Need help with content management system issues (long)

[Amy Dohlman <amdohlman -at- uwalumni -dot- com>]

I recently started a new position with a large company, and we're working to
revamp the content management system we use for documentation. While we're all
pretty knowledgeable, we're struggling with the issue of how to get the
analytical information we need to make the best decisions on where to focus
our improvement efforts. Knowing that this is an excellent resource with a
staggering amount of experience, I thought I'd bring it to the list for ideas.
If you've worked with a content management system, could you share some of
your experiences and recommendations on what it took to get it all working? I
searched the archive, but didn't find the answers I was looking for.

First, some background information about our system:
Our system is a web-based system managed by Stellent's Content Server
application. This product manages the document repository and gives us version
control, along with providing intranet access to the documents for business
users. The Stellent application is something the company purchased before
anyone on our team worked here, and about half of the documents it contains
have suffered some neglect that we're working to rectify, along with improving
the front-end and navigation to make it easier to use and documents easier to
find. We currently author in Word and publish to .PDF, both of which are
checked in to Stellent's Content Server. We do have an IT resource who
administers the Stellent application, but we share him with various other
teams in the division, meaning that the time he can devote to our projects is
limited. Cost is an issue (isn't it always?), but we do have money in the
budget available.

Here's where we want to go:
--We want to use usage metrics to determine where best to focus our
documentation maintenance efforts - which documents are being hit most, and by
whom? We can purchase another Stellent add-on to do this, but (like many CMS
systems), it's expensive. We have rudimentary metrics from an older version of
WebTrends, but it gives us a very incomplete picture as it's not optimally
customized (due to our limited IT support). We're looking for a solution that
will give us usage numbers and hits, but that we can customize or manage
within the documentation team with little help from IT. What are your
experiences with metrics tools? Do you have any recommendations?

--We're looking to introduce workflow concepts to manage document maintenance.
Again, the Stellent product has workflow capabilities to automatically route
documents to reviewers to obtain their approvals, then route the document to
the next step, and so on, but we're interested in finding the best solution,
regardless of who produces it. One thing we struggle with here is how to give
reviewers the authoring rights they need to revise and approve documents while
still maintaining control over standards (in other words, we don't want to
willy-nilly give our business users authoring rights, but we don't want to
lock it down so much that we become a bottleneck either). And again, we'd like
to implement this all with as little help from IT as possible. Have you
implemented any workflow like this? How did it go with your business users -
was additional training needed? Were documents that had been approved by
SMEs "hidden" or unavailable to the general public until after final
Documentation approval? How hard was it to set up and maintain?

--The current site isn't the easiest to navigate - currently, users can
navigate to documents via a left-hand navigation "tree" pane, or they can use
the search tool to perform a full-text search (that has limitations - it's
case-sensitive and finds only exact matches, that sort of thing). This model
isn't meeting users needs. We'd like to move to something that only shows the
user documents for his or her team, based on log-in, or that hides listings
for other divisions within the company, but again, with little IT support.
Does something like this exist?

--Perhaps the easiest - we're planning on moving away from Word/PDF to HTML in
the near future, and we're looking for an authoring tool that can fit within
this whole structure. Dreamweaver is available to us, but is it the best
choice here? Or is it overkill, as the Stellent product includes many the web
management tools itself)? What are your recommendations for authoring in HTML?
I'm not sure authoring in XML is appropriate for us, but am I wrong in this
assumption?

Thanks in advance for your help!
Amy Dohlman

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