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If you followed the advice from the first two articles in this series (How to build a short list and Developing scenarios), you should have a good idea of what you are looking for and with what products you might find some content management system bliss. This next article provides guidance on how you can start evaluating actual products against your defined requirements.

Silos don’t just exist on farms. You can find them in business, in government, in charities, in hospitals, everywhere where humans organize. Silos can be strategic, functional or geographic. They are characterized by their isolation within the larger organization, acting as self-contained units with very little interaction occurring outside their walls.

Before we answer the "what" question on social networking ROI it is important to understand why organizations are interested in embracing social networking. In this article I explore both the motivations for enterprise social networking and how one might think about enterprise social networking ROI.

Managers in large organizations are too concerned with downsizing and cost cutting and not concerned enough with efficiency, productivity and customer satisfaction.

In my last article, I described how to avoid the analysis-paralysis trap and quickly make your way to a short list of content management software options. If you missed that article, check out Selecting a CMS: How to Build a Short List.  If you followed the recommended approach, you should have a good idea of your high-level vision (what type of website you need to manage), your financial and technical constraints and few promising products to look at.

In this article I describe how to define some practical usage scenarios which you will use to shape the product evaluation process.

WCM Field Notes is a regular column written in collaboration with Jon Marks (@McBoof), Head of Development at LBi. This issue lists 15 questions you can use to judge the state of your content management project.

It is time for marketers and communicators to stop treating customers like little children and start treating them like intelligent adults.

Modern organizations have armies of people trained in producing and publishing information, but there is a huge and growing lack of people who are skilled at organizing, analyzing and prioritizing it.

SharePoint empowerment includes instilling proper discipline. Being able to define a process and use SharePoint to support it allows users to reap the technology's promise of streamlining work, increasing productivity and improving business efficiency.

Teaching how to define business processes is equally as important as it is developing a SharePoint solution to support them. You wouldn’t want your organization to end up being the SharePoint cobblers’ children, would you?

Researchers with the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) have thrown themselves head over heels into the semantic web. At this year's 8th International Semantic Web Conference, they presented a paper (download the PDF) focused on the problem of automatically generating the metadata that many semantic web functionalities rely on. 

Talking about RDF closures can cause eyelids to flutter, but the RPI folks aren't living in some theoretical world. They've been digging hard into large, public data sets and have learned some important lessons about making data more useful. Come join us for a closer look.

The web content management feature matrix can be a useful tool, if you use it wisely. Here's how.

Success on the Web is not about making customers do what you want. It is about helping customers do what they want.

Web teams often think progress can't be made because "it's always been this way." By challenging tradition you can find that it's not as immovable as it seems.

IKEA changes its font to Verdana. This is not likely to result in a massive drop in sales.

User research works best when you match your participants to the people who will use your designs. It makes sense that teams would try to use the demographics, often compiled by the organization's market research team, as the basis of their recruiting efforts. However, this can be problematic.

Yahoo's customer is the advertiser. Google's customer is you and me. That's why Google has been more successful.

Traditional marketing and communication is about getting people to do things. Web marketing and communication is about helping people do things.

Many website managers fail to recognize that any addition to the website adds complexity, which may result in confused and lost customers.

Most of us are aware of the golden rule for plain writing on the Web: Keep It Short and Simple (KISS).

But there’s no getting around it—at some point you are likely to have a long piece of complex material that you have to put up on your website.

It might be a ‘terms and conditions’ page for a contractual agreement. A set of instructions for a new product. A detailed explanation of a business policy. Whatever it is, you want your customers to read it because it will improve your business.

You can’t force them to read it, but you can encourage them to read it. You can make it inviting. Enticing. Kissable. Here’s how.

Creating an effective search results page takes hard work. In the first installment of this article, I introduced how designers need to understand the users' tasks and ensure every result delivers great scent. In this installment, I'll elaborate on the specific principles of the scent of information that play an important role when designing search results.