Content Management Workshop

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Highly interactive 1-day workshop with Bob Boiko, the author of "Content Management Bible"

8 November 2004 (10-18u)
Location: Sofitel Diegem (Diegem near Brussels (Belgium))
Presented in English
Price: 480 EUR (excl. 21% VAT)

This event is history, please check out the List of Upcoming Seminars, or send us an email

Check out our related in-house workshops:

 Learning Objectives

Why this workshop?

A systems integrator we recently heard said "All too often Portals are the question, but Content Management is the answer." Companies may be seduced by slick looking interfaces that promise to deliver you the information you need at a glance, or at most with one search query.
Often, companies buy-in to the CM vendor story as well; that keeping a website or intranet coherent and up to date is as easy as uploading the umpteenth press release via a simple web interface.

Some of the most important problems in project have much more to do with content than technology, and with organization and communication rather than with CM product features. Questions such as the following keep project leaders awake at night:

• How will I get and sustain adequate support and resources for my system?
• How do I get people to contribute?
• How do I get them to understand how to scope and divide their content, and write in a way that can be reused in different media?
• How do I convert legacy content?
• How do I prepare and model the flow of content between people and systems and how do I communicate this?
• ...

A lot of these problems could be avoided by better preparation, modeling the flow, and communication within your organization.

These and other questions will be discussed during our 1-day Content Management Workshop with Bob Boiko. Bob has more than 20 years experience helping organizations to create, manage, and distribute their content more efficiently. He will present a number of valuable concepts and practices and illustrate them in real-life exercises. The workshop is CMS-system independent, but the insight you gain, will help you to better make decisions on any CMS you decide to build or buy.

Included in the workshop is Bob's "Content Management Bible", targeted background-material and an exercises book compiled by Bob Boiko.

Who should attend this seminar ?

• Portal and intranet project managers: if content turned out to be an issue in your project (getting and keeping it up to date, motivating people to contribute, conversion of "legacy" content..., consistency and reuse of information...)
• Information architects, Content Management people (the "librarians" of your company). They are the people responsible for how different types of information (texts and text fragments, documents, structured information, email) are handled, what they need to consist of, how and which metadata is added, reuse strategies, how information is made retrievable via search and navigation systems.
• Knowledge management responsibles, who search for efficient ways to organize and store the knowledge of employees into manageable chunks of text in order to make it transferable to colleagues.

 Full Programme

In this part of the workshop, we will become acquainted with each other through the CM project that we have been part of. Each of us will attempt to state 5 sentences that define the CM project that is of most interest to us.The 5 sentences are:

• My system is called ...
• It helps my organization by ...
• The content it manages is...
• The people and systems we get content from include ...
• The people who receive content include ...

In this part of the workshop, I will present some of the key concepts of content management and the problems they lead to. I will begin with a brief overview of each key concept and the challenge it presents to your organization. Then you will work through an assessment of the magnitude of the challenge in your organization and some first steps of how to confront it. We will deal with these concepts and the issues they present:

• Content and the challenge of keeping it from overwhelming you.
• Management and the challenge of getting your organization to be organized.
• Systems and the challenge of figuring out what sort of system you need.
• Publication and the challenge of reuse and templating
• Politics and the challenge of getting the physical and mental support of your organization

In this part of the workshop we will focus on the design and implementation of the system you need to construct to gather and prepare content for your system. While this part of the CMS is often undervalued, if it is not well constructed, the rest of the system cannot function. I will begin with an overview of the structure of a collection system in the context of a full CMS. You will then spend some time working through the appropriate design and technology behind your own collection system. The topics we will cover in this part of the workshop include:

• The relation of the collection system to the rest of the CMS.
• Authoring including what you need to know about authors and what technology you can deploy to help them.
• Acquisition and what you need to do to assure a smooth acquisition process.
• Conversion and the trade-offs you must make between automation and quality
• Aggregation and the process of making all content consistent.

In this part of the workshop, we will focus on how to structure a content-base for management and end user access. Iwill begin with an overview of what it means to model content and how you can begin. Then you will work through your own content model and link it to the collection system you have previously designed. The topics we will cover in this part of the workshop include:

• An introduction to how content is divided and stored including a discussion of relational databases and XML.
• The concept of a content domain, why you have probably ignored it so far, and why you should now take it very seriously.
• Content types and how you can come up with a set of your own.
• Body and management elements within content types and the purposes they serve.
• Access structures and how they are the basis of end-user navigation and administrator maintenance.

In this final part of the workshop, we will focus on the next steps you might take in your own CM Project. I will present two methods you can use to move forward with your project regardless of what stage is at. For each of the two methods, I will present abrief overview and then you will do some preliminary work from the perspective of your own organization. The methods we will focus on are:

• A competitor/peer CM analysis, where you review the Web sites of organizations who are your competitors or peers in order to build a best practice approach to your own content and presentation.
• What I like to call "strategic triples," which are simple statements of how you will meet the needs of your organization and users. These statements allow you to reign in content overload and focus your CM effort on the largest rewards.

 Speakers

Questions about this ? Interested but you can't attend ? Send us an email !