Vamosa

As noted in a previous post  by Nic Archer it is anticipated that a third of organizations will in time employ a MOSS migration strategy and migrate to the new SharePoint 2010 platform. However in order to maximize organizational efficiency it is essential that all data is prepared prior to the SharePoint 2010 deployment to ensure a smooth content migration strategy.

By defining efficient content taxonomy structures prior to deployment, organizations are able to more easily move content into their new SharePoint environment resulting in improved site architecture and navigation within the new site. This task in itself can involve a significant amount of work before data is ready to be migrated.  If this stage is not meticulously carried out, the value of the content in the new store will be significantly depleted.

The suite of MetaVis tools for SharePoint, now allows SharePoint administrators to reclassify content by assigning new metadata values and new content types during a migration, allowing organizations to migrate more efficiently. Even post migration, MetaVis allows administrators to bulk update metadata, should this be required, further enhancing the findability of data for the user.

With MetaVis, SharePoint administrators can utilize the new Term Store, to graphically re-design and re-architect their content, significantly improving search and discovery of local documents for organizations that are located globally.
By utilizing the capabilities of the new SharePoint environment through MetaVis, administrators will be able transform the web experience, lower the cost of ownership of content management and deliver error free automated migrations, while creating effective content structures in SharePoint 2010 – the ultimate goal for all SharePoint administrators.

To learn more about the suite of MetaVis tools download the MetaVis Architect Suite Buisness Results Sheet.

Yesterday we announced our partnership with MetaVis to be the sole European distributor of MetaVis packaged software tools to help SharePoint Administrators. We will now provide tools that ease the daily task of organizing SharePoint environments for improved search, findability and e-discovery.

Our decision to partner with MetaVis was not made lightly. We evaluated a number of SharePoint migration solutions including Metalogix and AvePoint to ensure we would be providing out clients with the best out-of-the-box product on the market.

The most significant reason we chose MetaVis is because it was developed for the SharePoint 2010 market and therefore provides a more comprehensive solution. The MetaVis Architect Suite not only allows migration, but it allows SharePoint Administrators to graphically re-design and re-architect content so they get the most out of the features and functions of 2010: this is the major differentiation.

When evaluating Metalogix and AvePoint we recognized that they could do simple MOSS migrations, but being developed for SharePoint 2003 and 2007 means they have only been adapted for 2010. The products will not necessarily give you solutions for re-architecting your content and definitely do not provide an easy to use graphical representation of the your content. And as a result, you’ll end up migrating all your content to SharePoint 2010 without the ability to take advantage of all the new features and functions within SharePoint 2010. You’ll need to buy more tools in order to get around this problem, costing you time and money.

The bottom line is that if you need a SharePoint migration solution for 2010 and you are evaluating Metalogix and AvePoint, MetaVis should also be on that list.  We found it to be the far superior solution and we think you will as well.

You wouldn’t move house without taking stock of your content to decide what you need, what you can get rid of and what won’t fit in your new house. Or devising a plan for all the content to be cleansed, refitted and moved. So why would you do it with your enterprise content? It is essential you have a comprehensive content migration strategy.







To find out more about MetaVis,
download the MetaVis Architect Suite Business Result Sheet.

Fifteen years ago having a website wasn’t mission-critical for an organization. Now there isn’t an enterprise that exists without one. The Web has fundamentally changed the way organizations operate. From its simple beginnings, the use of the Web now extends from public-facing Internet sites to knowledge-sharing, employee-focused Intranets, partner-oriented, limited-access Extranets, and the newer collaborative domain of social media. As the Web function continues to broaden, managing it becomes more difficult. The need for Web Governance is now essential.

The same management accountability mechanisms and controls that support and govern other aspects of business also need to be viewed as mission-critical. To align the Web with strategic objectives, formal Web Governance must be established and mechanisms to enforce standards must be incorporated into day-to-day Web operations management.

Taking a few steps back, Web Governance is the authoritative administrative structure that sets policy and standards for Web product management. But what does that mean? Simply put, every enterprise must have a set of policies for their Website. These policies refer to the way people make decisions about the organizational Web presence. They determine who gets to sit around the table when those decisions are made and who has the final decision-making authority when consensus cannot be achieved through discussion.

A Web Governance framework will help minimize and settle internal Web site ownership disputes. It can also smooth the relationship among marketing communications, IT, and various departmental Web stakeholders. This stability turns the focus to managing Web sites instead of arguing about them.

Formal Web Governance allows individuals to understand their role as it relates to Web decision-making, policy creation and standards enforcement. It reduces the potential for silos, stalemates, and disputes and enables collaboration by setting the foundation for efficient execution of Web projects and initiatives. As a result, it also reduces redundant efforts and technology misalignment.

Enforcement begins with the definition of a full range of standards followed by dissemination to all stakeholders, careful implementation and finally, measuring for compliance. For more information download our white paper or view these videos.

Download our Web Governance and Standards Compliance White Paper to understand the importance of incorporating mechanisms into your day to day web operations management strategy to allow your organization to measure web governance and compliance standards.

