Other Publishing Technologies

As well as CMS, there are also many other types of information publishing technologies, and in this section we take a look at a few of the different systems available, and how they could be useful to your intranet.

Portals

Portals are an online information gateway, and act as an anchor point to many different sources of information. Portals generally cover one type of information, and sort the links to this information into categories and bring a logical order to the information to make retrieval quicker and easier. Whereas an intranet covers a wide area in the content it contains, portals tend to be focused towards specific areas of content.

"Portals are an online information gateway, and act as an anchor point to many different sources of information."

A portal is different from an intranet in that an intranet is a content site containing information that the user requires, and a portal is a site a user visits to locate a particular content site. Although most portals are focused towards a certain subject area, there are also portals springing up which are less focused, such as the ones created by Excite, MSN, and AOL. These portals provide links to other content on the Web as well as their own content.

Using an internal business example, you could create a portal for your company's sales team. This would bring together links to information specifically for that department, such as links to customer records, and customer administration sections of the intranet. It could also include links to supplier's web sites, so the sales team can check prices etc. All the information the sales team needs will be brought together into one place, organized into logical categories, to make it as easy as possible for the staff to access the information they need.

Portals have a reputation of being fairly simple, but the technology has evolved quickly and can interface with many different types of systems and applications to pull all the different data into one place. They can provide users inside and outside the business with an integrated and personalized interface to a range of business content including information, business applications, and expertise.

Many companies are now developing web portals, with information relevant to the type of business. As well as a medium for displaying the company's services etc., they also bring together relevant industry news pulled from other sources, and links to relevant information. This makes the site more attractive to the end users, because it's not just acting as a brochure, but also as a source of useful information. More users will return to spend more time on the company's site because all the information they need is in one place. It's also likely that they will tell their colleagues which increases the popularity of your site.

If you are interested in portals, you can start by looking at some of the existing portals available. If you simply search for the word "Portal" in one of the major search engines, you'll get a huge number of portal sites returned covering a wide range of different subjects. There are also a large number of software vendors offering portal software, for example IBM has a portal toolkit for their WebSphere software platform, please see http://www-3.ibm.com/software/info1/websphere/index.jsp?tab=products/portal for more information about portals, and how they can be used by a business.

Document Management Systems

Document Management Systems allow a business to store all the documents they generate in a centralized repository. The Document Management System categorizes the data, and has powerful search and retrieval facilities to allow the user to quickly find the information they require. They allow users to upload and download documents, and can track user changes. They allow people in different departments to easily collaborate without overwriting each other's data, as well as maintaining version control and user permissions.

A Document in this sense is defined as a container for information. Document Management is a structured, systematic approach to controlling, describing, indexing, storing, retrieving, and sharing the information contained in your documents. With electronic storage costs so low, over time, a huge amount of documents will be archived, and without a good system it will become increasingly difficult for users to find the information they are looking for.

The Document Management System also controls security, so confidential documents can only be seen by staff with correct authentication details. Version control is also implemented, so changes to documents can be rolled back if necessary, and it ensures that staff do not accidentally overwrite each other's alterations to documents.

Document Management Systems are usually coupled with imaging systems, such as high-speed scanners, and use OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to "read" the document, classify the data it contains, and store it in the repository. This allows for the "paperless office", as all documents are stored in the computer system rather than in physical filing cabinets. This has a number of advantages:

• Backups can be taken off premises in the form or removable hard drives, tape cartridges, and so on, where it would be impossible to store copies of all paper documents outside the premises due to the volume of paper involved. Backed-up data is actually more secure if there was a fire for example and could easily be recovered, unlike if a filing cabinet is destroyed in a fire and the information it contained would be lost forever. Recent DMS systems have built-in compression routines for storing documents, and this increases the amount of data that can be stored on the storage medium, and increases document management efficiency.

• Documents are categorized and indexed so advanced search operations can be used to find any document quickly, wherever the employee is located in the company, without having to go and get a physical copy of the information from a filing cabinet.

• Documents are easily shared between departments, and are stored centrally, rather than each department having to have a separate copy of the information.

There are many different Document Management Systems available, and they need to be evaluated in a similar depth as you would with a CMS; there is a large variation in prices and abilities of the various systems on offer. Many vendors are now selling both the software and the hardware (like scanning equipment and so on) and this is usually cheaper than buying the hardware and software separately, from different vendors.

A good resource for finding out more about Document Management Systems is Comp Info, the Computer Information Center. On its document management page at http://www.compinfo-center.com/docs/document_management.htm there are a number of links to sources of more information about different aspects of DMS systems. There are also a large number of books available from Amazon, specifically about Document Management Systems.

Discussion Groups and Web Logs

Discussion groups are hugely popular, and there are now many different types of discussion group systems, for example newsgroups, which allows discussions through a newsreader. Alternatively, web-based forums can be used, and both of these formats are becoming more and more popular. They allow relatively quick interaction between people, either inside a business, or as a support medium for the business's clients. Information is displayed in threads, where each thread represents an individual conversation, so a message and its replies are kept together.

All discussion groups however serve the same purpose, which is human interaction. As the name suggests they are designed for discussing and sharing information, and tend to be fast-growing sources on information between a large number of people. They allow people to easily collaborate on any information, and receive fast replies. Discussions are divided up into topics and are usually threaded, and viewed in a hierarchical format so you can easily see which reply is to which message visually. Search facilities are provided so you can find all threads about a particular subject, and easily locate specific information.

Note

One of the most common applications of discussion groups is for dealing with questions and answers. One person posts a question, and then other people who know the answer reply, usually fairly quickly, and sometimes this might spark off a discussion about the best answer to the question, it has the advantage that old messages are held in searchable archives, so people can quickly find the answer if their question has come up in the past, without having to report the question again.

Web logs, or Blogs as they are more commonly known, are similar to journals, although in a business sense they don't contain personal information, but business information. They are fast moving and usually contain information which has a fairly short lifespan, rather than being put in "long-term storage" on a web page for example. Usually they show information for a short amount of time, a week, or a day, perhaps. Information that appears on the blog isn't necessarily lost once it has reached the expiry time, but it's no longer viewable by default.

A blog is similar to an online version of Post-it notes, where snippets of information are added by the staff regarding the latest project, for example. They tend to be more informal and are good for allowing staff to brainstorm and share thoughts and ideas.

Many companies have blogs open to the public to share information about recent company news, or answer frequently asked questions for example. It allows the business to have more freedom to share information with its clients which wouldn't normally be shared. They have the advantage that clients go there because they want to read the information contained, rather than forcing information on the client in the form of an e-mail that they are less likely to read. As blogs are usually informal, they allow a more personal relationship with the customer.

A large number of links to articles and information about Blogs can be found at http://www.marketingterms.com/dictionary/blog/.

Web logs and Discussion forums will be discussed in greater depth in the next chapter.