Good design is essential to the success of your unified content strategy. Once you’ve analyzed your information (through a thorough content audit) and analyzed your content life cycle, you’re ready to begin designing how your information will be structured to support reuse, how it will be tagged, and how it will be produced. The five chapters in this part discuss various aspects of design, from information modeling to implementing your design decisions.
Chapter 8, “Information modeling” begins the discussion with the first—and probably the most critical—phase of design. Once you have identified opportunities to reuse content in your organization, you need to model the content you plan to reuse. Models formalize the structure of your content in guidelines, templates, and structured frameworks such as DTDs or schemas. Through information modeling, you identify and document the framework upon which your reuse strategy is based. Just as architectural blueprints define how houses are built, information models design how your information products are built.
In addition to information models, you also need some way of classifying and identifying all of the information or elements so that they can be retrieved and combined in meaningful ways for authors and for users. Metadata allows you to describe elements in terms of their behavior, processes, rules, and structure. Chapter 9, “Designing metadata” describes what metadata is as well as its role in a unified content strategy, both in terms of categorizing documents and in defining content elements. While metadata has been a buzzword in the information technology and data warehousing fields for some time, it has recently emerged as an important concept for enterprise content management solutions. After all, information is only effective if users can get to it in a way that’s useful for them.
Chapter 10, “Designing dynamic content” takes design further by offering strategies for personalizing content. Within any organization, and certainly on the Internet, there is so much content being created and being delivered that users can’t find what they want and authors can’t find what they need. Adding metadata can help to further categorize content, but it can only do so much. Users must still know that particular content exists to be able to find it or reuse it. Dynamic content can help by providing users with the right content, at the right time, and in the right format. But, designing dynamic content is a lot of work; this chapter also describes when dynamic content makes sense.
As you design how information products will be built and how information will be categorized and delivered to users, you also need to design your internal processes for making sure all tasks are completed in the right order, such as adding metadata before content is published. Workflow, in the context of a unified content strategy, defines how people and tasks interact to create, update, manage, and deliver content. Workflow moves content from task to task, ensuring that the business rules specific to your organization are followed, for example, making sure that sign off occurs at the appropriate levels. Chapter 11, “Designing workflow” describes the concepts of workflow and its benefits, and takes you through the basics of designing workflow to support your unified content life cycle.
Finally, Chapter 12, “Implementing your design” rounds out Part III with suggestions for implementing your unified content solution. It discusses factors that affect implementation, as well as some of the options available, such as implementing your design in XML, or using authoring forms or structured templates with traditional authoring tools. It also discusses where metadata is stored, managed, and maintained. While this chapter does not provide technical “how-to” information, it guides you through some of the technical issues so you’ll have a better understanding of how to map your design to a software or process solution.