Blog entries

ECM Growth

Brad Cohen — Wed, 23 May 2007 04:00:00 +0100

A CMS Wire article reports that Gartner, the research firm, expects the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) global market to increase by 12% per year. This would bring the global content management market to $4.2 billion by 2010. The article went on to state the following:

"The reason for this expected growth can be found on the hundreds of thousands of hard drives inside the computers used by corporate workers across the globe. This “unstructured data” includes word proce...

Structured Authoring Implementation

Brad Cohen — Mon, 21 May 2007 04:00:00 +0100

The prospect of implementing a structured authoring (or single source, as it’s sometimes called) environment can be quite overwhelming. This is especially true in organizations that have mounds of largely unstructured content. Trying to structure legacy content, in all of its formats, means being able to locate it all and understand the intrinsic relationships.

Because there tends to be a learning curve with stakeholders, implementations should begin with a small group within an ...

Performance Metrics for Writers

Brad Cohen — Thu, 17 May 2007 04:00:00 +0100

I read an interesting article the other day via TheContentWrangler, which discussed managerial use of (or lack there of) performance metrics in evaluating writers. The article stated that most technical communications managers have a background in English or journalism and find writing skill and experience to be the most valuable skill set.

Seeing that I have a background in English, I’m curious what metrics can be used to evaluate writing performance. I’ve seen folks in the consultin...

Portals, Blogs, Wikis, Etc.

Brad Cohen — Wed, 16 May 2007 04:00:00 +0100

So I just attended an event at the Pittsburgh Technology Council on Portals, Wikis, Blogs, and other new media technologies. When I arrived, I expected the presenter, Ian Rudy of Plus Consulting, to discuss these topics from a generalist perspective. As the presentation unfolded, however, I soon realized that the event was focused on how each of these new media technologies have been integrated into Microsoft SharePoint 2007.

The presenter touched on a point that interested m...

Collaborative Authoring

Brad Cohen — Tue, 15 May 2007 04:00:00 +0100

I recently read Ann Rockley’s book, Managing Enterprise Content, and had to pause on the section titled “Collaborative Authoring.” In some more traditional authoring environments, writers are asked to take ownership of specific content areas within an organization. Often times this leads to a kind of territorialism among individual authors and creates a siloing in the content creation process. Moving into a unified content strategy with a specific focus on content management...