Archive for July, 2004
July 9, 2004
Managing Search and Taxonomy
Lou Rosenfeld’s recent post on where to position search and taxonomy management within the organization was a nice validation of how we have it set up at our office. According to Lou:
To rant a bit, it really drives me nuts to hear people talk of “search and IA” (which they often understand as browsable taxonomies). This is an absolutely false distinction, and leads to poor search design, poor taxonomy design, and perhaps worst of all, missed opportunities to better integrate the two to support finding, IA’s ultimate goal. For example, search often is greatly improved when it leverages metadata tags. Metadata therefore should be designed with search in mind. So why separate teams? I don’t see any good reason, just a lot of bad ones.
At ASHA, we have two teams in the Web Cluster (our label for a division): the Content Management Team (CMT) and the Knowledge and Community Management Team (KCMT). CMT has responsibility for IA, visual design, general content development and managing the stream of content that comes from our 40+ content contributors. KCMT is responsible for managing our search engine, the ASHA intranet, the member community, online events and the ASHA thesaurus of terms. Both teams sit next to each other in our office and have easy access to one another. We also have a full staff meeting every two weeks where the topic of discussion is often on how we can improve the overall findability of content and services on our site by tweaking our search, metadata, etc.
While they are technically two separate teams, they operate as one in effect. I’m very happy with how well this arrangement has been working for us.
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July 9, 2004
Upcoming Presentations
I’ll be speaking at 2 sessions at ASAE’s Annual Meeting in Minneapolis next month.
The first is a preconference session called Building Bridges: IT as a Strategic Partner. The portion of the session I am involved in will focus on how to get IT involved in the overall strategic planning and execution of the organization. The second part of the program will take a detailed look at the current state of the association management system industry, which is the biggest technology investment for most associations (just slightly ahead of the web these days).
The second is a concurrent session called Web Technologies for the Future. The session is built around William Gibson’s quote: “The future is here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.” Non-profit organizations are typically the last on the technology distribution list, so there is lots of stuff we can talk about that have not penetrated our industry yet.
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July 9, 2004
Microsoft Content Management Server
We have been using Microsoft’s Content Management Server in production for almost a year at this point. A while back I added a page of MCMS resources and links to the High Context Wiki. Feel free to add to the page if you have additional info/links/etc.
There must not be a lot of MCMS information sites out there. My little wiki page shows up very high in the Google results for many MCMS searches.
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July 8, 2004
New Blog Software for High Context
I’ve cut my weblog over to Wordpress from MT. Most permalinks and the RSS feed should automatically go to the new location of the content. Let me know if you see any weirdness going on. I’m still working on the categories which are a bit of a mess.
KMpings is still running on MT and should behave as before. I also discovered a couple of posts that I had left in draft mode in MT and forgot about. They are now published here.
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