Vamosa

Mergers and Acquisitions are high profile events and the need to seamlessly combine two disparate content stores and deliver a consistent message to users is vital. To achieve success the project team needs to deal with issues such as brand compliance, application of a single information architecture, content model, and corporate taxonomy. These issues require careful thought and should be an integral part of planning for any merger.

So, why then do so many mergers, carefully thought out in terms of strategy, markets, and organization, stumble on the integration of technology and the valuable content of the user community? One reason is that IT assets and important website and intranet collateral are often absent from the due diligence process.

Research suggests that only around one in six of these projects bring in the data or content migration portion on time and within budget. The main reason for overruns is a failure to fully understand the content to be migrated. In other words, the data sources are neither fully known nor completely understood.

Failure to include content within the due diligence process can lead to high profile, post merger quality issues, such as a lack of brand governance and poor link cohesion.

So, what are the key points to think about when embarking on an M&A project involving digital content. Here are some pointers....

-    Undertake a thorough Content Discovery phase to ensure that you understand the size, structure and scope of the acquired property and the effort required to create a unified content store
-    Consider whether your existing hardware and infrastructure can cope with the additional content and increased numbers of authors and consumers
-    Talk to the content owners and make sure they are involved in any decisions that will affect future content usability
-    Produce a plan with key milestones and deliverables to track progress towards a smooth integration
-    Plan to implement a common IA, content and metadata model which can encompass all content
-    Think about the key customer-facing sections of your site

• branding must be consistent
• navigation and search must function reliably for all content
• duplicate, conflicting and non-compliant content should be identified and removed

-    An ongoing content governance model should be adopted to ensure all future content conforms to the organization’s digital content policies

Removing risk from these projects is a Vamosa speciality, but even without professional support, these pointers will help to keep you on the right track. There are many pitfalls for the unprepared, but taking an organized and structured approach actually enables a merger to benefit content quality, as it is the ideal time for content cleansing and removal of redundant and obsolete content.

Although high risk and highly visible, tackled in the right way, M&A projects provide a platform to a more streamlined and efficient digital content store.


 To learn more about the typical barriers to starting a content migration, download the 'Making Enterprise Content Governance a Reality' White Paper.

There is an urban myth that HRH Queen Elizabeth II thinks that the whole world smells of paint – due to the fact that everywhere she goes, somebody has been there five minutes before applying a nice white coat of paint to anything that doesn’t move!  I sometimes get the same feeling: whenever I talk to customers, as I’m arriving I can smell the constant state of change! – Mergers, acquisitions, innovation, vendor selection, knowledge management, new web site, new technology, the list is endless.There are many drivers  for business change, and, as my company now has a bit of a reputation for helping businesses to re-align their electronic content to the changed business requirements, I often get a glimpse of the chaos that change can cause.

So how does all this organizational change and findability connect, I hear you ask?  Well let’s think about it.

As discussed in previous blog entries, most content savvy businesses know that search isn’t the panacea the search vendors would like to suggest.  Search and find are not interchangeable terms.  Search is a component of findability; as is content taxonomy, classification, de-duplication, lifecycle management and all of the other information management processes that are needed to tame the beast of the ‘digital landfill’ (thank you AIIM).

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus coined the phrase ‘Nothing endures as change’ or ‘the only constant is change’.  We all know that.  You work your fingers to the bone to implement the next big thing for your business – hundred hour weeks for months to hit your deadlines, and then after a scant few months of use, up pops the change gremlin and all your hard work is squandered because the business has to/wants to change!

That’s when we get the call – ‘we can’t find all of our content’ or ‘the merger means we have a lot more content, and a lot less money to control and manage it with’ or ‘we have to rebrand our latest acquisition by next month – the CEO thinks that it proves the merger has worked’.

This is when the light bulb should flash brightly in your head – ‘if I have processes and policies to ensure that our content is truly findable, and then I can respond to any change request thrown at me’.  Let’s take that thought one step forward: ‘if I understand what needs to be done to make content truly findable, then at the next re-org, merger, acquisition etc, I can make sure that not only are we well positioned for change, but that I will know what has to be done to all of the content managed by my equivalent in the company we have just acquired.  Now it doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to work out who brings the value to this new equation – it’s survival of the fittest and in the world of constant change, if you can find it, you can change it.  Elementary my dear Watson!







