Blog posts about Information Architecture

A portrait of the artist as a metadata manager

Added By Kashyap Kompella on 24-Apr-2012

Art helps us to understand the world we live in. We can in fact think of art as metadata about the world (and artists as metadata experts of the human condition). Art is also ahead in showing us the path to the future, and digital art may provide some clues to the future in the content management world ... Continue Reading

Digital workplace and enterprise architecture -- two sides to same coin

Added By Tony Byrne on 19-Mar-2012

A confluence of trends is elevating the concept of the "Digital Workplace." Much of the current discussion has centered around what a digital workplace mean for traditional intranets, emerging social collaboration spaces, and aging transactional systems.

Those are important topics, but I think an even bigger to-do for enterprises is to bring the right skill sets to bear. One key skill set to engage here is enterprise architecture ... Continue Reading

Big Data: Does Variety, Volume, and Velocity really deliver Veracity?

Added By Matt Mullen on 12-Mar-2012

Having been rather cynical on the subject of Big Data, it was reassuring to see a full-house at a recent Computer Weekly "CW500 Club" gathering dedicated to the subject. Nevertheless, I came away with more questions than answers about the value of this topic right now for business users. ... Continue Reading

Big Data plus Enterprise Search equals Big Enterprise Disappointment?

Added By Matt Mullen on 20-Feb-2012

This week, whilst I sat on one of London's First Capital Connect's delightful 1950's railway carriages traveling to the RSG UK office, I imagined a conversation a decade or so hence....

"So, Uncle Matt, what do you remember most about 2012? Was it the London Olympics?"

"Well my impertinent nephew, 2012 was in fact the year we learned about 'Big Data'." ... Continue Reading

Key Decisions to Make When You Decide to Go Mobile

Added By Apoorv Durga on 13-Dec-2011

At such time you decide you need a mobile presence for your corporate website or for an enterprise application, you'll face some key decision points, the outcome of which will define how you execute on a mobile strategy ... Continue Reading

New evaluation of taxonomy management tools

Added By Stephanie Lemieux on 16-Nov-2011

You the customer can choose from among several fully-featured taxonomy management tools, yet each vendor has tackled the problem of managing vocabularies from a different angle. So how do you figure out which one is right for your context? ... Continue Reading

Alternatives for integrating content Into your portal

Added By Apoorv Durga on 3-Oct-2011

In most enterprises, content resides in disparate, heterogeneous systems, including (but not limited to) content management systems. Those who have invested in portal-type technologies have a reasonable expectation that this technology can integrate the content consumption experience, exposing content and related data from multiple repositories ... Continue Reading

Is Search the New Portal?

Added By Apoorv Durga on 17-Jun-2011

Well, that's what some of the hype in the market would have you believe. Let's look at what's driving this. The last decade has seen continuous improvements to search technology. At least in theory, today's search engines can crawl more complex repositories, can handle many more documents, and run faster and more efficiently. ... Continue Reading

SharePoint leadership starts with a SharePoint strategy

Added By Alan Pelz-Sharpe on 25-Feb-2011

On the 28th and 29th March, my colleague Jarrod Gingras and I will be hosting the inaugural SharePoint Strategy Summit in Scottsdale, Arizona ... Continue Reading

Android Tablet or iPad

Added By Apoorv Durga on 8-Feb-2011

Google demonstrated Android 3.0 -- a.k.a., Honeycomb -- last week. Honeycomb is a version of their mobile operating system optimized for tablets. It works within a bigger form factor, and also packs in much more power to be able to run videos, games, and other applications better. But that's not the point of this post ... Continue Reading

In praise of TIMAF

Added By Tony Byrne on 29-Dec-2010

There's a great new book that begins with two questions:

"What does an information manager do?"
" How does she do it?"

And then proceeds to answer them both. ... Continue Reading

Mobile and Social event in Utrecht

Added By Adriaan Bloem on 22-Sep-2010

On October 7th, the MobileMojo event in Utrecht (NL) will focus on mobile and social media. Those two areas touch on almost everything we cover, so I'm happy that both my colleague Theresa Regli and I will be attending ... Continue Reading

When 66KB really equals 4.12MB

Added By Alan Pelz-Sharpe on 1-Sep-2010

Just as Route 66 in the United States has taken on a mythical status, 66KB is begining to take on the same legendary status in my own little world of ECM ... Continue Reading

Sitecore 6.3 is more Major than Minor

Added By Adriaan Bloem on 30-Aug-2010

Danish CMS vendor Sitecore released their new version 6.3 last month. For me, the immediate question always is: how much has changed? It's only a dot release, so it shouldn't be anything major, right? Well ... Continue Reading

What Exactly is IDOL, Anyway?

