Amzon.com has begun taunting me on their home page with items from my wishlist. They appear under a heading of ‘You Know You Want It’. Ha! I love marketing with a sense of humor.

Thunderstone has launched their own Search Appliance product.

(Thanks to the most excellent Search Tools News for the pointer.)

On the ASAE Technology List, someone asked for the top three tips you would give for someone who is about to embark on a content conversion project (defined as moving content from an old site to a new site). Great question!

Here are my top three based on one completed mirgration and another that is in the planning stages:

1. Inventory current content and delete as much of it as possible. Remove anything that is out of date, incorrect, etc. If you are migrating to a new site structure, the inventory can be used to map existing content to its home in the new structure. This page has some good tips and a spreadsheet tool for conducting a content inventory.

2. Budget for html temps to assist in migration and clean-up. This is essential if you do not have tools to automate portions of the conversion. The temps can focus on brute force cut-and-paste (if necessary) and content clean-up to use new style sheets, etc. Staff can then focus on overall content organization, template design, etc., which is a better use of their time. BTW, you need to do the content inventory/mapping for temps to effectively do the brute-force work. No budget for temps? Then you need to allow for extra time (lots of it) for staff to do this themselves.

3. Force yourself to assign metadata during the conversion. If you don’t do it now chances are you will never have time to go back and do it later.

Column Two is conducting a survey that will assess CMS vendor websites on how well they serve their potential and existing customers. Take a couple minutes to fill it out. I’m looking forward to the results. My prediction: CMS vendor web sites fail miserably in areas deemed important to their customers.

From the Intranet Focus Blog:

A CMS is probably the most complex rollout an organization will manage. Even a change to the desktop IT environment is less of a challenge. Indeed, only organizations that have implemented an ERP application or a document management application are likely to have had any related experience.

It is a huge process that requires lots of buy-in and support from around the organization in order to succeed. For membership associations, such as where I work, implementing a CMS is very similar to implementing a new association management system and comes in a close second as far as degree of difficulty.

The organizers for the Open Source Content Management Conference have a blog: OSCOM Blog. Also check out the CMS Matrix.

CMSWatch: Featured Opinion: 5 Biggest Mistakes in CMS Selection provides some excellent pointers on pitfalls to avoid when selecting a CMS.

While they are all good points, the most fundamental recommendation, imho, is to create a formal, diverse, selection team. At a minimum, according to the article, it should include both IT and content development staff. This seems obvious but I have heard of many instances where IT simply handed down a solution to the content folks without their involvement in the evaluation of products. Less frequent are cases where the content staff buy software without consulting IT and then ask IT to install it. IT people LOVE that. 🙂

The content staff are the primary users and are the best judges of authoring and publishing functionality. IT staff can best judge the infrastructural requirements and performance measures as well as the depth of their knowledge in the technology on which the candidate systems are based. You must have both of them well represented in the selection process.

(Thanks to Column Two for the pointer.)

Spotted via drupal.org:

Third Open Source Content Management Conference
Due to the great success of the first and second conference we are organizing another conference at Harvard University, Cambridge/Boston in April 2003. To stay informed please subscribe at our Participants mailing list.

I may try to attend that one next year.