To get to grips with your organization's 'digital landfill', by discovering the five steps to achieving insight into all of your unstructured content, including information on usage, metadata and storage. Find out what you need to know to make your content management system truly effective.

We at Vamosa recently conducted a survey of UK and US private and public sector organizations to uncover: who is responsible for websites; what is involved in the day-to-day management of websites; and how website performance is measured. Over 100 webmasters, IT project managers and web marketing staff completed the survey.

The results provided us with some valuable insights into web operations management, focused on the very real day-to-day challenges.

The survey clearly showed that the web team is inundated with a variety of requests and projects. They are most commonly tasked with publishing content - 90% of respondents handling such requests. Fixing broken links is also a major issue for the web team, with 84% dealing with link cohesion problems. Implementing and maintaining technical standards, such as web accessibility, were also dealt with by 71% of respondents. Finally, ensuring SEO performance was optimized was carried out by web teams approximately two-thirds of the time – in fact SEO and general site performance were the most frequently logged requests that the web team had to deal with.

In addition to the tasks highlighted above, the survey also found that the majority of web maintenance and management is carried out in house, not handled by external agencies. A third of all web teams stated that they were responsible for between 76% and 90% of all task requests while another third of respondents said that their web team was fully responsible for all tasks.  When you consider the daily demands that Web teams are faced with, it is clear that teams need to be efficient in fixing errors before they get out of control.

Vamosa has introduced WebWorxx to put web teams in the driving seat by completing daily crawls of websites. ‘Hotspots’ on the homescreen show where the most common issues on your website are occurring and places them in rank order.  The web operation teams can then create specific ‘focus areas’ designed to address a particular sub-set of the problems identified. Work can then be assigned as a project to team members, to work through the tasks and resolve problems. Notes can be captured against tasks and even marked up on the page where the error occurs - all within the WebWorxx collaborative portal. This means everyone is fully aware of the status of assigned tasks at all times.

WebWorxx monitors web properties against a configurable list of policies, dependent on your specific requirements. These policies incorporate a range of typical web operations issues such as:
•    Accessibility (26 Policies)
•    Search Engine Optimization (10 Policies)
•    Brand Compliance (8 Policies)
•    Governance (4 Policies)
•    Data Protection (7 Policies)
•    HTML Standards (2 Policies)

Web teams are clearly under time pressure to complete a wide variety of tasks efficiently and effectively. WebWorxx allows proactive management of day-to-day requirements of web operations management putting the web team back in control.











To find out more about how WebWorxx can support the day-to-day management of your website visit: WebWorxx or download the free 14 day WebWorxx trial now.

When technology provides a revolution in service delivery, unfortunately there inevitably comes a point in the adoption curve when the service provider ceases to perceive the technology as being ground-breaking, and it becomes viewed as a burden or overhead.   The initial competitive advantage becomes a distant memory.  Take, for example, the humble ATM.  Twenty-five years ago, ATMs were innovation supreme.  They delivered 24/7 services to bank customers and allowed banks to significantly reduce the cost per transaction of dealing with customers.  Move forward to the new millennium and the banks started to introduce invidious charges for using the very same machines that had allowed them to become so efficient in the first place.  The ATM becomes a mode of operation rather than a differentiator, a profit center rather than a cost center.

In the second decade of the 21st century we see far more ubiquity in the web – Google trawls trillions of web pages and there are hundreds of millions of websites.  Corporations recognize that their web presence opens up markets at a speed and a rate previously undreamt of.  However, there is a downside to this rush-to-web.  As websites become bigger, more innovative and more technology laden, understanding the real web experience of the online customer becomes a huge challenge for organizations; website governance is now essential.  And the innovative aspects are becoming a dim and distant memory – single point of publication, world wide reach etc.
 
The aspect of the web that is so attractive is also the aspect that makes it so dangerous.  With a frictionless market for information, and a ready audience of consumers, your customers now find that they have teeth.  If the web experience is poor, or if a broken link prevents them from making a purchase, or if a pressure group spots the tiniest chink in your accessibility armor, then countless blogs and forum comments and YouTube videos can appear (in many instances even before the offending company knows that it has sinned!).