Added By Adriaan Bloem on 18-Aug-2010

There's a lot of mysticism shrouding Autonomy's mega-search offering, "IDOL." Not in the least bit because every piece of software that is acquired by the vendor is either "plugged into," "powered by," or "integrated with" IDOL. Supposedly, ... Continue Reading

Document Asset Management?

Added By Alan Pelz-Sharpe on 9-Aug-2010

You probably see a variety of overlapping terms to describe the management of content. One example is "assets" -- aren't all content items assets of one kind or another? ... Continue Reading

Don't ogle search if you really want content management

Added By Tony Byrne on 8-Jul-2010

I'll agree with mega-vendor Autonomy on one key point: Search technology is really important. But is it so important that search functionality should dominate your choice in a content management system? ... Continue Reading

Decoding Content Management jargon

Added By Adriaan Bloem on 1-Jul-2010

Now that we've built content management to reach into the clouds, have we been punished by a confusion of tongues? Sure, there are tangible differences between, say, a page-based or a component-based system. And some labels are rooted in their underlying technology. Still, there's a couple of archetypes we could at least attempt to label similarly ... Continue Reading

The case for Case Management - and Business Intelligence

Added By Alan Pelz-Sharpe on 8-Jun-2010

Both IBM and now EMC have recently touted their improved Case Management capabilities, so I thought it timely to take a look at this area in a little more detail ... Continue Reading

Multiple document silos - where to start?

Added By Alan Pelz-Sharpe on 31-May-2010

Virtually every customer of ours manages multiple document repositories. The document volumes stored in these repositories can get enormous; even smaller organizations can produce millions of documents, while the largest run to billions ... Continue Reading

CMIS - An important standard for buyers of ECM

Added By Alan Pelz-Sharpe on 6-May-2010

CMIS (Content Management Interoperability Specification) has been ratified as a standard by OASIS. What is it and what does it mean to buyers and users of ECM and Document Management technology? ... Continue Reading

Eyjafjallajokull's Cloud hanging over the Web

Added By Adriaan Bloem on 23-Apr-2010

I spent several days anxiously keeping track of the latest updates on the cloud hanging over Europe. It gave me plenty of time to ponder just how important on-line communications play a role in this nowadays. ... Continue Reading

Enterprise search versus federated search

Added By Theresa Regli on 5-Apr-2010

A question often asked by people learning about search technology is the difference between enterprise and federated search. It is not the simplest question to answer ... Continue Reading

What is Content Management?

Added By Tony Byrne on 24-Feb-2010

There's a question that keeps popping up around our industry: "What is Enterprise Content Management?" ... Continue Reading

Which is better for you - platforms or products

Added By Tony Byrne on 23-Feb-2010

Today we released a new advisory paper, "How the New Platforms vs. Products Debate Impacts Your Success." Subscribers to any of our EI Watch, SharePoint Watch, and CMS Watch research streams can ... Continue Reading

The value of the AS IS in Information Management Change

Added By Alan Pelz-Sharpe on 21-Feb-2010

One of the founding principals of business process change is the concept of understanding and defining the current "As Is" situation, before analyzing it and then constructing an ideal "To Be" situation. ... Continue Reading

Let us now praise metators

Added By Tony Byrne on 29-Jul-2009

Longtime information management guru Bob Boiko is a modest guy. You won't hear him blowing his own trumpet, so I will ... Continue Reading

Are we reaching the limits of UI buildout?

Added By Kas Thomas on 28-Jul-2009

As you can imagine, in the course of covering more than 200 software products, my colleagues and I get to see and touch a lot of different user interfaces, and one thing we've all noticed lately is the trend toward larger and larger interfaces ... Continue Reading

Know your relevance

Added By Theresa Regli on 22-Jul-2009

Today I took part in a lively panel about enterprise search at ACM's SIGIR (Special Interest Group for Information Retrieval) conference in Boston ... Continue Reading

Is Drupal Over-hyped?

