The Enterprise Search Report. Requirements, Costs, Products and Practices. Steven Arnold, CMS Watch $1250
If there have been few books on intranets the literature on search software is almost non-existent. All credit to Steve Arnold, the author of this report, and Tony Byrne, the publisher, for combining their talents to produce what is without any doubt the definitive report on enterprise search. A great deal has been written about content management but the focus is usually on getting content into a CMS and then publishing web pages. Until this report the requirements of searching across enterprise repositories of all types have not been examined in any depth.
The main sections cover what enterprise search is and how it works, making a business case for an enterprise search application, defining enterprise search requirements, profiles and assessments of nearly thirty vendors, and advice on how to select and price an enterprise search solution.
The report is not only 475 pages long, but such is the format of the report that you are getting perhaps 200,000 words of the utmost erudition. This shows especially in the vendor profiles, each of which is around 10 pages long and presents not only a detailed account of the features of each search engine but also an invaluable perspective on its strengths and weaknesses. I would have liked to see a more extended section on open-source software, as many organisations are now more disposed to use open-source solutions.
The single user price is $1250, and there are team and intranet pricing options. Expensive? Look at it this way. That money only buys you a few hours of a consultant of the calibre of Steve Arnold. The report represents months of work and years of experience, and will transform information access in your organisation.
Ambient Findability. Peter Morville O'Reilly Publishing $29.95
According to the author ambient findability describes a fast emerging world where we can find anyone or anything from anywhere at anytime. But there is a dark side to this. Later in this remarkable book Morville goes on to comment that findability is at the center of a quiet revolution in how we define authority, allocate trust and make decisions. That presents all who seek to find with some challenges.
I am renowned as a speed reader, to the annoyance of colleagues. This book is not only impossible to speed read, but it would be dangerous to do so. The reason for this is that the insights that Morville offers into the processes, outcomes and impacts of information discovery are such that at almost every paragraph I needed to take time out to reflect.
For once the chapter headings do nothing to help me explain what this book is about. They include A Brief History of Wayfinding, Intertwingled and Inspired Decisions. In the chapter on wayfinding there is the observation that because of poor wayfaring design (such as poorly labeled fire exits) people die. There are many other examples of how the process of information discovery can change people's lives, several of them from the author's personal experience.
This is a very personal book. You feel that the author is sitting in the room with you, talking you through his discoveries. The publishers have done a superb job on the design of this book, almost as an example of how good book design is an exemplar of findability. The index, paradoxically, is poor. Don't let that put you off reading one of the most original and thoughtful books on information that I have ever come across. Brilliant!
Portals - People, processes and technology, Andrew Cox (Editor)
2006 Facet Publishing 246 pages GBP39.95
Wherever two or three intranet managers gather together the talk often turns to portals. Opinions are usually divided, and there is still much to learn about how the technology is best used. This book is a well-assembled collection of 17 papers that seeks to set out the benefits and issues in a very considered way, with the aim of informing the reader rather than shouting. The term 'portals' is used in its widest sense and covers everything from enterprise information portals to consumer and public portals, and is all the most useful for doing so. Indeed one of the best papers is by the editor himself on the issue of definitions. There are five sections to the book; Core themes, The library and the portal, The portal in the corporate sector, Portals in the public sector, and The future. This is, I think, the first book on portals from a European perspective, and many of the authors come from academic institutions, mainly from the UK. There is in fact a high degree of interest and considerable experience in portal technology in UK universities so this book is a valuable status report. The problem with all multi-author works is the way that the delays in submission are reflected in the timeliness of the references, but in general this is not a problem with this book. As a set of case studies and reflections it is admirable, but it is not, nor does it pretend to be, an instruction manual in portal technology.
Improving Intranet Search, James Robertson StepTwo
Search is now being seen as a crucial success factor in intranet implementation, helped by the vigorous marketing of the Google Search Appliance. This excellent report is therefore very timely, and as with all of the author's reports it is full of very practical guidance and the presentation is faultless. The approach taken is to set out two personas, one for a specialist searcher and one for someone with little search expertise, and then compare the value of various elements of a search engine, especially the way that hits are displayed on the screen. This works well, and shows the benefits of personas at the same time.