From the government agency which has to ensure that all citizens have access to all services online regardless of disability, to the online retailer with a hugely complex content supply chain, there are a huge number of ‘micro-measurements’ that must be applied to every page on every website; then every changed page needs to have this all-seeing review applied as apart of a web operations management strategy.  The numbers can make your head hurt – checking thousands of web pages every day for dozens of mini-flaws is a thankless task, but it is becoming a more and more essential one as the importance of web compliance increases.  To invest tens of millions of dollars into your website, your marketing strategy, your corporate brand, and then provide a second rate customer experience smacks of bad luck if you are charitable; amateurism if you are being realistic.

To find out how you can get back control of your site, so your customers can get a truly impressive web experience every time, checkout the latest WebWorxx video.

Today, an organizations Website is usually the first point of contact that a customer has with a company. As such it is essential that your Website is as compelling as possible and people are not turned off it. In order to ensure your customers benefit from using your site, your content should be descriptive, readable, accessible and consistent.

However, ensuing Website governance and maintaining an error free web presence is a huge undertaking. Errors such as duplicate content being published, broken links and incorrect tagging are inevitable. It is essential that organizations can work quickly to rectify these issues before customers recognize them, which often result in missed sales, lost baskets and incomplete forms.

In order to ensure these concerns are dealt with promptly, collaboration within web operations teams is essential. Web teams should not have to be reliant on raising support tickets to find and fix errors, team members must be able to dedicate the right resource to fixing errors, allowing them to get on with more pertinent work and not continually struggle with technical emergencies.

WebWorxx allows web teams to gain control of their sites, by providing the information they require to proactively manage site performance. This not only allows their web estates to continuously improve but provides customers with a truly impressive web experience allowing you to convert visitors into sales.

To understand how WebWorxx can help give you back control of your Website and improve web operations management, download the free 14 day trail.

There is a growing rift between web teams over the issue of web accessibility. Three camps exist: those who believe accessibility is about disability, those who believe it is broader than that and those who really do not care either way. As normal, my position is I have a foot (big size 4) in two camps.

There is currently a virtual fistfight ensuing between numerous well-respected figures in the web operations and  accessibility communities that reflects the wider gulf emerging between those that design with and for the web.

The two positions taken are as follows:

Accessibility is about the disabled

Many believe that web accessibility is entirely about meeting the needs of disabled people. It is about helping those who have no control over how they access web sites because of some physical or cognitive disability. These developers and designers believe that if people choose to use incompatible software, whilst there are compatible options available, then this does not constitute an accessibility issue.

Accessibility is not just about the disabled

The other side of the argument is that accessibility is not "just" or even "primarily" about people with disabilities. Rather, it is about going to all reasonable lengths to ensure the widest possible access to information you provide on your site.

My size 4’s in two camps

If all you do is ensure your site runs in another browser in addition to Internet Explorer or ensure that colour-blind people can still read your copy then that has more value than all the endless theoretical debates in the world.

With fear and trepidation, I would like to wade into the middle of the debate by suggesting that the pragmatic and socially responsible approach lies somewhere in between.

Socially responsible

I believe that accessibility should be about more than meeting the needs of disabled users. It should certainly extend beyond the sometimes-limiting checkpoints of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0. and as such website governance standards are imperative.

I do not believe we can always expect users to upgrade or change their browser options simply because it is theoretically possible. As various members of web teams, we work with computers and browsers all the time. It is easy therefore to forget that the majority of people do not know how to upgrade their browsers or even change their default settings. In reality, many of them have trouble completing online forms! Even if they do, there are many environments where that option is unavailable to them such as in some corporate offices or in a public library where configuration is limited or non-existent.

Pragmatic

After saying all of that you have to draw the line somewhere. The real world of web operations management, with limited timescales and finite budgets, does not allow you to develop around every browser bug or accommodate every possible limitation. In the real world, you have to worry about return on investment. Is it worth 2 weeks work to get your site working successfully on a Mac when you’re selling a product that only runs under windows? Is it worth making sure your site works with screen readers when you are offering driving lessons? In some situations the answer to both those questions could actually be yes, but what you need to ask yourself is how often is that the case. In addition, some functionality is just impossible to reproduce in an entirely accessible format. In fact, I would go as far as to say it is impossible to make a site entirely accessible anyway. We need to resign ourselves to the fact that accessibility is full of grey areas and we have to endeavour to do the best we can with the resources available to us. We need to make decisions on a case-by-case basis.