Added By Tony Byrne on 11-Jun-2009

I'll disagree with Gartner as frequently as the next person, but their Hype Cycle is surely genius ... Continue Reading

SOA and Records Management

Added By Alan Pelz-Sharpe on 5-Jun-2009

An announcement caught attention the other week, though I don't have much insight into the details yet. In short a new RM (Records Management) standard has emerged ... Continue Reading

EMC Documentum opens the kimono

Added By Alan Pelz-Sharpe on 4-Jun-2009

Earlier this week EMC announced that it was providing more extensive development support for Documentum. This is something we had to comment on, as in our various product evaluations we have long called out EMC Documentum for providing relatively poor support ... Continue Reading

Chatting about SharePoint tomorrow

Added By Tony Byrne on 3-Jun-2009

Please join CMS Watch as we participate in the Earley & Associates "SharePoint Search & IA Jumpstart" series ... Continue Reading

Search, query syntax, Google and Starbucks

Added By Adriaan Bloem on 20-May-2009

There's too much here to write up in one blog post, so I'll pick one of the cherries for you here. Last week's Enterprise Search Summit in New York ended with roundtable discussions ... Continue Reading

Web Analytics vs. Web Design: Why Can't We All Just Get Along?

Added By Phil Kemelor on 13-May-2009

One of the many great discussions at last week's JBoye conference in Philadelphia centered on Douglas Bowman leaving Google for Twitter ... Continue Reading

Oracle proves the value of static web content delivery

Added By Adriaan Bloem on 20-Apr-2009

An early joke on Twitter about the Oracle/SUN acquisition: "Oracle buys Sun just to see if Twitter can handle the resulting noise" ... Continue Reading

Open Text goes to the (eye) candy store

Added By Kas Thomas on 10-Apr-2009

Until Open Text came along and bought the company (in a deal announced earlier this week), Toronto-based Vizible Corporation was not exactly (ahem...) visible.... ... Continue Reading

Are you investing in technology, or people?

Added By Kas Thomas on 6-Apr-2009

One of the more popular sessions at the recent AIIM show in Philadelphia was this year's "Stump the Consultant" session ... Continue Reading

Lucene and the return of bundled CMS and Search

Added By Tony Byrne on 25-Mar-2009

Today we released some findings pointing out how Web CMS vendors are increasingly embedding website search into their packages ... Continue Reading

OASIS blesses UIMA - What does it mean?

Added By Kas Thomas on 20-Mar-2009

Yesterday, OASIS (the standards body behind things like DocBook and BPEL) approved a new standard ... Continue Reading

Autonomy, Interwoven, and the ongoing search-content management dance

Added By Tony Byrne on 18-Mar-2009

Autonomy's acquisition of Interwoven formally closed yesterday ... Continue Reading

Exalead BI aspirations demystified - slightly

Added By Adriaan Bloem on 13-Mar-2009

When enterprise search vendors say they're moving into Business Intelligence, I walk to my closet to take out my skepticism hat. ... Continue Reading

Pardon the ECM Interruption

Added By Jarrod Gingras on 5-Mar-2009

The AIIM International Expo and Conference in Philadelphia, PA is rapidly approaching. One session that I am particularly excited about is ... Continue Reading

Challenge the Analyst Panel at the AIIM Expo

Added By Tony Byrne on 27-Feb-2009

I'm looking forward very much to moderating the ECM Analyst Panel at the AIIM Expo on ... Continue Reading

Web management - beyond the basics

Added By Tony Byrne on 11-Feb-2009

I teach a lot of intro courses about web technologies, and enjoy them very much. But I'm particularly excited to be teaming with ... Continue Reading

Blogs Are Dead! Long Live Blogging!

Added By Tony Byrne on 4-Feb-2009

After Wired counseled "pulling the plug on your blog" late last year, I decided to came to the defense of blogging ... Continue Reading

Green IT versus blue sky

Added By Kas Thomas on 12-Jan-2009

In a new report, Gartner reportedly points to effective use of ECM as something that can help enterprises make IT greener. The idea is that ... Continue Reading

Whose got your data?