As an experienced Consultant, I find it’s difficult to say when considering a data migration strategy which step in the process is most important. The success of a data migration methodology really depends on all the components of a solution working well from beginning to end. But it’s certainly true that a successful data migration project cannot take place without a robust means to push content into its new home, whatever that might be.

Since virtually every content management system (CMS) on the market is different, there is no silver bullet for loading content quickly and dependably. Each application programming interface (API) is different and can vary greatly in terms of quality style and completeness. Some may require a custom web service, deployed on the target environment and called remotely.

But this solution isn’t quite optimal. What if the client’s target environment is completely inaccessible for some reason? Perhaps the client’s security model forbids deploying foreign services. Microsoft’s SharePoint 2010 CMS circumvents the necessity to deploy remote services with its client object model. After getting your hands on the required libraries the SharePoint 2010 API is suddenly at your fingertips. Using this technique, a data migration can be accomplished using a locally deployed custom service after supplying the required credentials!

While I found SharePoint’s client object model to provide a promising new way to connect to a CMS, I thought the API was incomplete and sometimes poorly documented. Luckily, the out-of-the-box web services packaged with MOSS provided the methods I required. I am excited at the prospect that more CMSs will start packaging up libraries that provide the tools necessary to connect to an environment with a remote machine. It simply provides a safer solution for the data migration and one that doesn’t require deploying anything on the client’s machines! The big upshot of the client object model implies that projects are less likely to face resource bottlenecks because additional access to secure systems is not required. A smaller gap between the development and testing periods allows more time for refinements and a better quality data migration solution.

It seems that Microsoft is leading the way in this regard.

  Download our Data Migration - Seven Steps to Success White Paper to gain a further understanding of the data migration best practices that should be considered when beginning a migration project.

In short: when its in a zoo… Bare with me. Common Eland in Zoo

A document is a record of something that has been observed. Such a record can be anything – a utility bill, an employment contract, a sculpture in a museum, or a painting on a wall. All are examples of documents describing something else. The utility bill records and describes your usage of gas and electricity. The employment contract records and describes the details of the handshake you gave at that final job interview. The sculpture or painting documents – there’s that word – a historical event. All these examples of documents are records of something observed by something or someone else.

Paul Otlet (1868-1944), the father of information science, is known for his observation that documents could be three dimensional. As examples of such “documents” Otlet cites natural objects, artifacts, objects bearing traces of human activity (such as archaeological finds), explanatory models, educational games, and works of art.

Suzanne Briet (1894-1989), also known as “Madame Documentation”, states her case through the enumeration of six objects:

•     Is the star in the sky a document? No.
•     Is the photo of the star in the sky a document? Yes.
•     Is the stone in the river a document? No.
•     Is the stone in the museum a document? Yes.
•     Is the antelope in the wild a document? No.
•     Is the antelope in the zoo a document? Yes.

Suzanne Briet rules: an antelope running wild on the plains of Africa should not be considered a document. But if it were to be captured, taken to a zoo and made an object of study, it has been made into a document, it has been made evidence. So there is a process involved in making “the something” into a document – we call it documentation.

As humans, we’ve invented all kinds of devices to aid in the process of documentation: library cards, folders, URLs, bibliographies, tags, taxonomies, reference documents. They form part of the discipline that is documentation and the basis for content management.

With the advent of content management systems we seem to have lost some of the high-level abstract concepts that were clearly laid out in the early parts of the 20th century. As an industry sector, involved in content management, we’ve become too focussed on the implementation details of content management systems and the limitations that these systems face.

Context

“What is metadata? What is a document?” These questions typically go hand-in-hand and are often naively answered by: “the document is a file or a blob that is stored in database but is difficult too manipulate, so the metadata, table rows and columns, are used to facilitate manipulation and describe the document”.

Metadata provides context with which to consume the document. You’ll have seen this in a zoo. You walk up to the antelope enclosure and there’s plaque containing the name, Latin name and a map of the world with a particular part of Africa highlighted describing the antelope and its origin – metadata. The zoo is giving you context with which to understand the antelope document.

The same holds true for documents in a content management system. Documents are stored in a particular context described by their metadata. The folder, the author, draft/publish status, tags, taxonomy are all pieces of metadata to aid the consumer in consuming the document.

That consumer may be the content management system itself as it responds to the query “give me all documents in the /marketing folder” on behalf of a web visitor. The consumer can also be a records management system archiving documents “in a published state and that are older than 24 months”.

Documents never exist without metadata, without context. For example, the print-out of sales figures that I’ve thrown in the wastebasket is a fully-fledged document of our company’s sales figures telling the person that picks it out the wastebasket to treat (read “consume”) the document as a discarded document.

I’ve seen this catch people out on a few content migration projects when they try and de-duplicate content repositories. They classify documents as duplicates based on their contents alone, without ever taking context into account. De-duplication is tricky business because in doing so you are destroying metadata that is right-or-wrongfully been created to help consume documents.