Don’t forget the third camp

At the beginning of this entry, I mentioned three camps. It is important to remember that there is a huge number of web site owners out there that have not faced up to the issue of web site accessibility at all. Arguments like this can just make an intimidating subject even more so. In my opinion, taking one-step into the world of accessibility is better than doing nothing at all.

So think about wading in (with your big size 4s) and join in the debate. How do you currently ensure accessibility? Have you got website governance standards in place and have you ever thought about automated accessibility checking? If not, have a think about trying WebWorxx. WebWorxx does so much more than daily automated accessibility checking for your website - but that, my friends, is for another blog post.

This is a safe place and we love hearing your opinions so drop us a line or download the free WebWorxx trial to see how it can give your web team control.

The daily challenges associated with managing a website and its content are vast and hugely varied. A diverse range of people contribute to a corporate site: not only those traditionally responsible for web content such as web developers, webmasters, web authors, digital marketing managers and marketing managers, but also occasional contributors such as web authors and many varying members of IT .

This complex network of individuals inputting content and managing web assets or performance inevitably leads to errors  such as duplicate content, broken links, incorrect tagging and content that is difficult to find.
WebWorxx allows web teams to organize and execute web projects more effectively to improve transparency and productivity. As WebWorxx is a collaborative tool, the user responsible for web content compliance, for example, can generate work packages and delegate specific issues to content owners who can then be tasked with resolving them.

To see how WebWorxx can help you overcome the many issues associated with web operations management, we’re currently offering a free 14-day free trial. To find out more visit http://www.vamosa.com/webworxx-c121.

When choosing a new CMS a customer’s primary concern is almost certainly authoring-based. That is to say, a clear vision for the future of content is established well before the vendor is chosen. There are many CMSs to choose from and they vary greatly in scope, functionality and ease of use. You may be faced with a large influx of new content which is no longer manageable under the current CMS; or you may come to the realization that your current vendor no longer supports your vision for your website in the functionality it supports (it’s not uncommon to find content authors use tricks to get around the limitations of your CMS); or you may simply be tired of that clunky user interface and want something with a little more pizzazz.

What’s not always considered is backwards compatibility with existing content. Ideally, undertaking a CMS migration into a new platfom represents a translation of data, resulting in the achievement of value. Otherwise, a content migration can leave you with a truncation of content resulting in a functional, but 'lossy' migration. Metadata management is incredibly useful on both sides of a website, internal and external. Content with good metadata is good content ie.  findable! It’s a good idea to have a strategy in translating both content and metadata from your source CMS into the target. It’s all too easy to favor new functionality and componentry in a new CMS over the simple-yet-invaluable little things.

CQ5 is a particular favorite of mine to work with but it’s my belief that a crack team is required to take full advantage of all the features CQ5 has to offer. Not everyone requires a CMS as flashy as CQ5 and there are plenty of other utilitarian options. One thing is clear: regardless of which CMS you choose,  it is imperative you understand what you’re getting in your CMS and that you are prepared to spend the time necessary to get the most out of your investment. We at Vamosa were recently faced with a client coming back to us after a brief disengagement only to reveal that they had decided that their chosen target system did not adequately meet their needs - after months of work on both sides. It’s hard to imagine a more tragic outcome than that! So be sure to take your time deciding which system is right for you, and good luck!










If you are unsure of what CMS is right for you, download the Vamosa Consulting Service CMS Vendor Selection Business Results Sheet and see how Vamosa may be able to help you.

We are excited to announce the launch of a 14-day trial of WebWorxx to give those responsible for web content compliance a view of how this can be easily managed day-to-day.

The 14-day trial is available now and all users need to do is enter some quick details and the link to the website they would like to monitor.

WebWorxx will then get to work on crawling the website content and analyze the performance based on set policy areas including accessibility, brand compliance, search engine optimization, links cohesion, HTML and language.

Within 2hrs the portal will generate a report that is emailed to the user who will be invited to log into the account to view the results. A member of the Vamosa WebWorxx team will be in touch to talk through the findings and advise on next steps.

As WebWorxx is a collaborative tool, the user responsible for web content compliance can generate work packages and delegate the content owners to resolve any issues found. As an ‘out of the box’ solution it is set up with 63 policies but the client has control of these and can turn off whichever ones are not relevant.