Added By Phil Kemelor on 5-Jan-2009

One of the more interesting threads that I've read recently was on the Web Analytics Association Yahoo! Forum ... Continue Reading

Practical guide to Web CMS usability

Added By Tony Byrne on 5-Dec-2008

James Robertson has produced a very practical paper on how to assess the usability of Web CMS tools ... Continue Reading

Some early thoughts on CMIS

Added By Alan Pelz-Sharpe on 24-Nov-2008

Since the announcement of CMIS (Content Management Interoperability Specification) I have been inundated with requests ... Continue Reading

Scalable ECM?

Added By Alan Pelz-Sharpe on 23-Oct-2008

One of the words that makes me most cringe when I hear or see it in vendor marketing is the word scalable ... Continue Reading

Considering Storage

Added By Alan Pelz-Sharpe on 20-Oct-2008

I tend to be a bit "old school" when it comes to note taking and writing, something that can drive my colleagues ... Continue Reading

Should IAs be building applications without engineers?

Added By Theresa Regli on 8-Oct-2008

A former colleague of mine, one of the smartest engineers I have ever had the pleasure of working with, recently attended "developer training" for WCM vendor ... Continue Reading

Ignore usability testing at your own peril

Added By Kas Thomas on 24-Sep-2008

Most content management professionals know very well the importance of user-based acceptance testing, and understand the high stakes involved ... Continue Reading

Intranet goodness times two

Added By Tony Byrne on 23-Sep-2008

In the crush to support public websites, I think (too) many Web CMS vendors are ignoring Intranet scenarios ... Continue Reading

CMIS - the new Lingua Franca of ECM?

Added By Kas Thomas on 10-Sep-2008

It's often said that the great thing about industry standards is that there are so many of them. Now we have one more ... Continue Reading

Scared of Spiders?

Added By Adriaan Bloem on 3-Sep-2008

My girlfriend really doesn't like spiders, so I regularly get to roll up my newspaper and squash one. I'm not so much afraid of them, but that's starting to change: they can be lethal to a website ... Continue Reading

CMS Watch launches online ECM Technology Education

Added By Alan Pelz-Sharpe on 3-Sep-2008

Today we are really excited to launch our latest online course, Fundamentals of ECM Technology ... Continue Reading

Stop the Presses: the Word is out

Added By Adriaan Bloem on 30-Jul-2008

WordPress version 2.6 was released two weeks ago, and as I reviewed 2.5 for the Enterprise Social Software Report 2008, I was eager to run it through its paces ... Continue Reading

Introducing our new Online Education series

Added By Jarrod Gingras on 29-Jul-2008

We're excited to introduce a new offering - Online Education - for those interested in learning the fundamentals of content technologies. Today we debut our WCM course ... Continue Reading

Web UI development: inherently slow?

Added By Kas Thomas on 22-Jul-2008

In a thoughtful post at JavaLobby, developer Ali Loghmani poses a simple but important question: Why is Web UI development so slow? ... Continue Reading

Why most branded communities fail

Added By Tony Byrne on 17-Jul-2008

In "Why Most Online Communities Fail," the Wall Street Journal cites some very useful Deloitte research on businesses who launch their own online communities ... Continue Reading

When portal platforms aren't true SOA

Added By Tony Byrne on 14-Jul-2008

In our Enterprise Portals Report evaluations, we point out that vendors who tightly couple their portal offerings to other pieces of their underlying platforms can't call themselves truly Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) -ready ... Continue Reading

Enterprise Search Scalability: A Big Issue

Added By Kas Thomas on 9-Jul-2008

In the future, your search system may need to scale to handle billions of documents. For some companies, the future is now. ... Continue Reading

Adobe's brave new stack

Added By Kas Thomas on 8-Jul-2008

Over at the Adobe Developer Connection website, Belgian developer Sébastien Arbogast has posted an interesting article (a tutorial of sorts) on how to write next-generation web apps in Flex ... Continue Reading

White paper on SharePoint for public websites

Added By Tony Byrne on 2-Jul-2008

We've critiqued SharePoint's rather awkward web publishing capabilities in different evaluation reports (on Web CMS tools and SharePoint itself). But we also see customers who seek to deploy SharePoint for their public websites, either because ... Continue Reading

Best bets: a worst practice?

