-party gadgets can be incorporated with FatWire gadgets on FatWire sites. And gadgets built with FatWire Gadget Server can be incorporated into any OpenSocial/Google Gadget standard compliant web page.

With Gadget Server organizations can offer site visitors the ability to personalize their own web experience, driving loyalty and repeat visits. Gadget Server also gives organizations the ability to extend their brand and business reach through syndicating out their content or functionality.

FatWire Mobility Server

Enables organizations to deploy their web content seamlessly on thousands of mobile devices. Whether traditional web content or community content, companies can enable their users to engage with their organization via the mobile channel.

FatWire Content Integration Platform

The FatWire Content Integration Platform lets organizations quickly access stored content across the enterprise, publishing it to their public web sites, intranets and extranets managed by FatWire Content Server. The solution employs strict enterprise standards for maintaining version control, access policies, and workflow applied to documents and content shared, and lets FatWire customers utilize Content Server interfaces to access content from throughout their various business silos for online use with minimal effort. 

This might be a trivial question, however, many organizations still use network drives for storing documents and their employees collaborate on these documents by sending them to each other as email attachments.

What is wrong with this picture?

The volume and variety of electronic information is exploding. Organizations are required to analyze new information faster and make timely decisions for achieving business goals within budget. They therefore are becoming increasingly dependent upon efficient access to information. In order to effectively use information, it must be readily available for analysis and synthesis with other information. The value of information depends on two things: finding it, and being able to use it.

Why can't this be done in network drives? Here are just few reasons:

• documents in network drives cannot be searched;
• there is no version control in network drives;
• there is no trail who changed documents and what has been changed;
• there are multiple versions of the same document;
• there are no workflows and so there can be no automatic documents movement between participants;
• few people could be editing the same document at the same time and so there is no control of made changes;
• there is no possibility for the reuse of content;
• permissions cannot be set up.

Further on, your organization would not meet regulatory and legal requirements if it stores its documents in network drives. If you are in a regulated environment, such as ISO 9001 or GxP/GMP, you must have a document control in place. Documents have to be accounted for, there can be no multiple versions of the same document in one place, there has to be a complete control on which documents are used, etc. This cannot be done in network drives. In addition, e-discovery is going to be very difficult and its cost very high.

Sending documents as email attachments is inefficient and time consuming. Sometimes it is even impossible, for example when these documents are too big for the email to handle. It is much easier to upload documents in a central location and for employees go there and update them as necessary. If it is a CMS, you can keep control on who changed what and when.

Content re-use is very difficult or even impossible, because every time a document needs to be changed, a user would have to change the entire document instead of just changing one paragraph and then being able to have the same content output as a brochure, marketing collateral, white paper, etc.

And if you need to translate documents in multiple languages, documents change is going to include tremendous cost because rather than translating just one paragraph that was changed, you would have to translate the entire document.

There are numerous advantages of having a content management system (CMS) in place. Here are just a few advantages. CMSs provide the facility to control how content is published, when it is published, and who publishes it. CMSs allow to set up workflow management thus allowing documents to automatically move between participants (reviewers, approvers, etc). There is version control, audit trail, collaboration features. You can set up appropriate permissions for your documents. Your documents would be searchable and readily accessible in one central location.

The best option is ECM suite. To be considered an ECM suite, the system has to include the following components:

• document imaging – the ability to process and store high volume images of documents like insurance claims;
• document management – the ability to provide library services and version control;
• records management – the ability to declare and manage corporate records;
• collaboration – the ability to share content with team members;
• web content management – the ability to publish and update web sites;
• digital asset management – the ability to manage digital assets like powerpoint slides and movies.

Some content management systems are free, such as Drupal, TYPO3, Joomla, and WordPress. Others may be affordable based on size subscriptions. Although subscriptions can be expensive, overall the cost of not having to hire full-time developers can lower the total costs. In addition, for many CMSs software can be bought based on need. In addition, many CMS can be deployed in a cloud thus further decreasing costs.

CMSs are designed with non-technical people in mind. Simplicity in design of the administrator UI allows content managers and other users to update content without much training in coding or technical aspects of system maintenance.

Many CMS tools use a drag and drop AJAX system for their design modes. It makes it easy for beginner users to create custom front-ends.