We’ve already had 50 users download the trial so try it for yourself and see how WebWorxx can simplify managing website content and optimization.

To find out more visit http://www.vamosa.com/webworxx-c121

We recently launched a suite of awesome SharePoint Tools.  While using the tools internally, I came accross a subtle but cool technique to copy a SharePoint list with dependent content types to the right place in another site collection!

At first glance this task seems to be simple enough considering there are some tools on the market that can let user to grab a list and drag it / drop to the other site collections. Still, you must take into consideration the dependencies within the SharePoint architecture before doing this drag and drop; the list may have content types defined in the parent site, not within the source site itself.

Let’s, for the sake of simplicity, consider two sites: root site of the site collection (Publishing Portal in this case) and its sub-site (Hadrian's Site).

The tricky part is that the parent site (Publishing Portal) contains the definitions for content types. And the sub-site (Hadrian's Site) contains the list itself with all views and content.  We want to keep it that way in our new world to comply with our Content Migration Strategy.

If we continue with a simple drag and drop then we will end up with a list in our destination sub-site that has the content-types directly associated with it instead of the parent site. This is not ideal because acordding to our Content Migration Stragety all vehicle-based content types must be created in the site collection root with the intent to reuse them across the sub-sites.

A workaround to this dilemia would be to copy the list twice. First, to copy it to the root site of the destination site collection even if it ultimately should not go there. Unlike the first copy attempt, this time do not copy content, permissions, workflows or views related to the list. Instead just copy the list itself and all dependent content types. This way, all content types and fields will be automatically created together with the list in the right spot of the destination site collection. There are specific options in a Content Migration Tool like MetaVis Migrator for SharePoint to give the granular control to copy just list with content types.

After this, delete the list from the root site of the destination site collection. All content types created in the root site will still be there because they are defined outside of the list.

Finally to tie things up, copy the same list again but this time – to the right sub-site of the destination site collection. It will create the list and reuse all content types from the root site created during the previous copy. This time, select all options to copy content, permissions and views on the copy list wizard screen.  A helpful hint to preserve the architecture in your target site during your MOSS Migration.

This technique allows to preserve originally designed architecture of SharePoint site collection that involves complex taxonomies of site columns and content type hierarchies.  Make sure you also understand your architecture before you jump in; check out MetaVis Architect to get a complete view of your MOSS properties and build yourself a strong Content Migration Strategy.


 

Download the MetaVis Architect Suite Business Results Sheet
to learn more about moving and classifying content between SharePoint sites.




Content provided by MetaVis for Vamosa

The challenges of content governance are constantly evolving as the volume of digital content published increases exponentially every day and new publishing channels emerge. Who, 12 months ago, for example, could have predicted that Twitter would become such a publishing phenomenon?

Vamosa understands this complexity and we know that dealing with the end-to-end life cycle of content in separate parts can make implementing an effective strategy for managing enterprise content more complex.

In response to enterprise needs, coupled with our understanding of the obstacles to enterprise-wide content management, we have launched two configurable software platforms that incorporate this end-to-end approach to content: Vamosa Enterprise Content Governance (ECoG) Suite for Documents and ECoG Suite for Web. 

ECoG Suite for Documents

ECoG Suite for Documents has been designed to enable the transformation of document repositories into clean, usable content stores that can be governed by ECoG policies. The suite automates the life cycle of documents, from creation to on-going maintenance, supporting taxonomy and metadata management, versioning, policies for records management and archiving, and so on.

ECoG Suite for Web

ECoG Suite for Web allows clients to take back control of web content by automating policies for all stages of the content lifecycle, from accessibility to tagging and from broken links to ECMS migration, making it findable, compliant and more usable. By adopting a SaaS approach to web maintenance, web properties are monitored 24/7 so any breach of policy is trapped and resolved.

Most importantly for enterprises, the suites offer all the functionality previously available in separate Vamosa products, including analysis, data cleansing and migration but bundled into a single installation that is then configurable to the customer’s environment and specific ECoG policies.

If you use a Document Management System (DMS) to manage document based content you will already know that one of the key issues faced is how to move existing content into the new system.

