Byrne Tony Byrne

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Navigating Intranets by Folder

15-Jul-2005

Tags: Document Management (ECM), Web Content and Experience Management, Open Source, CMS

Perhaps heeding the old saw that Windows Explorer is everyone's first content management system, vendors are constantly trying to make their tools more "Explorer-like." A couple of product demos today really brought that home. First, CMS vendor Ektron has discovered that many of its customers use its folder-explorer interface (see screenshot) to navigate Intranet content in lieu of traversing the actual site itself. Clearly, navigating folders is faster and more familiar to some employees than browsing or searching an Intranet website -- even when the desired content is an HTML page. But mostly it reminds me that good Intranet information design and navigation is difficult -- and the challenge of combining the typical admixture of shared files and web pages helps explain the growing popularity of workgroup portals. Which brings me to my second demo, of the new open-source document collaboration platform, Alfresco. Like many of its competitors, employees can mount the Alfresco repository as a shared drive and drag files into particular projects or business processes (see screen). For the enterprise, Alfresco pitches its rules engine here, but for the employee, the appeal is using good ol' Explorer.

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