The accurate consumption or manipulation of documents is intrinsically tied to the accuracy and completeness of their metadata. Is the print-out of sales data in the wastebasket to be trusted? Is the sales data accurate? How should the reader consume the document? Look at the metadata! Its in the wastebasket. This opens up the possibility: did I mean to throw the print-out in the wastebasket? Is the metadata accurate? The reader can only make that decision with more metadata. The reader could phone or email me and ask: did you intend to discard that print-out? Thereby creating more metadata and a better context with which to consume the document.

Content management systems merely store metadata, human beings create metadata – often by hand, sometimes using automated tools. The process of generating metadata or maintaining its accuracy is a human process. Computers don’t care about accuracy or completeness.

Adriaan Bloem, analyst at CMSWatch, touches on this by labeling enterprise search as a “brute force” approach. Adriaan also points out that metadata or context is neccessary to communicate. He’s right – otherwise how do we make sense of a document ?

What if metadata contains a document, i.e. when one document describes another? Doesn’t this form of reasoning collapse in on itself?

What if you took a photograph of the antelope and attached it to the information plaque outside the enclosure? So when the antelope is having an off-day and its hiding in the undergrowth, passers-by can still learn about it by reading the plaque. Now you’ve got one document (the photograph) describing another (the antelope), haven’t you? Aren’t both documents? Wrong.

We can describe documents with other documents. Suzanne Briet would argue that the antelope in the zoo is the primary document and any scholarly articles written about it are secondary documents. They provide context around the primary document. There’s is a document and there is context with which to interpret that document – metadata. Nothing else. Document… Metadata… Document… Metadata.

In an English language sentence “things” can be both subjects as well objects, yet can’t be both at the same time. In one situation the photograph is a document, described by metadata from a digital camera (exposure, shutterspeed), in the other situation it is metadata describing the antelope.

Confused? What is metadata ? In any given situation, ask yourself what the document is and by exclusion all that isn’t is metadata.

So what does this means for content management systems ? Are they all broken? Do we need metadata management processes as well as content management processes? Do we need a separate metadata lifecycle to run alongside a content lifecycle ?

The answer to those questions is unfortunately – yes. Yes, we do need separate metadata management processes. Yes, we do need a separate metadata lifecycle. Unless… we stop building content management systems in the naive fashion of blobs for documents and table rows and columns for metadata. We need to start building these systems so that there is no technical distinction between the content store and the metadata store. Having separate stores for content and metadata causes us to duplicate our efforts, causing us to define duplicate processes to support the lifecycle of both document and metadata.

Ironic, since a promise of content management is the removal of duplication.

W3C, WCAG, Section 508, Double-A, XHTML Strict, Dublin Core, EDRM, ISO 9000… if you have a role in managing compliance within your organization – particularly as it relates to delivery of web content for internal or public consumption – chances are high that at least some of these terms are familiar to you. As argued in recent Vamosa blog posts from Moayyed Darugar and Paul Henderson, companies have a legal or ethical obligation to maintain compliance with some accepted standards, which all basically boil down to making sure the right information is disclosed and making sure that disclosed information is accessible. The software tools marketplace abounds with point solutions addressing compliance issues in each of these categories. But in addition to the universal standards, it’s likely that your organization has its own policies and protocols with their own set of motivations. What is your technology doing to address these?

It’s quite likely that your organization has many guidelines and procedures for managing your web and document content which are not reinforced by the technologies used to do that management. If you do have tools in place to address these focused objectives, it’s likely that they are integrated clumsily into your CMS or disjointed entirely… a cobblestone of macros. Even worse, some of the bricks in your road to compliance may be feature-rich applications from which you only need one or two functions; expensive bricks indeed! Taking a blue-sky view of the problem, it should be evident that the way to effectively manage your content’s compliance to both good-corporate-citizen standards and company-specific policies is to do so from a unified console giving you a view of exactly the policies you want to manage, and only those.

In the enterprise, there’s no such thing as a technology problem. There are only business problems to be solved with technology. This means that for a technical solution to be viable, its design, deployment, and usage must be fully aligned with the business issue it addresses. Producing this kind of solution is virtually impossible for a traditional software manufacturer: a precisely targeted solution limits the market, and a generic solution is bloatware that no one wants.  Building a tailor made solution, based on a standard software platform however, is exactly what has established Vamosa as a leader in Enterprise Content Governance. By offering a rules-based engine, Vamosa allows organizations to build robust, custom  solutions to govern compliance to their specific standards, with help on hand from the Vamosa Expert Services Team.

Whether you’re suffering blemishes on your corporate façade or fissures in the foundation of your business Vamosa offers a flexible solution.

Understanding where and what content exists is becoming vastly important within organizations. In today’s digital world, as volumes of content increase exponentially, employees are often overloaded with an insurmountable mass of content, resulting in, inefficient internal and external communications within organizations. This was a problem recently encountered by the Vamosa Expert Services  team when working with Statoil.

Statoil had outgrown its Content Management System (CMS), and was unable to manage the existing and insurmountable volume of content. As a result they chose to work with Vamosa to provide a fast, effective and accurate way of analyzing their content.

Using Vamosa Content Analyzer, a full content audit of 150,000 pages of web content was performed in just three weeks. Statoil were able to identify problem areas within the corporate estate and automatically remove duplicate, redundant and obsolete content.