Added By Kas Thomas on 26-Jun-2008

As one of the authors of our Enterprise Search Report 2008, I've been spending a lot of time lately looking at search technology and talking to folks who care deeply about the subject ... Continue Reading

Blog migration: your castle is your domain

Added By Adriaan Bloem on 11-Jun-2008

One thing surprised me while evaluating hosted blog solutions for the Enterprise Social Software Report 2008: customers often indicate they'd like to switch to another service, but ... Continue Reading

Adobe woos Sun recruits to the Flex cause

Added By Kas Thomas on 18-May-2008

In an earlier post, I commented on the (undeclared) "VM war" that seems to be shaping up between Adobe and Sun Microsystems ... Continue Reading

DAM's growing pains

Added By Kas Thomas on 15-May-2008

Digital Asset Management may not constitute a huge slice of the ECM pie, but it's a fast-growing slice ... Continue Reading

Thoughts on how to do your DAM homework

Added By Kas Thomas on 13-May-2008

Yesterday at the Henry Stewart Digital Asset Management & Marketing Operations Symposium in New York, I sat in on a DAM "best practices" talk given by onetime independent consultant Linda Tadic ... Continue Reading

SEO: furthering the case for better content hygiene

Added By Theresa Regli on 9-May-2008

The worlds of SEO and enterprise search are not as far apart as you might think. Let me explain. ... Continue Reading

What WCM can learn from DAM

Added By Kas Thomas on 26-Apr-2008

Having spent a great deal of time in recent weeks talking to vendors, consultants, and customers in the Digital Asset Management space (in preparing for the upcoming release of our Digital & Media Asset Management Report 2008) ... Continue Reading

Special challenges of managing school websites

Added By Tony Byrne on 7-Apr-2008

Today I spent a delightful morning with 75 web managers from "K-12" (i.e., primary and secondary) school districts around the U.S. ... Continue Reading

Oooh...an XML fight!

Added By Alan Pelz-Sharpe on 4-Apr-2008

The world does seem to love an XML fight. ... Continue Reading

JBoss DNA: using JCR to make metadata behave

Added By Kas Thomas on 22-Mar-2008

The JBoss folks have launched an ambitious new open-source project that is so breathtaking in scope, it defies easy categorization, even though (ironically) it is largely about categorization. ... Continue Reading

La taxonomie est morte! Vive la taxonomie...

Added By Theresa Regli on 12-Mar-2008

Conference events and tracks are getting nichey-er and more specific, and rightly so, as every year the knowledge we accumulate about content technology gets deeper and more nuanced, which begs more specific presentations and probing questions from implementers ... Continue Reading

Content: what's it worth to you?

Added By Theresa Regli on 17-Feb-2008

Kevin Kelly recently wrote a superb commentary on what adds value to digital content, called "Better Than Free." Free content is everywhere, so what compels, and will compel, people to pay for it? ... Continue Reading

The world is your oyster, but is the Geo-web right for you?

Added By Theresa Regli on 30-Jan-2008

We all have our computer time-wasters. For some it's games, for others, IM'ing with friends. For me, it's the geo-web ... Continue Reading

Debunking the Google Generation Myth

Added By Alan Pelz-Sharpe on 29-Jan-2008

My thanks to our friend James Robertson for pointing to an important UK study that debunks many of the "Web 2.0" and "Google Generation" myths that ... Continue Reading

Cache as Cache Can

Added By Kas Thomas on 24-Jan-2008

Despite what eager (often junior) developers may tell you, snappy website performance is hard to achieve when you're serving complex, dynamic content ... Continue Reading

Content cleanup in the former East Germany

Added By Theresa Regli on 26-Dec-2007

There's no time like the holidays for catching up on back issues of The Economist (don't worry, we're baking cookies, too), and this morning I found myself engrossed by a tale of pattern matching ... Continue Reading

Making Search Work

Added By Tony Byrne on 14-Dec-2007

That's the title of a badly-needed new book by Martin White. At CMS Watch, we tend to focus on search technology, with an eye toward helping ... Continue Reading

Placed and placeless content in Vignette

Added By Tony Byrne on 16-Nov-2007

CMS Watch is frequently -- and I think justifiably -- critical of Vignette's "VCM" web content management platform (c.f., my review of their new management interface). But in fairness, there is one thing that the product does fairly well ... Continue Reading

New York in December: Christmas Trees, Ice Skating, Polar Bears, and IOA!