On paper document migration looks relatively easy. A team of people could spend the next six months copying files and documents from their existing location into the DMS. However in order to achieve an effective document migration project it is essential that you consider:

•    How many files can one person move in one day? A document migration project of only 100,000 pages might take anywhere between 10 to 100 days to complete.
•    What happens during this move? Do you place a content freeze over all of the files and documents for the duration of the migration project? What about moving attached documents and handling internal and external links? How can you incorporate this functionality into your document migration strategy?

A document migration does not simply mean changing a few attributes and then placing the content into a slightly different information architecture. Document migrations involve the wholesale change of properties, storage, information architecture and content lifecycle, therefore document migration projects tend to involve hundreds of minor changes to very large volumes of data. This can potentially become incredibly time-consuming and frustrating. To reduce this confusion and to improve data quality, eliminate redundant, obsolete and redundant information and match the requirements of your new system, you really need a tried and tested method.

Vamosa Consultancy Practice, with their collective experience gained on over one hundred client projects, can assist in implementing best practice content quality processes; such as when selected to undertake the migration of the website and corporate Intranet for the UK’s Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra).

Working with integration partner, digital media giant Euro RSCG, Vamosa’s solutions and expertise was the obvious choice to deliver a web and Intranet content migration for Defra.

Gregory Roekens, Technology Director at Euro RSCG said ‘We were asked to provide a best of breed and best value solution to Defra’s business content migration problem and Vamosa’s tools and methods have the reputation as the Central Government standard’.

Vamosa Consulting was able to successfully bring control and structure to all documents across Defra’s content stores, providing, de-duplicated and clean content. As a part of an ongoing Enterprise Content Governance strategy, Vamosa ECoG Suite for Documents also uniquely pinpoints breaches of policy for all document governance areas, and offers an automated process to resolve each breach, allowing document stores to be kept up to code.

Corporate intranets are changing fast! No longer are intranets created and controlled by a few select authors and webmasters. New social networking features are being adopted across all industries in an attempt to increase user collaboration and provide a support framework through a modern, feature rich intranet site.

Fears of users running wild and spending their working day tweeting or poking have proved unfounded. In fact, providing social networking features within the organization actually reduces the time users spend on external sites. Evidence also suggests that because users are in a working environment, they retain a professional attitude and don’t abuse the system. Companies are learning that there is a huge wealth of information held within their user base. Blogs, wikis, support forums etc. can all be used to leverage that knowledge and benefit the wider user community. Commonwealth Bank recently introduced a new SharePoint based intranet with social networking functionality and - among other benefits - have had helpdesk calls reduce by 50-60%, massively reducing support costs.

So, all good news then? Well, yes and no. The benefits are obvious: more collaboration from motivated staff interested in contributing to the site, the ability to tap into the knowledge of all users and possibly even a reduction in external browsing leading to increased productivity. It’s also safe to say that a failure to embrace social networking will lead to an exodus from the intranet to the intranet for the most innovative and forward thinking users, who use these tools daily in their private lives and expect to do the same in the workplace.

The drawbacks? It may be new and cool social media, but it’s all still content and as such requires a governance strategy to ensure that user-authored content is relevant, accurate, standards-compliant and appropriate for internal publication. The Intranet 2.0 Global Survey reveals that only 57% of all organizations have published user content policies and standards. This means that almost half don’t have any user content governance. Especially worrying when the same survey indicates that 87% of organizations have at least one social networking tool on their intranet. That’s a lot of ungoverned user content!

As described by Elizabeth Marsh of the Intranet Benchmarking Forum, social media governance is all about mitigating the risks and fostering user trust. You don’t need a separate social media policy. A well designed Enterprise Content Governance (ECoG) model will cover all aspects of content, including social networking. The risk of not having a solid governance model is that your organization’s content, including that stored in blogs, wikis, podcasts, status updates, comments and instant messages, will expand in an uncontrolled way, increasing risk and liability.

So, to enjoy the benefits of a popular and productive intranet you should fully embrace collaboration and social networking. Just be sure that you have appropriate safeguards in place. Take expert advice and ensure that you have a content governance model in place that will allow you to reap the rewards in a controlled and risk-free way.

Any enterprise looking to manage content knows it has a challenge on its hands. Not only has the volume of content exploded exponentially in the last few years but so has the rate at which content is changing and users’ expectation of a satisfactory experience, whether on the Internet, or simply locating a file on the Intranet or Portal.