Once you have deployed a CMS, your employees are going to be more efficient and productive and you will save cost in the end.

How to choose a CMS? See my blog post on this subject. 

When a SharePoint list or library has a large number of items, you must carefully plan its organization, taking into account how users need to access documents or data. By planning and using a few key list and library features, you can ensure that users can find information without adversely affecting the performance of the rest of your site.

SharePoint contains a Document Center site template that you can use when you want to create a site that is optimized for creating, managing, and storing large numbers of documents.

Manage large numbers of documents using Document Center site

A Document Center is a specialized site designed to serve as a centralized repository for managing documents. You can use a Document Center site as an authoring environment or a content archive.

In an authoring environment, users actively check files in and out and create folder structures for those files. Versioning is enabled, and 10 or more earlier versions of each document can exist. Users check documents in and out frequently, and workflows can help automate actions on the documents.

In contrast, very little authoring occurs in a content archive. Users only view or upload documents. The Document Center site template supports creating knowledge base archives.

You can also create another type of large-scale archive by using the Records Center site template. The Records Center site template contains features for managing the retention and disposition of records.

Document Center Features

Tree View Navigation 

The tree view should be a familiar navigation element for most Microsoft Windows users. A documents library can have folders so you can use the tree view to quickly browse to the document that you want. Be careful when you create folders. It is not advisable to create sub-folders, i.e. folders inside folders because users have to click many times to get to documents. If you need to separate documents inside the folder, perhaps it is the time to create a new library to create more space.

Major and Minor Document Versioning

You can turn on versioning for any document library. Versioning lets you track changes to documents, and it helps you manage content as you revise it. Versioning is especially helpful when several people work together on projects, or when information goes through several stages of development and review. 

With versioning turned on, you can restore an earlier version as your current document, or view an earlier version without overwriting the current document. 

Check-in and Check-out

The default settings in the Document Center require users to check out and check in files. Requiring check-out helps prevent conflicts and confusion over changes, because only one user can change a file at a time. When you require check-out, a file is checked out automatically when someone opens it for editing, unless another user already has it checked out.

While you have a file checked out, your changes are not visible to others until you check the file back in. This is true whether you are working on your hard disk or on the server. When you check in a file, you are prompted to enter comments about your changes, and the comments become part of the version history. And because the Documents library tracks major and minor versions of a file, you are prompted to choose which type of version you are checking in. Minor version is usually still a draft document, and a major version is a completed version of this document.

Content Types

A content type is a reusable group of settings for a category of content. You can use content types to manage the metadata, templates, and behaviors of items and documents consistently. See my post on SharePoint content types for more details on how to work with content types in SharePoint.

Create Specialized Views

You can create specialized views in libraries which will allow users to see only one set of items at a time. Views are based on metadata fields assigned to documents or data. When you create these views, choose only those metadata fields that you want to see in these views. You can also specify the order in which metadata will appear. You also will be able to filter these views to see only specific items.

Workflows

You can create workflows to automate movement of documents. SharePoint has the following workflows: approval, review, collect signature. You can also set up a workflow to flag obsolete documents - it is called three-state workflow. You can create specialized workflows using SharePoint Designer. See my post on SharePoint workflows for more details on how to set up and manage workflows. 

Content Approval

If you set up content approval, you can control the publication of new content. This will help to ensure that only completed documents are uploaded, that documents are uploaded into correct locations, and metadata is populated correctly. 

EMC Documentum Record Management Solution helps organizations to comply with legal and regulatory requirements for documents retention. This solution allows to capture and manage records generated in the company allowing for its automation. It also expands classic records management with features that track and dispose of non-records in order to reduce discovery costs and mitigate legal risks.

Records management solution is fully unified with Documentum content management platform.

Key Benefits

Risk Mitigation – reduce your content liability by disposing of records and non-records once they fulfilled all legal and regulatory and compliance obligations.

Automation – automate the capture and classification of records.

Comprehensive Management – manage all records regardless of file type or content type.

Centralized Management – allows to manage all records in one place regardless of disparate repositories and regardless of type or location.

Flexibility – it can be aligned with your needs as necessary.

Seamless Integration – integrate with your systems infrastructure including SharePoint.