Although the analysis allowed Statoil to bring order to the chaos of their digital content, it was essential that measurements were put in place to ensure content quality was maintained on an ongoing basis.  By implementing an Enterprise Content Governance strategy, which defines who can make what decisions, who is accountable for which efforts, and how everyone works together to operate a website and web management process effectively Statoil were able to achieve control over their previously unstructured content.

To help you identify where you experience challenges managing the life of your content, we’ve created an Enterprise Content Governance Framework showing you where Vamosa tools can be used to automate tasks at each stage.

As unstructured content grows exponentially, businesses need to capture, store, manage, integrate and deliver all forms of content across their enterprise. Knowledge workers  need the right information at the right time to make the right decisions.

Managing unstructured data (web content, email, Blogs, user-generated content) is inherently different, and in many ways more challenging, than controlling its structured counterpart. Controlling this ‘digital landfill’- as AIIM would have it – requires organizations to discover what content they have and understand what condition it is in. Through our extensive experience in enterprise content migration projects Vamosa is only too aware of how frequently organizations are faced with these challenges – for example when we recently worked with IBM.

IBM was required to migrate from their legacy system to Lotus Web Content Management (LWCM) in order to gain control of their digital content. A full understanding of their current content inventory was therefore required to ensure that only the necessary content was migrated.

Using Vamosa Content Analyzer IBM conducted a full content audit; which involved crawling all content and nullifying any obsolete or redundant content, ensuring there were no broken links and identifying any outdated pages. Once the appropriate content had been identified, it was enhanced, allowing IBM to remove duplicates and manage version control through automated classification and tagging.

Vamosa Content Migrator was then used to simply, automatically and quickly migrate the required content into Lotus WCM within the project’s timescales. Vamosa solutions allowed the project to be completed up to four times faster than alternative approaches, at a quarter of the price and with no impact on day to day operations.

To learn more about the key implementation steps required in order to achieve a successful migration into IBM LWCM, download the 7 Steps to IBM LWCM Migration white paper.

In part 1 of the series we highlighted some of the steps that can help you obtain maximum value from your content. In this issue, we will further explore some of the solutions that will allow you to overcome the business challenges associated with the digital landfill.

1) Make Sure Your Content isn’t Duplicated

While reducing the noise on your content store is hugely beneficial you need to go one step further; you must ensure that there are no duplication issues.  A Swiss Bank client once told me that attaching a PowerPoint presentation of 1Mb to an email within that bank increases corporate storage requirements by at least 1 GB and produces on average ten versions of the file.  In one search, a single document could exist in 100 different places. That single fact alone highlights how difficult it is to sort out the knowledge from the noise. By de-duplicating your content, you’ll already be streamlining the process. Anecdotally this can reduce the file count by between 50% and 80% – significant in anybody’s language.

2) Find the Holes within Your Knowledge

Look for existing entities in your classification that do not exist within your metadata – the information you have about your content. Holes provide you with the ability to clean information, ensure metadata management is considered by content creators; and if it’s not to get those content creators in line, by setting out content complaince guidelines. That way you’ll be able to ensure content is relevant, findable and clean.

3) Share Knowledge

Content Management Systems work optimally when the content that they are custodians of is focused, relevant and classified and as a result this content compliance issues should be addressed. You need to assess how your content is being consumed and with this information drive your choice of platform as required. When undertaking a data migration strategy, for example emails, a real opportunity exists to be selective about where you store content. One customer was migrating 120,000 user email accounts from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Exchange. When discussing the migration, it was identified that 70% of the storage requirement was generated by attachments. Moving all of the attachments to SharePoint instantly enabled ‘share-ability’ and de-duplication. You don’t need to follow the obvious route when sharing knowledge, rather choose a platform based upon what your business requires.

4) Maintaining Your Knowledge Assets

It is essential to keep on top of your knowledge. If you allow your content to become chaotic, it’s not easy to repair; if you manage it on a weekly basis, maintenance is much easier. Once your content is at a point of usefulness, where it is relevant and findable, keep it there. If you don’t’ look at it for a year, you’ll then see some major gaps in the metadata, incorrect naming conventions, incorrect storage locations etc. If you invest in a pragmatic care and maintenance program, then spotting minor deviations from the documented standard will be easy to monitor, highlight and resolve, allowing you to continually obtain maximum value from your digital landfill.







To learn more about getting the most from your digital landfill,
download the Five Steps to Discovering the Real Shape of your Digital Content White Paper.

Knowing how to turn the contents of your digital landfill into a knowledge asset presents a huge challenge for any business. In today’s world, most organizations do not realize the actual volume of data living and breathing on their corporate web properties, document management systems and file shares; it is estimated that around 80% of corporate data exists in unstructured forms. There are however a number of steps that can be taken in order to capture, share and retain that knowledge, allowing you to build business advantage.