Vamosa announced its new consulting services on Tuesday. They offer a comprehensive approach to implementing best practice Enterprise Content Governance (ECoG), focusing on practical aspects, such as content modelling and keyword tagging.

A Vamosa customer – British Council – summarized the need for such expertise perfectly: “We knew there was a lot of out-of-date content, but with so many pages, it was an enormous challenge for us to undertake an analysis on our own. We chose Vamosa because of its Consultants’ expertise.”

The Consulting services are structured around ten different components to provide enterprises with a start-to-finish content strategy, and the added bonus of providing an independent evaluation to support decisions on CMS vendor selection.

A few examples of the different areas of the Practice include:
•    Content Discovery – a comprehensive analysis and assessment of content to optimize performance, reduce Total Cost of Ownership and resolve problem areas before content users complain
•    Migration Programme Management – capitalizes on the expertise of Vamosa experts to migrate content so employees can focus on day to day jobs and avoid the common pitfalls associated with CMS/DMS implementation
•    Keyword Tagging – Valuable keywords and phrases extracted from content and weighted based on relevance, then tagged as metadata making it easier to find

By engaging with Vamosa for consulting services, enterprises can not only be confident of receiving advice gained on hundreds of customer engagements, but also that these will be executed within a structured ECoG framework.

Organizations use SharePoint for a variety of things, from Intranets to Extranets, from Customer Portals to document management and for team collaboration.

Recently there has been a significant amount of discussion around exactly what SharePoint is and what it offers. For example, a recent AIIM article highlights 8 things SharePoint 2010 needs to be a true ECM system. A blog by the Microsoft Team describes SharePoint 2010 in 1 sentence, 8 categories and 40 features. The Rez's SharePoint blog provides a comprehensive comparison of features between SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint 2010.

One element thats there has been great excitement around, is the SharePoint 2010 taxonomy implementation and management across sites and site collections. Organizations must spend time and effort building the appropriate foundation for utilizing the content taxonomy. That is all well and good when a green field project is started, but considerations must be given to data that is already stored in previous versions of SharePoint; how can that information be classified correctly when undertaking a SharePoint Migration? Microsoft does not provide a tool or utility which can be used to apply a new taxonomy and as a result many organizations may become stuck during a MOSS migration.

Vamosa recently announced a partnership with MetaVis to help both existing and new customers get a better ROI and increased value when moving into SharePoint 2010 from SharePoint 2003 or SharePoint 2007 environments, by ensuring the new taxonomy values can be applied to documents.

The MetaVis Suite does not simply help organizations migrate their existing content into the SharePoint 2010 platform; it also provides features such as  a graphical top down view of the web estate and it highlights dependencies between objects. This provides the administrator with a complete view of how their sites are structured. The 'Live Compare' feature of MetaVis provides useful functionality as it allows comparisons of two sites to be undertaken in real-time, listing the differences between sites at the granular level of identifying column differences between content types.

Synchronizing two SharePoint environments at the click of a button is only one of many features offered by Metavis that will help SharePoint Administrators perform their day to day tasks more effectively and efficiently, while ensuring their organization has an effective SharePoint Governance strategy.

On any given day a web operations team can be inundated with requests to change this web page, add this link, ensure the back-end is updated to reflect various changes. The queue of problems stacks up from these requests, but also because many people contribute to a site, so content can be incorrect, duplicated, tagged incorrectly and therefore not findable. Even the smallest inaccuracy or inconsistency in a regulated environment can result in untold problems with major financial implications. Business opportunities may be missed, sales lost and legal liabilities created by published or user-generated content which simply fails to follow the correct policy.

Ensuring that every single piece of content adheres to the content compliance policies and standards of your brand is a 24/7 process that no one can afford to fail. It requires automated software.

Last week we announced our new software tool dedicated to helping web operations teams deliver value for the business, but what does that really mean? Essentially it provides an integrated platform for managing and governing web operation projects. To manage the digital haystack, this tool provides full visibility of any issues on a daily basis to identify problem areas and address these with the relevant people quickly. It can help the web team identify policies and procedures that need to be introduced to minimize ongoing web issues.  It’s an easy-to-use interface dedicated to improving the performance of web operations teams and therefore the effectiveness of a company’s web properties.

If you are a Web developer, Webmaster, Web author, Digital Marketing Manager or Marketing Manager, you can increase both your own and the wider team’s productivity by using this dashboard product. You’ll find that your time is freed up to initiate more strategic web development projects.

