Taking on the Challenge of ECM
Content management is a tough job and it’s not going to get any easier. The glut of information online continues to grow, not only in the types of content known to the Internet but even more so with the advent of lightweight publishing tools such as Moveable Type and Google’s Blogger. Geek and respected journalist alike can now have their say. Online publishing can be done easier, quicker and cheaper than ever before, resulting in near instantaneous travel of breaking events, instant editorials, and opinions online. Indeed, by the end of 2002, there were 3 million web sites, 3 billion pages, and 500,000 Blogs online, but only a fraction of which could be considered newsworthy.
Today, four out of five people turn to the Internet first for their information needs, reflecting the fact that most business critical information appears first, and often exclusively online. As information continues to metamorphose, it becomes less defined, more dispersed and, by default, more difficult to manage. The greater the number of online sources, the more difficult it becomes to keep track of which sources to read. And while the ideal content management solution utilizes both aggregated and syndicated solutions, it is the fluid nature of Internet content that poses the greatest challenge.
The Content Manager’s Challenge
While Internet content plays a mission critical role in creating a comprehensive content management solution, the challenge is how best to leverage and control this online information. The content manager has a number of conflicting interests to address:
- Providing information that is comprehensive but not surplus to requirements;;
- Empowering people to manage their own information searching but with an element of control;;
- Using the open Internet but ensuring results are reliable and accurate; and;
- Giving access to the open Internet but using internal business applications as the first point of contact.;
Aggregation addresses many of the challenges of content management— it offers single point access, it mirrors the existing trend for on-line searching, it offers breadth of sources and it is completely automated. There are still, however, some problems inherent to aggregation which Moreover addresses as follows:
Access to the right sources: Most aggregators crawl the Internet, collect headlines and deliver those headlines as headline links. With less sophisticated solutions, however, what you get is information overload—an abundance of headlines delivering information of varying quality. Moreover addresses this problem by using a powerful combination of automated and human editors to select which online sources to use and then scours those sources on a continual basis. The difference can be seen in the quality and reliability of information that is provided. Christine Bennett, Editorial Program Manager at Microsoft Information Services, chose Moreover as a result of its “breadth of coverage and quality of information”. Moreover provides comprehensive online news coverage delivered in real time via multiple delivery mechanisms to more than 50,000 employees across Microsoft.
Relevance: Many of today’s search engines provide fast and efficient searching across the Internet. Moreover powers over 65% of these searches resulting in more classified and organized content retrieval. Jim Lanzone, Vice President of Product Management at search engine Ask Jeeves, explains why they chose Moreover to enhance their offering: “We selected Moreover Technologies to supply our news feed because the sophistication of its technology solves the unique challenges inherent to search engines.” Moreover adds qualitative data, called metadata, to online sources. The metadata added includes information based on publisher source information and article subject matter, enabling very controlled categorization of information based on type of publication, location, category, media type and so on. The metadata opens the door to powerful filtering capabilities like AltaVista’s News 2.0 search product and for corporate customers produces very specific and tailored information results.
Variety of Different Formats: Online information is published in a variety of formats. Moreover’s technology normalizes these formats and converts them into XML, thus ensuring universal compatibility with any technology platform. As a result, products can be quickly and easily integrated into any business application. Moreover also has a reputation for pioneering new technologies like RSS and has partnered with many of the leading names in technology, including PeopleSoft, Autonomy, IBM's WebSphere and Inktomi.
Conclusion
In general, it’s an exciting bewildering and, above all, challenging time for the information industry and content managers. New tools, new formats and new resources mean that there is more and more information available. As the volume of online information continues to grow at such a rapid rate, content managers need to look to solutions such as Moreover Technologies, which enable them to gain control of this information, improve the way users search for online content and ultimately provide the right information to the right people at the right time.
Moreover Technologies, Inc. is a provider of real-time information management solutions, delivering essential online information in time to impact business decisions. If you are interested in learning more about Moreover Technologies, please visit Moreover