1) Define Knowledge and Deliver it

In order for companies to create a competitive business advantage it is essential that they have content knowledge, as this is the building blocks for differentiation. To obtain the most relevant information from your content stores you must first define what knowledge is. Knowledge must be up to date, relevant and map onto your prime business objectives. It also must be aligned with the mode of operation of your business; in a distributed, technologically advanced enterprise, there is often no need to produce paper-based information, with all the associated challenges of change control, and inherent costs. Within more traditional, slower moving environments the use of electronic media alone may involve a level of culture change that is unnecessary due to the prevalence of paper based manuals, such as in field based applications of within engineering workshops.  The reality is that knowledge should be independent from the channel through which it is delivered. It should be fit for purpose, and ideally operate across all communications channels within the business.

2) Adopt Industry Standard Classification Schemes where Possible

Now that the knowledge has been defined it is essential that it is understood how value will be extracted from it. To achieve this, a flexible classification process is required. You should identify all business content within your company and then associate those pieces with an industry or corporate standard classification, thus creating a data map to valuable knowledge.

3) Embrace Long-Term Standards

Industry-wide standard object based classification will provide your business with a flexible organizational solution. If there is organizational change, you can modify your content taxonomy (that is, change the way in which the relationships exist between the objects) rather than having to physically re-classify every object to reflect the changed taxonomic requirements of your organization.  This will help to ensure the knowledge assets are of use and will continue to be valuable going forward as the business changes.

4) Apply Consistency to Your Existing Content to Reduce the Noise

Inconsistent nomenclature, patchy classification, duplicate and near duplicate content creates a significant amount of static noise within your organisations proper information. This noise makes it hard to find anything – normally because you don’t have the tools or techniques to pinpoint a relevant subject area, or because your information is stored in functional silos – in department-specific storage areas, for example.  It is therefore important to reduce the noise within your organization by applying standard classification to your existing content and ensure content compliance standards are in place.










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 management and storage. Find out what you need to know to make your content management system truly effective.

In a CNET Q&A with Microsoft Business Division President, Stephen Elop was asked how Microsoft will get businesses to upgrade from the older version of SharePoint they’re already using and ‘in a nutshell, what’s Microsoft’s pitch to large businesses this time around?’ Stephen replied by discussing productivity across the PC, the phone, and the browser and the focus on making sure that people can work better together, taking advantage of the social-networking capabilities, the rich cloud technologies and a variety of other things.

He was also asked about the specific features that the average productivity worker will get with Office 2010 that they couldn’t get in either Google Docs or a prior version of Office. Elop commented that for users of Microsoft’s Outlook product for e-mail and various forms of communication, there are all sorts of capabilities that have been introduced to help people more effectively manage their communications, whether it’s ignoring threads of communication that are annoying, whether it is the ability to work with advanced conversation views to deal with complex communication patterns, or the interoperability established between Outlook and a number of the social-networking environments, such as LinkedIn, MySpace, and Facebook.

The benefits of SharePoint are certainly there and according to Forrester, a third of big enterprises plan to upgrade to SharePoint 2010 within a year, and that in turn will drive the corporate success of the Office 2010. But while Stephen is thinking of ways to convince enterprises to buy, he’s not thinking about or being asked about how Microsoft suggests large enterprises conduct a MOSS migration and migrate all of their content including documents to SharePoint 2010.

Migration is often viewed as an obstacle to enjoying the full benefits of a new product, but it needn’t be and Microsoft should recognise this early or face low adoption.

There are a few steps that need to occur prior to the upgrade to make it smooth and ensure it is a success.  These include content analysis to understand exactly what exists and a process to clean that content up. SharePoint 2010 is being received well, but it won’t solve many of the issues faced by enterprises unless a clear content migration strategy for upgrade is adopted and the required process of content migration is carried out properly.







MetaVis MIGRATOR is a simple tool for migrating content and objects between SharePoint sites, site collection or servers. Whether you are consolidating, upgrading or simply re-organizing your SharePoint environment. Download the MetaVis MIGRATOR business results sheet of have a free trial.

Moving house is said to be one of the most stressful things to do in life. First, you need to find the new house considering the requirements you need. A 3 bedroom or 4? A big yard or small? Lots of storage or minimal? City or country? Next, you need to negotiate the terms of sale and close on the house. Then comes the actual move. This is the part of the process where you go through the years of built up stuff and decide whether to be rid of it or not. This process often brings to light stuff you haven’t seen for years, broken items you’ve saved ‘just in case’ and some keepsakes. Overall, you are cleansing your household contents.

This same process applies when a corporation approaches its Enterprise Content Management (ECM) decisions. However, it’s a constant surprise these decisions are made without having all of the facts at hand. Knowing answers to questions, such as: how much content exists; how often is content accessed in a week/month/quarter/year; who owns the content; what happens to old content; what content adheres to today’s standards; and when changes are made, how does the change impact on the other content; is the only way to truly understand what is in a corporation’s household content and is an essential part any data migration strategy.

Many ECM novices and veterans most likely have a question mark over what is in the content inventory, so getting to grips with this is often the main problem and is only done when a move is in sight. But content tooling is available and should be used to not just manage content (which most ECM systems already do), but govern it on an ongoing basis. These content tools provide answers to all of the questions that should be known before a content migration is even considered, as you’ll then be better placed to decide on the necessary requirements for the new system.