Added By Jarrod Gingras on 14-Nov-2007

We have just a few spots remaining for a class I'll be teaching on Information Organization and Access in New York from December 10-13, 2007 ... Continue Reading

Keeping it simple

Added By Tony Byrne on 7-Nov-2007

When I'm teaching or writing about content management, one of my mantras is that, to the extent usability is fundamentally "fitness to purpose," then you cannot declare any software tool inherently more usable or "intuitive." ... Continue Reading

To tag or not to tag

Added By Tony Byrne on 16-Oct-2007

Fellow analyst Mike Maziarka recently went over to the dark side (he now works for portal/middleware vendor BEA -- good catch for them). That's too bad, because Mike and I had a modest tradition of holding freewheeling "Town Hall" debates at industry conferences. There's one big topic where we could always disagree: tagging ... Continue Reading

Search the X-Files: unknown entities

Added By Adriaan Bloem on 21-Sep-2007

If you're in the market for search technology, you probably hear a lot about faceted browsing, guided navigation, refining, clustering, categorization, and so on. Many of today's search engines attempt to present more than just keyword search. That's fine if your content has high-quality structured metadata, but what if you throw in thousands of Word documents where the "author" is defined as John Doe? ... Continue Reading

Dilbert on IOA

Added By Tony Byrne on 19-Sep-2007

There's a particular Dilbert cartoon making the rounds that pokes good fun at Web 2.0 in general and "folksonomies" in particular. Surely there is much to satirize here. ... Continue Reading

Hope to see you in Denmark

Added By Tony Byrne on 30-Aug-2007

I'm very pleased to be returning to CMF2007, the "Third International Web Conference," this November. I'll be teaching on WCM, and CMS Watch is leading a track on selecting and implementing the various technologies we cover. You might be interested to know that ... Continue Reading

Classifying why we have sex

Added By Theresa Regli on 26-Aug-2007

Like great bottles of wine or legendary concert performances, there are occasional taxonomy projects I hear about after the fact that I'm very sorry I missed. Recently in The New York Times, society and science columnist John Tierney reflected on the results of a taxonomy project at the University of Texas that attempted to classify all the reasons why people have sex ... Continue Reading

Just what is IOA?

Added By Tony Byrne on 10-Aug-2007

Of course, the world doesn't need another 3-letter acronym. But we think this one's important. IOA stands for "Information Organisation & Access", a new AIIM certificate course developed by CMS Watch and taught by both of us around the world ... Continue Reading

Announcing a New Training Program

Added By Tony Byrne on 9-Aug-2007

Today CMS Watch officially kicks off a formal training program. In conjunction with AIIM, we are providing classroom workshops (leading to official AIIM designations) in Information Organisation & Access (IOA) and Business Process Management (BPM). I'm very excited about these new courses. ... Continue Reading

Taxonomy management, or BSM? Its all semantics.

Added By Theresa Regli on 16-Jul-2007

Recently I chatted with SchemaLogic CEO Jeff Dirks about the companys new spin in the marketplace. The software formerly known as "taxonomy management software" is now "BSM" software or "Business Semantics Management." Call it what you will, it's still about managing categories and vocabularies for your content, which we all could do a bit better ... Continue Reading

Intranet and Portals Survey

Added By Tony Byrne on 2-Jul-2007

Jane McConnell continues to do some interesting research. The second edition of her annual "Global Intranet & Portal Strategies Survey" is now open to enterprise participation ... Continue Reading

Web CMS usability fundamentals

Added By Tony Byrne on 7-May-2007

StepTwo's James Robertson has identified 11 usability principles for CMS products. I would quibble that some of his rules are actually more situational rather than universal. But if you care about actual user adoption ... Continue Reading

Your iPod, or your business? Taxonomies in-depth...

Added By Theresa Regli on 26-Apr-2007

A couple of months ago, I got many reponses from fellow frustrated iPod owners to my post about how bad metadata in iPods makes for a bad user experience. The same was true last week at the AIIM Expo, when during my taxonomy tutorial, the audience was quick to point out the problems they endured transfering bad metadata from CDs to their online jukebox ... Continue Reading

Proud of your Intranet?

Added By Tony Byrne on 5-Apr-2007