Features

File Plan Administration – organize recordkeeping requirements across the enterprise with corporate and departmental taxonomies.

Platform Unification – simplify user retrieval with files that remain in place and preserve audit trail integrity for documents creation.

Physical Records Support – manage paper, microfiche, and other types of hard copy records.

Classification – organize records manually or automatically to specify authorities and disposition instructions.

Management of Compound Records – manage multiple documents as single record.

Records Disposal – ensure timely disposal with automation tools for identifying eligible records, requesting authorizations, and scheduling deletions.

Microsoft Integration – declare records within Microsoft Office products including SharePoint.

Automated Capture – integrate Line-of-Business (LOB) systems with little or no customization.

The solution provides: document expiration dates, superseding or prior versions, notifications and reminders, reports, disposition console, automation, digital shredding.

Any information system should have two access points - search and browse. When users know exactly what they are looking for, they are going to use search. If you have enabled metadata search in your system, this search is going to be precise and will retrieve documents that users are looking for.

If users do not know what they are looking for, they are going to use browse to navigate to documents. Somewhere, some time during their browsing they may switch to search and then back to browsing.

In order to enable browsing or navigation in your system, you must create taxonomy and organize your documents according to this taxonomy.

But how do you apply the taxonomy that you created to your content management system (CMS)? Each CMS has a hierarchical structure. For example, SharePoint has the following structure: site collection --> site --> sub-site (optional) --> library --> folder, Vasont has collection group --> collection --> content type. And so each CMS has a hierarchical structure which could be adopted to your taxonomy.

Let's look at a specific example. Your taxonomy may look something like this: department --> unit --> content type --> subject --> date. 

If we take SharePoint as the CMS you use, then: department = site collection; unit = site; content type = library; date = folder (for some content types) or subject = folder (for other content types).

In other words, each taxonomy unit is the same as a unit in the hierarchical structure of your CMS.

So, our example within CMS would look like this: 

Engineering Department Site Collection --> Electrical Engineering Site --> Drawings Library --> Building Electrical Wiring Folder

or 

Engineering Department Site Collection --> Electrical Engineering Site --> White Papers Library --> 2012 Folder

So, if somebody tells you that a CMS does not have a functionality to create taxonomy, ask them what is the hierarchical structure of this CMS and adopt this structure to your taxonomy. 

You have decided to deploy a content management system? How do you select a system? This is the subject of my today's post.

The process of selecting a content management system (CMS) centers on the list of requirements you users have for the system, then vendor presentations, and some sort of selection committee. The process contains the following steps:

• create a high-level overview of the CMS project and your users requirements;
• review the market for the products that seem to fit your project and your users requirements;
• make the first cut from the list of candidates, selecting those that seem worth really pursuing;
• send a Request for Proposal (RFP) to those who make the first cut;
• select a small number of finalists by scoring the RFP responses and any follow-up questions that you ask;
• have technical drill-down meetings and check references from each of the finalists;
• have a presentation from the remaining candidates;
• make a final decision by combining the scores for the references and presentations with those for the RRP.

High-Level Overview

To start the selection process, it is useful to create a short project overview that you can include in early correspondence with the vendors. The overview also should orient your selection committee to the major points toward which you are aiming.

To create the overview, take the high points from your project mandate, requirements, and logical analysis. Include in the overview the short description of features that your product should have to make it successful in meeting your needs. Use this overview to orient all involved parties to the key selection criteria and also to provide them with an introduction to the fuller analysis you might have created.

Review the Market

Perform a broad overview of the CMS market looking for products that address your general needs. Here are few tips to conduct your research:

Get recommendations: try sending your overview via email to anyone you can think of who may have an opinion. The recommendations would give you a place to start and a set of products to which you can compare the ones that you find yourself.

Keep your analysis close at hand: have your requirements, logical design, and the selection criteria that you think are most important. Look at them often as you do your search.

Develop a short set of questions that you ask at each web site that you visit: this helps you stay on task and give an even, standard treatment to each product.

Consider core products versus peripherals: develop a quick eye for products that do not have enough core content management functionality to qualify for your search.

Keep a list of your special needs: this list should go beyond standard content management concerns, for example special marketing needs, unusual publications, particular integration, etc. You may come across products that do not address all your needs, but try to find a product that addresses at least some of them. You may find these products helpful later on, either as add-ons to the system that your purchase or as good examples of how a particular need can be met.