You wouldn’t move house without taking inventory of your household contents and you shouldn’t make ECM decisions without this analysis either.








Download the ‘Five Steps to Discovering the Real Shape of Your Digital Content,’ 
to learn more or check out the Vamosa Migration Methodology.

The issue of controlling content and privacy popped up in the news last week; as Facebook has reviewed its privacy practices after a new feature exposed private information and wrested control away from users as to what content was shown to whom.

Personally I find the amount of personal information on the public internet  astounding  and this is just the random non-sensitive information. If my birth date gets out on the web, at worst I might get an extra birthday card or two; but corporate entities cannot afford to let sensitive information become public without often facing heavy legal penalty; not to mention what it does to their reputations. Facebook is reported to be losing users as a result of their miscalculation. The more sensitive the information the larger the risk becomes. Structuring content leads to predictable data. Predictable data leads to predictable areas of sensitivity and predictable areas of sensitive material can be controlled and protected.

Now I am not saying that if Facebook had implemented a more cohesive content model and massaged their content into those structures that they wouldn’t have exposed this private information. But I am stressing the importance of understanding the content structure and which portions will be provided to whom. Content Management Systems are one part of this equation – they should control the content as expected so long as it is stored in the right place. That is the key; so long as it is in the right place.

Structure and predictability are cornerstones of any successful migration. Taking content that was once fragmented and moving all the like parts together into a common structure(s) is the first step. And it can be an undeniably complicated step. With complication comes the need for traceability/auditability; the need to understand where content is going and what that content is. This applies whether that content is within the content model or the content object itself.

Having an auditable process, addresses that need. The Vamosa methodology provides two reports, one of which audits where every object will end up and the second that details what content will exist where within each object. This became an invaluable tool even prior to the content migration for a recent project I was on. We used these reports to discover that two of the security parameters required to control user access to sensitive content were inconsistent in the source content! Without that insight we could have had a Facebook-like situation when it came to the migration execution.

Knowing where your information is, when and how it is being consumed and by whom is important and is an essential component in any smart content migration strategy.


To learn more about where your content may lie download the Five Steps to Discovering the Real Shape of Your Digital Content White Paper.

Stephen Elop, President of the Microsoft Business Division, announced the launch of Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 on May 12, 2010 at 8 a.m PST or 11 a.m. EST last week. As a result, there is sure to be a wave of organizations migrating from SharePoint 2007 to 2010 as there was when 2007 was released; but what issues should be considered before undertaking a SharePoint migration?

Gartner have urged enterprises to avoid the use of customizations as much as possible, since this was a real pain point during the 2003 to 2007 SharePoint migration surge. They also suggest that organizations should consider using one of the many content migration tools available; these tools will not nullify the labour costs involved when undertaking a content migration – they can however significantly reduce them, by ensuring that only the required content is migrated.

By undertaking a full content analysis of your content prior to migration, you ensure that content that is no longer required for the business is not unnecessarily migrated to your new repository. It is essential to prioritize content, authorize and make decisions as to deleting old, redundant files or creating new ones. This will ensure that all content meets both corporate and technical standards, while guaranteeing that content is not weighing down the data structures and back up abilities of your new SharePoint environment.

You may also want to consider companies with experience of SharePoint if you’re considering an enterprise-scale data migration.

When creating or authoring content one important factor that is often overlooked by authors is correctly tagging the content. Perhaps this is a result of authors misunderstanding what is meant by tagging content properly.

There are two main approaches to tagging content; top-down and bottom-up. The top-down approach has been with us for a long time, even before the invention of the Web and is still used extensively today with Web content. The top down approach tends to be more hierarchical and involves the use of a taxonomy. The bottom-up approach is however much less structured and allows for the tagging of content by the author without limiting them to a specific set of terms to describe the content. This form of tagging content has proven to be very popular in the Social Media sites such as Twitter, Flickr and delicious.

The hierarchical top-down tagging approach tends to be used for enterprise content, where audit requirements for regulatory compliance are more onerous. Corporate, Industry and Government taxonomies are increasingly being used within implementations of Content and Information Management Systems. Taxonomies are used to classify and help in the retrieval of unstructured data within the organization. The taxonomy, if designed correctly, should help to create a map of the content. The main benefit of this, over the bottom-up approach, is  it allows users to find the relevant information quickly. Taxonomies achieve this by supporting the broadening and narrowing of topics, which allows users who are not sure what information they require to zero in on the information relevant to them.

We can see, therefore, that it is important to tag content correctly as this allows for effective and efficient retrieval of information. The problem that exists within many organizations is that there is a slew of digital content published across hard drives, intranets and CMSs that is not tagged correctly and this volume of content is continuing to grow at a rapid rate. Often, organizations  have a well designed taxonomy but authors are either not using it at all or are not using it correctly, leading to content being hard to find, content being created multiple times resulting in unreliable information being found.