MetaVis Migrator for SharePoint allows to use filters to copy content to new location or to tag existing content setting new values for the existing fields. These properties enable an interesting technique to perform a data migration strategy in a slow pace – at the same time as preparing new environment, training users or organizing the existing content.

Sometimes copying data from one SharePoint site to the other one is a quick process that could be done by copying the whole list or library from one place to the other one. However, in other cases this is more complex routine involving copying different items in different locations or migrating portion of data in one day and other portion of data in the other day when users of this content are ready to use new environment. In this later case it could be useful to use combination of some artificial field marking the migrated content in the source site, MetaVis Migrator copy filters and SharePoint views hiding the content that was already migrated to the destination site.

The idea of this technique is simple. First, we will create an artificial Yes/No field in the source list that will indicate that an item is copied to the destination site. By default this field will be “No” for all items / documents in the list.


Then we will go ahead with our SharePoint migration activity selecting portions of data to copy based on some filter condition. The filter will always include the condition to exclude the content which is already migrated based on the state on our artificial columns that we created earlier. Below in an example of such a filter (this time we copy all documents with MK Region equals to Netherlands):


After the copy is completed we use the very same filter that we just used to copy content but this time – to tag selected source data setting our artificial Migrated field to Yes – indicating that this content has been already copied to the destination site. Using the same filter will ensure that all items just copied using this filter will be marked as Migrated.

The fact that all copied content has been marked with certain criteria could be used in a variety of ways. First use is to skip the content which was already copied before when performing new copies to the other places. The second use it to create list view that will hide copied content from the viewers. Below is the example of such a condition in a list view.


Having this condition enabled for the list view will point out that the content is already located in the new destination.
















To learn more about how Metavis MIGRATOR can help you simplify yor SharePoint migration, download the MetaVis Migrator Business Results Sheet.

Content Provided by MetaVis for Vamosa

In his AIIM 2010 Keynote presentation, John Mancini talks about a variety of "disruptive forces" that will transform the CM industry. Among many other factors, he cites the following:

•    A demographic-driven shift in expectations of information management
•    Volumes of data rising faster than available storage
•     A "transfer of experiences... with consumer technologies into expectations for enterprise IT"
•    A pervasive feeling among enterprise users that information is easier to find on the web than in their internal systems

What this effectively means is that the realities of enterprise content management are continually diverging from the idealistic "everything you'll ever need" contention of traditional ECM suites. In chasing the carrot of single-point accountability, organizations have perpetuated an over-reliance on their content management systems, spurring vendors into building generic functionality - which may only crudely represent a customer's specific needs - or super-customized modules which can not adapt to changing business needs. In order for a CM implementation - like any system - to be effective in the modern enterprise, it must recognize two things:

1. It must address the specific needs of its users.
2. Those needs are going to change over time.

Organizations that have historically stemmed the rising tide of user requirements by tacking changes on to their  'all-in-one' systems will find this method inadequate to shore up the coming "data deluge". Mancini believes businesses will then stop investing in legacy systems that do not support the future and will look to the kinds of solutions which comply with the two tenets above: namely, solutions which are cheap, standards-based, and open.

Mancini contrasts applications with platforms, and specifically calls out SharePoint 2010 as a technology which, perhaps non-intuitively, falls into the latter category. Unlike traditional applications, these platforms will not ship with everything you'll ever need, and Mancini predicts a renaissance of process-specific solutions to fill this gap. This largely resonates with the practices of social and new media companies like Twitter and The Onion, who have created utterly unique experiences by bending open-source web frameworks to their will. In a similar vein, Vamosa's Expert Services organization has rolled out innovative solutions in the past two months by combining open-source frameworks like Sinatra and Django with SaaS offerings from Zoho and Heroku.

Taking this a bit further, I would propose that the concept of the platform is one piece of a larger framework (which Vamosa calls Enterprise Content Governance - ECoG) needed to effectively manage enterprise content. Successful CM architectures will incorporate a constellation of loosely coupled technologies, services, and processes. The businesses that succeed in this environment will be the ones who abandon the pursuit of the CMS holy grail and find a way to command a hybrid of proprietary and open-source platforms, point solutions, and services to achieve their precise objectives.