A quick look on SEO basic

WCM (Web Content Management) explained

A nice video on marriage of Enterprise Content Magagement and Web 2.0

content management system - Scalability at the cost of simplicity

Typically most of the large enterprise grade content management systems are complex to work with and not very intuitive for the business users. A part of this observation is influenced by one of the product from a major vendor in which I have invested a lot of my professional time. The Vendor is Vignette which had seen its better days but eventually got bought over by Open Text a very recently has a solid web content management suite which they call VCM (Vignette Content Management). However using the product to product content in a website or portal is an extremely tedious job which scares away the typical business and functional users. Though one of the most prominent selling pitch for any content management system is enablement of business users in the whole content creation effort typical that does not happen in enterprise grade CMS packages. Buried in the layers of object relationships, child-parent dependencies and taxonomy considerations it is very difficult for business users to visualize the content management model and create content which is ready to serve without the intervention of technical stuff. As a result organizations ending up spending millions in implementing these packages still have to rely on an army of content authors who are trained on these packages just to enter content which otherwise have been captured in a different tool. It is understood that prime reason for this complexity in the CMS packages of enterprise grade is the goal to achieve better scalability, reusability and findability. Couple with it if your organization is highly regulated (Healthcare or Finance) you will be burdened with a validation rigor which will make the overall content lifecycle that much more complex and hard to visualize for typical functional users (marketing folks or finance guys) for whom content production is just a part of their overall role description. The organizations are therefore pleading for a CMS package which is simple on the interface and implementation but at the same time provide better scalability, findability and reusability.

E-Discovery in developing world...

Lately I have developed an acute interest in e-discovery and associated business challenges and technologies to overcome those. Obviously it is still in its infancy and came to the content world spotlight primarily because of the FRCP rule 26 which came into effect on December, 2006. There is not doubt in anyone's mind that organizations are facing huge challenge to keep a tab on its content (Physical or Electronic) which is ever growing in exponential rate thanks to lowering entry barrier helped by technology in creating digital content. Now as far as the law goes in United States the relevance and discover ability of any content is driven by FRCP and in coming days I am sure more digital content type will come under its purview e.g. Online Audio or Video files posted by employees or organizations in social networking sites may be). My curiosity is more to do with the status of e-Discovery initiatives in developing countries like India. Being not so well known for its efficiency in speedy and transparent justice system can countries like India help support implement E-Discovery initiatives across the legal landscape? What do we need for that? We need a whole new bunch of lawyers who are technologicall savvy and understands various nuances of Digital Content and its discoverability, we also need a complete overhauling of our legal rule book and define new laws with regard to discovery rules (whats come in and whats not) and we also need a very powerful local industry (KPOs ) which caters to the domesctice industry in e-Discovery efforts. Our organizations also need to spend billions in updating their existing IT infrastructure to make them compliance with any potential e-Discovery rule change. It is also important from a globalization aspirations as companies which do business overseas especially in US come under US FRCP purview.