In order to combat this all too frequent enterprise failing, it is essential that content is not only tagged but that it is tagged correctly to ensure that when content is found it is relevant and of use to the person requesting the information. To ensure that content is not only tagged correctly at source but that it also conforms to all of the other corporate standards, an Enterprise Content Governance (ECoG) strategy should be implemented. Many organizations are currently considering a move to SharePoint 2010, which has limited support for enterprise-level taxonomies and organizations may want to consider solutions to control; tagging standards at the desktop as part of their project implementation.

Through truly effective Enterprise Content Governance – businesses can optimize their existing investment in enterprise content management systems through proper control of content, while reducing costs, improving corporate efficiency.

We recently worked with 451 Group  to host a webinar focused on Information Governance. During that webinar, we looked at what information governance is and why it is important to an organization and its content management system (CMS).

I remember a research paper from 451 Group called ‘Unstructured Information or Unstructured Content: the elephant in the corner’. People were starting to flag up the fact that content is amassing within businesses day by day. And not every single piece of content is necessarily under control.

Content governance is about a frame of mind within an organization. It’s also about real life implementation of that governance to ensure that published content is consumed by stakeholders and then controlled as it needs to be. We see content governance as being driven by risk mitigation. Obviously there are legal and industry regulations, compliance challenges, cost control and also the drive to make information findable for knowledge workers. But there isn’t always the drive towards reducing content. Metadata and some tracking capability won’t always optimize what you have.

We talk about ‘quality built in’. It’s about the fact that each and every piece of content has to have some structure built in to ensure it can be controlled under ILM processes. We see the main challenges to governing content as web content and social media.

During the webinar, Kathleen Reidy, Senior Analyst at The 451 Group said that Information Governance is knowing what content exists, where it is located, how long it will be kept, who will have access to it – and then how to ensure it is protected and that policies and standards are used and enforced. She also said that businesses need more intelligence about this content, to decide what happens to the data. Is it a record? Does it go into the archive; does it get deleted? A lot of organizations still say “our users are the best ones to decide.” And that’s certainly true. But you will find more organizations that want a technology safeguard behind that; to ensure retention even when nobody has declared the data as a record. And then how do you make sure that policy continues to be enforced over time? Certainly technology has a role to play there as well.

With Vamosa technology, we can identify the value of content ranging from documents to web pages, where it is located and automatically clean it up, but then govern it. Doing this enables organizations to gain the value from content that they should.

We say to our customers that content management doesn’t always mean content governance. Content governance can be implemented without content management, and more often than not, content management is implemented without content governance. But they do make very good partners. A good content management system is made even better by implementing successful and effective content governance.

Download the transcribed webinar whitepaper here.

Do you understand your content lifecycle? Do you even have a content lifecycle? A content governance model, such as Vamosa’s Enterprise Content Governance (ECoG) framework is built around control and governance of content from creation, through consumption and on to retirement/archival or deletion. Implementing a governance model will make a huge difference to overall content quality, with streamlined processes resulting in a high percentage of well tagged, standards-compliant and relevant content. There are other benefits too: including cost reductions from increased efficiency; and reduced maintenance and storage requirements. The big question for Records Managers, Web Content Managers, Librarians and other professionals is ‘How can I start to apply this framework and regain control of the information in my organization?’.

Content has always been difficult to control due to its diverse nature and it should be no surprise that it’s not going to get any easier. This article from the eDiscovery Journal raises some of the issues facing organizations in the Web 2.0 era. Not only is legislation being tightened around how information can be used and how it should be retained within organizations, but the number of ways that information can be created has increased dramatically. In addition to the content residing within Content Management Systems (CMS) and email servers, organizations now have to consider the new breed of collaboration and social networking tools that are growing rapidly within the workplace. User-generated content featured in instant Messaging, Blogs, Twitter, Google Wave, Buzz etc. all make it possible for information to exist in a wide variety of locations, yet still “owned” by the company. This type of information cannot be managed or controlled using traditional methods.

Failing to appreciate the need for governance introduces risk and is one of the reasons why enterprise organizations find themselves in a situation where they lose control of their content. There is often no real understanding of either the quantity or the value of information existing within the network. Misleading information can seriously damage a company’s brand and customer service, while duplication can result in increased storage and infrastructure costs. Ultimately, this lack of control leads to an increase in the so called “digital landfill” and the first thing to suffer is content quality and, in due course, the end user experience.

So, where do you start? The first stage of the ECoG governance model is “Initiate”. This really is the stage where you have to plan your strategy and think about the content you need – whose going to use it and when; what are they going to do with it – and also what you can live without. Retention of obsolete or irrelevant information is one of the biggest factors contributing to uncontrolled growth of content within organizations. The Initiate phase fits extremely well with the implementation of a CMS for the first time, or as a ‘take stock’ point ahead of migration into a replacement CMS, but it can also be undertaken on the back of a thorough analysis of existing content. This is the perfect opportunity to rationalize content and ensure quality and relevance are high before populating the CMS. A CMS will only manage content, it won’t deliver governance. For that you need a strategy and policies covering the end to end content lifecycle – ensuring that you not only obtain a high level of content quality, but maintain that level, in order to maximize the value of your information assets.