The report opens with a section on evaluating search engines, and the process of selecting a new search engine. However most of the report is taken up with advice on refining the search interface (12 pages), refining the search results (24 pages) and search engine tuning/usage logs (25 pages). The report concludes with sections on usability testing and the importance of allocating adequate staff resources to search engine optimization. I would also like to have seen more discussion about metadata issues, especially synonym management, and the problems of intranets that contain content in more than one language.
Overall though this is a report that every intranet manager should have in their document collection. It is readable, authoritative, and encapsulates search best practice. It should also be required reading by search engine vendors, most of whose public web sites demonstrate a depressing lack of commitment to search excellence
Content Management Bible . Bob Boiko. Hungry Minds, New York. Second Edition 2004. ISBN 0-7645-4862-X
This massive 1000+ page book was one of the first books to be published on content management, and remains the definitive textbook. It covers both the principles of content management and how to implement a content management system, based on the author’s ten years of experience in this area. There is a companion web site at http://www.metatorial.com . Bob Boiko and Rita Warren have also developed a CMS Metatorial Planner as a companion to the book. This 168 page guide is designed to provide a way for organisations to cope with the complexities of the analysis and planning phases of the project. The Planner itself is in a pdf format, but with it come a number of Word templates. These enables the team to work through the sections of the Planner, and then paste the outcomes of the analysis work into the templates for review and subsequent incorporation into a Request for Proposal from vendors.
Enterprise Content Management: Taming Content Chaos Anne Rockley, with Pamela Kostur and Steve Manning. New Riders, http://www.newriders.com . ISBN 0-7357-1306-5.
The focus of this 565page book is, as the title indicates, on the development and implementation of an enterprise content management strategy. There is a very good section on tools and technologies which sets out very clearly the questions that need to be asked of any commercial content management software vendor. The human aspects of implementing a content management strategy are not overlooked either, with good chapters on implementation and managing change. The book concludes with appendices which provide a checklist for implementing a unified content strategy, writing for multiple media, content management vendors, a tools checklist, and an introduction to content relationships.
Intergrative Document and Content Management: Strategies for Exploiting Enterprise Knowledge. Len Asprey and Michael Middleton. 2003. Idea Group Publishing, Hershey. ISBN 1-59140-055-4
The benefit of this very comprehensive handbook is that it goes beyond web content and addresses the selection and implementation or document management systems as well as web content management systems. The authors emphasis the importance of the initial work on understanding and documenting business processes and document life-cycles, and a valuable feature of the book is the level of detail on the function requirements of a document management system.
Information Architecture for the World Wide Web. Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville. O'Reilly and Associates Inc. Third Edition 2006 ISBN 0-596-00035-9
Although not strictly about content management systems this book is essential reading on the subjects of information architecture, navigation design, search systems, thesauri and metadata. The book is illustrated with many examples of good practice and as with all the other books in this section is written by experts who have substantial practical experience in information architecture. http://www.oreilly.com/
Content Management Requirements Toolkit. James Robertson, Step Two Designs, Sydney, Australia. http://www.steptwo.com.au/
James Robertson has been involved in content management projects for some time, and writes from practical experience. This toolkit is designed to assist organizations prepare a Statement of Requirements for a content management system. Like the Metatorial Planner the 64 page Toolkit comes as a pdf file and also as a set of Word templates. The sections of the Toolkit deal with Content Creation, Content Management, Publishing, Presentation, and Contract and Business.
The CMS Report. Tony Byrne. CMS Watch http://www.cmswatch.com/
The CMS Report is compiled by Tony Byrne and Janus Boye of CMS Watch and sets out the main features of the leading CMS packages in a format that makes feature comparison much easier than spreading out product brochures on a table. The report describes and evaluates 25 of the leading web content management packages. In addition to the very good product reviews the opening section of the report provides an in-depth analysis of the main components of a CMS software suite, and highlights the main pitfalls in specifying and implementing a CMS. The cost of the report is $895 and it can be downloaded from the CMS Watch site.