The Evolving Role of Content Management in Modern Intranets

As 2012 comes to a close, it’s safe to say that the modern intranet has become a mission-critical resource for most in mid to enterprise sized organizations. If we were to look at an intranet today and compare it to the 2009, 2006 and 2003 versions within those organizations, the differences would be nothing less than striking in terms of their effectiveness and impact on the overall organization.

One might reasonably ask what is the role of content management in today’s intranet, and how is it evolving?

Those of us that design and implement these experiences know that content management has an essential role in any interactive project, but understand that an Enterprise CMS isn’t a panacea; there’s plenty going on in a modern intranet these days that’s not content. Today’s intranets are dynamic, social, highly collaborative experiences that connect people to all sorts of content, data, applications and, perhaps most importantly, to each other. 

Content Management in Action on Today’s Intranet

While enterprise social capabilities are clearly essential, a practical intranet implementation simply can’t succeed without some “traditional” Enterprise CMS feature support. For example:

• Easily adopted tools: Non-technical content contributors must be able to create web pages, documents, centralized asset libraries for video, images, etc. This is especially important for inherently social content like blogs, wikis, and threaded discussions. If you want people to create and share, it can’t be too difficult or time consuming.
• Governance tools often found in the Enterprise CMS stack: Editorial approval workflows, security enacted via permissioning and personalization, revision control with audit trails, analytics containing access data. These are especially critical for any group beholden to a standards body (Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, SEC, etc.).
• Templating concepts: Structured/normalized content and branding/design standards are usually necessary, especially when building an organization’s primary intranet site.

Taxonomy Matters

The CMS often provides the core "glue" for all collaborative experiences on an intranet: the classification engine.

A well implemented Enterprise CMS with a robust classification engine for taxonomy, folksonomy and metadata is at the heart of any intranet with “long-legged” strategic goals. While technical scalability is essential, a “killer back end” isn’t nearly enough on its own. Here’s how I’d define “robust” in this context:

• The classification engine has to be easily adoptable, by information architects, librarians, subject matter experts and the entire contributing user base alike.
• The same terminology within the enterprise classification engine must be universally available to all content — and people. All related implementation decisions should be non-technical in nature. For example, a major adoption barrier in SharePoint 2007 was rooted in an inability to share terms across Site Collections.
• Folksonomy and controlled vocabularies must have an inherent relationship. Tools that allow for easy promotion from the former to the latter, along with the ability to define synonyms, must be available to SMEs and librarians.

Where Social and Collaboration Fit In

Wait, aren’t intranets all about enterprise social connections and collaboration these days? Why the taxonomy rant?

This isn’t an “either/or” decision point. At a minimum you need a cocktail of content management tools, Enterprise Social feature support and a super-reliable search engine to unlock the potential of the intranet and raise an organization’s IQ. Consider how combining these tools can become an “intranet trifecta,” if we tune and prioritize search result ranking, using:

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

The New Box Experience: Building a Dream in a Box #BoxWorks

Aaron Levie is on a mission. The Box co-founder and CEO has a dream: he wants workers everywhere to have hassle-free access to the documents and other content they need to do great work from anywhere, at any time, using any computer or mobile device.  

Levie doesn’t want to deliver this capability to only the “Suits” but to anyone who works with content during their daily grind. And in an age where creating, referencing, sharing and collaborating on documents, images and other files is, increasingly, at the center of what we do day in and day out, this could mean everyone who gets a paycheck. That’s quite a sizeable number of subscriptions/licenses to sell and quite a dream.

Yesterday at BoxWorks, Box’s second annual user conference, Levie unveiled an “all-new Box” which is supposed to make it easier than ever for Box’s more than 14 million individual and 140,000 company clients to discover information, connect with collaborators and engage with content.

“People and content are at the heart of every business,” said Levie, during his conference keynote. “Our customers are transforming how they power collaboration and manage business information across applications, mobile devices and the cloud. Box’s mission will always be to deliver innovations that help them lead that transformation.”

Document Management for the People, By the People

And though it’s a bit of an aside, take note of Box’s messaging. Levy says that customers are changing the way they work with information — that they’re collaborating, being “social,” being mobile and storing their information in the cloud — and that Box is providing a service to make those efforts easier by managing the information for them and moving the technology out of the way.

Contrast the messaging that Content/Document management vendors used years ago that promised to keep CEOs out of jail. Box’s messaging is about empowering workers, more traditional Enterprise Document Management messages have been about protecting their bosses’ backs.

Content management is now as much about “the people” as it is the brass.

Connecting the Social Dots

You can’t talk about people without talking Social, especially in this day and age, and Box gets that. So the “all new box” includes some nifty (and useful) features such as including a pictorial list of the people you work in the right hand side bar of your Box screen, making it easier for you to connect with them. It also provides users with the ability to find coworkers who are also using Box by surfacing them via their corporate email IDs (which you provide).

The new Box experience will also give users an easy way to give each other a pat on the head via a new “like” feature. Some companies might see this as an easy (and, yes, potentially dangerous if the rules aren’t set right)) means by which to “approve” a document, to give someone a goldstar for their efforts or extend a compliment.

Taking the Pain out of Discovery

While Levie might not have actually uttered the all too familiar words “we’re putting search at the center of things” during his keynote, Box is doing that too. This functionality will allow users to see relevant results as they type in the search bar and be able to hover over a file to see who created it. Tasks and pending messages are in the header, too, so with a click users can find what they need to work on, no matter where they are.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com