The boardroom is a busy place with every department competing for resource and time from the decision makers. But often, content is not discussed or not a priority for the board. However increasingly, these decision makers are on the hook for the content stored within their company, or that appears on their Web properties; whether or not anyone in the company created it or even knew about it.

The need for businesses to protect costs and competitive edge has never been greater. That’s why now is the time for organizations to control and structure their content properly across the enterprise and for the board to recognize the benefits for the business and its agenda.

Enterprise Content Governance (ECoG) is central to businesses optimizing their existing investment in enterprise content management systems, while reducing costs, improving corporate efficiency, ensuring compliance and reducing their carbon footprint. More specifically, ECoG addresses the following board-level issues:

• eDiscovery - Effective ECoG lowers the risk of being unprepared, and ensures that access to electronic content doesn’t end up being extremely costly.

• Brand Governance – Brand compliance is hugely important for today’s globalized organizations to ensure their competitive messages are consistently communicated to key (and often geographically distributed) communities of interest.

• Reduced Storage – Burgeoning content and the constraints of compliance are inevitably going to have an impact on storage. And while the unit cost of storage is starting to decrease and technologies such as virtualization are coming to maturity, more work can be done to reduce the amount of storage a business uses. In the process of migrating over 100 organizations from one Content Management System to another, Vamosa has found that as much as 50% of an organization’s content is typically redundant. Remove this content, and 50% of a company’s server farm can be freed up, offering a huge saving on operating costs.

• Corporate efficiency – And there are more significant, farther-reaching benefits to be had from effective ECoG. ‘Collaborative working’ and ‘knowledge management’ may be industry buzzwords, but the concepts they represent should be taken seriously by every organization. The ability for a company to capture, share, organize, find and use its knowledge efficiently has a direct impact on its ability to be productive, competitive and ultimately, profitable – yet not all organizations are properly equipped to do this.

To be able to control and structure content properly across the organization – i.e., to achieve effective Enterprise Content Governance – organizations need to improve their content quality. The board needs to understand this importance and put proper resource into achieving effective ECoG. To learn about the five significant steps in the process, download the whitepaper here.

Content Migration is complex; it is not simply a case of ‘lifting and shifting’ content from one content management system (CMS) to another. Web content is often inconsistently structured and spread across multiple locations and sites.

With this in mind, there is a growing requirement for content to be analyzed, enhanced and standardized prior to migration. The cost involved in manually reviewing and migrating content can be significant; but it can be minimized through the use of software to perform automatic analysis and migration – a solution recently provided by Vamosa for the Department of Health and Ageing of Australian Government (DoHA).

DoHA needed to migrate from their legacy CMS to IBM WCM within just eight weeks in order to achieve better control of their internet sites. Vamosa recommended a solution that involved an automatic cleanup and enhancement of their content. This process firstly involved identifying all of the content that was required to be migrated.

Using Vamosa Content Analyzer Vamosa Expert Services gained a clear understanding of DoHA’s content inventories and content management activities. The results showed that DoHA had 40 static websites containing 50,000 ‘must have’ pages that were to be migrated.

Vamosa Content Migrator then extracted all of the required content, copying it into the staging repository while allowing business to continue as normal for all DoHA’s employees. The next stage of the process involved exposing all of the content to Vamosa’s rules engine, Vamosa Content Quality Builder, allowing all of the content to be modified both for business requirements and to satisfy the requirements of the target system. The content was then loaded into the target system already ‘fit for purpose’ and ready for productive use.

Vamosa Content Migrator was used to simply, automatically and quickly migrate the required web content and linked documents to IBM Lotus WCM in the stated timescales. The Vamosa toolset in the migration process, compared with the manual alternative, lead to the project being completed

    * Four times faster
    * At a quarter of the price
    * With zero impact on day to day operations

Over the last 15 years, the Web has fundamentally changed the way organizations conduct their business. From its simple beginnings, the use of the Web now extends from public-facing Internet sites to knowledge-sharing Intranets, limited-access Extranets, and the ever expanding world of social media. As the Web function continues to broaden, it requires the same management accountability mechanisms and controls that support and govern other aspects of business.

The notion of corporate governance is not new. Many organizations have formal governance controlling core functions such as IT and finance. However at Vamosa we have found that over one third of enterprises have no web governance policy or inconsistent policies on legal and technical compliance for web content.

Some view web governance as a barrier to freeform, organic Web development that has helped the Web move from a curiosity to a mission-critical business tool. However, there is now a mass of uncontrolled data available on the Web and this unstructured growth and lack of governance standards creates risk as the Web presence degrades amidst a cacophony of un-orchestrated development practices.

We agree with Lisa Welchman that the Web is simply too mission-critical to operate in an ad hoc or informal manner. In order to effectively align the Web with strategic objectives, Lisa is a proponent of formal Web Governance must be established and mechanisms implemented to enforce standards must be incorporated into day-to-day web operations management.

At Vamosa we believe it is time for Web Governance; Now and to demonstrate its importance, we will be running a series of weekly videos on this issue.



Web Governance Part, Now! Part 1




Web Governance, Now! Part 2

Check out more on this in our white paper Web Governance and Standards Compliance.