Document your search: track down the url of the web site, so you could return to it later.

Do not spend too much time on this process: if in doubt, include a product on your list, you can remove it later.

Start a file: both a physical and a computer file on each product. You eventually will accumulate a lot of material on the ones that make it to the end of the process.

Making the First Cut

Limit your list from the large number of products that have something to do with content management to few that seem to address your particular needs and budget. If you have time, you can contact each company and request a complete marketing package. Be sure to request white papers, case studies, demos, industry analysis, and pricing sheets. In addition, go back to each site and collect as much relevant information as you can about each candidate. Do not be afraid to dismiss those candidates who do not meet your requirements. 

The core of the first cut is a preliminary set of evaluation criteria, usually a spreadsheet. Apply your selection criteria to this list of candidates. Involve your selection committee in this process. Score each candidate product using all the resources that you have. Do not do complete and exhaustive analysis especially with your selection committee. Just have them quickly review your list.

The first cut should include 5 to 10 candidates. 

Sales Presentation

Now it is the time to get serious. Invite these candidates to present a demo of their product. Do not require preparation of your team or the vendor. Ask for the standard presentation. At the next meeting you can get down to details if necessary. It gives a vendor the opportunity to present their product. Save your probing questions and became immersed in the product as you can. Be positive and try to understand each product positive and negative features.

The vendor tries to qualify you as a prospect as much as you are trying to qualify the company. Try to answer vendor's questions as openly as possible and present your requirements and what you are want to accomplish. Learn the names of the people inside the product organization that you can contact directly for specific information.

Request For Proposal (RFP)

Create the complete selection criteria and turn it into Request For Proposal (RFP). Most likely it would be a spreadsheet that lists all the questions you need answered in order to arrive at a list of finalists.

Selecting Finalists

Plant to have follow-up meetings with candidates that made RFP cut. Before you schedule these meetings, see if you can eliminate any candidates due to lack of response or unacceptable response or poor performance on RFP. In these meetings, go over questions. In the first pass, focus on the issues that candidates did particularly well or poorly in their RFP responses. Make the list of the weak points and determine if these points disqualify these candidates. If you still have questions, ask the vendor to find the right person to answer some specific questions. Use emails, phone, and on-site meetings to move each question to a final score.

Technical Drilldowns

With a small list of finalists you can get down to details. Do a most thorough job of analyzing the RFP and follow-up questions from the finalists and schedule one or more meetings where your technical experts (IT) and vendors' technical experts gather to envision how the system would work and what the relationship is going to be between you and the vendor.

You may also want to schedule additional demos of the product. These discussions should result in a clear idea of how your team would accomplish different task with different systems. Share your full list of requirements with the vendors. Vendors would bring their development or professional services groups who would contribute to the process. Try to ask vendors to bring actual people to these meetings who would be assigned to your project.

References

Try to contact some companies who use these products. Vendors should be able to help you to identify these companies. But do not leave this process entirely up to vendors. Check the web, check logos on the vendor's site, check conferences, analysts' reports, etc. You need information to help you decide whether a specific product is right for you and whether vendors would deliver what they promised.

Final Presentations

By now you are very close to a decision or you may have a clear leader or you may have decided who you want to work with. But there is no contract yet, only a lot of discussions. You also may have a list of issues that have never been resolved. And you may have people who have the authority to sign the purchase order. You could combine all these needs into a final vendor presentation. It would have the following purposes:

• final resolution or any outstanding problems;
• full discussion of the terms of the agreement;
• executive review of the vendor company;
• cost estimate.

It is not the meeting to demo the product. It is a meeting to make the final determination whether you want to work together with this company.

Making the Final Call

Now you should be ready to make your final decision. You should have all the information you need. You should also have a numerical winner in the RFP scores as well as project costs. In addition, you have one or more subjective assessments from our team and sponsors. Try to drive for consensus in your selection committee. Create an objective scoring method for the subjective factors. Escalate the decision to someone who can make and enforce this decision. Provide the decision maker with all the information that you have collected.

If you followed this process, you will have succeeded in selecting a system that meets your needs!