Taxonomy News & Articles

As we wrapped up January’s focus on Customer Experience Management and turned to Social Business for February, our experts offered some great advice on how to keep your pesky taxonomies neat and tidy, shared insights from thought leaders in the Social Business and Risk Management fields and had a moment of silence for Knowledge Management.

Read on for more great counsel from the experts: resistance is futile!

Well done taxonomy management makes searches simple and finding the right answers near-effortless. But the effort it takes to create these ideal results requires a well thought out plan.

Ah, metadata and taxonomies: what’s not to love? Ask your content creators and you’ll be told loud and clear: having to apply said metadata and taxonomies to content through tagging.

Consider this: Microsoft has sold over 125 million licenses of SharePoint. It is a multi-billion dollar business. SharePoint is a platform that everyone seems to have, many actually use and most don’t understand how to implement and manage properly. There is no platform more in need of a proper information architecture than SharePoint. But what exactly does that mean?

Taxonomies in Enterprise CMSs like SharePoint 2010 can be made more valuable if content can be autoclassified. This month, I show how the taxonomy management tool DataFacet can be used to precisely control how autoclassification can be done to get better search results.

Without being able to find documents quickly and easily, employees lose valuable time. By creating and maintaining strong taxonomies, enterprises ensure that easy access to important documents are maintained. In my last post, I demonstrated the necessity of good metadata to access digital assets. With this post, I explore how everyone across an enterprise can contribute to strong metadata in SharePoint 2010.

Many organizations use a Digital Asset Management (DAM) system to store all the various media assets used within marketing material and other applications. But putting your assets in a DAM system is the easy part, finding them can be harder if you don't have a strong taxonomy defined.

In this video blog post, I take you through the process of updating metadata in your DAM system to help find images easier.

There is a saying in the software industry that goes, “Choose two: fast, cheap, or good.” The same can be said of content, commerce and community -- otherwise known as the three C’s of web experience. It’s difficult to make two of these elements work together; three is a herculean task. But it doesn’t have to be.

The more time I spend with clients working on taxonomies within a CMS, the more I realize that the real challenge isn’t technical per se (even though CMS platforms out there aren’t really “taxonomy friendly” just yet). It isn’t even designing and building the taxonomy itself, although that does present a lot of challenges and issues. Really, what matters the most in the long run for totally integrating a taxonomy into a CMS is governance.

The DAM Lowdown is back with: Latest News from Widen, Box.Net Secures Even More Funding, Taxonomies Grow in Popularity, Daydream Offers Advice on Choosing DAM Consultants, DAM Stew and the Twitter Shout-out of the Week.

A few years back, when clients would come up to me and ask, “How can I implement taxonomy in my SharePoint collaboration portal?” I’d say, “You can’t. At least not without some serious pain and suffering.” Back in 2007, SharePoint and taxonomy just didn’t play well: You couldn’t do hierarchical tagging without clunky workarounds, faceted search was near impossible… It was a misery for Microsoft customers, but a happy playground for many taxonomy management tool vendors, who jumped on the opportunity to create add-ons to fill this wide gap.

If you're interested in doing more crowdsourced tagging for your OpenText Web Site Management CMS, OpenText partner Enthink has announced a new version of its Taxonomy Manager.

Since it’s my job to create taxonomies for clients within their content management system, it’s somewhat ironic that I encourage letting the “crowd” (e.g., employees at the company) create the taxonomies instead of me using my years of professional experience to build them.

The art and science of organizing terms and terminology – taxonomy -- has recently gained a lot of buzz in corporate tech circles, so much so that taxonomy consultants like me no longer have to explain that we’re not about stuffing recently expired animals to make them appear life-like in their natural habitat. No, we don’t have to do that any longer.

The DAM Lowdown is back with news and notes from the world of digital asset management: DAM Events, Adobe's Edge in DAM, Video as Project Documentation, The Relevance of Your DAM Tools, Metadata Everywhere and the debut of DAM Stew.