Today’s conference call, “I Hate My CMS: The Perils And Promise Of Content Management Systems,” jointly-sponsored by the Society for Information Management and the Internet Strategy Forum, scored a home run. The 90‑minute panel discussion drew participants from across the country, including some on the West coast, awake at 5:30 AM for the chance to participate.

Bottom line

Very few of yesterday’s implementation issues have changed since I got involved with CM in 2000: the platforms are still big and complex; the choices, confusing; the question “Build or buy?”, still haunts, and is still misunderstood; and the main vendors are still Interwoven and Vignette. But‑most tellingly‑the advice from hard-learned lessons is still the same:

• Get buy‑in and mandate from the top, and work down.
• Start small, and don’t bite off more than you can chew.
• Respect and understand the complexities of building your business’ web presence.
• Last, and not at all least, training and documentation for developers and is a critical success factor.

A fellow member of the Society for Technical Communication (STC) presented a dilemma in a message in one of the STC’s mailing lists. Working on a Microsoft Word document, she needed to generate a table of contents (TOC) from text contained in page headers. This is problematic: text in headers has limited visibility, and isn’t visible to Word’s TOC generator, even if you use styles or outlines (two ways of tagging text for the TOC generator).

However, bookmark text defined in headers is visible throughout a document. So, using bookmarks for the TOC entries sidesteps the visibility problem. But now, there’s now a different problem: linking the bookmarks and Word’s TOC generator. Luckily, Word gives us “TC fields” to accomplish this. There are three steps to the work-around:

• Create bookmarks in page headers.
• Insert TC fields containing bookmark references.
• Generate the TOC.

Chances are good you’ll move to a new home or city at least one more time in your life. When you do, you’ll be shocked to discover a hidden, pervasive enemy: paper.

In the kitchen drawers, on the dining room table, behind the radiators … it’s everywhere! Clipped magazine articles stuffed into “read me” folders, recipes never cooked, books bought from the sidewalk dollar rack, old Ikea catalogs (“Why did I keep ’04, ’03, and ’02″), a collection of yellow, faded needlework patterns, copies of copies of project files from work, old cable bills (as if anyone needs proof that rates have gone up), bank statements from cancelled accounts, letters to the editor, unpublished, lists of things to do, not done-where did it all come from?

Believe it or not, you decided to keep every scrap in every teetering stack on the kitchen table, in the crooked pile next to your armchair, and I don’t even want to talk about the stack of five-year-old People magazines in the bathroom. And when you have to move, you’ll have to decide, page by page, sheet by sheet, piece by piece:

“What is this? Is it important? Then, I’ll file it. Should I shred it? I’m not sure – I’ll put here, I’ll look at it later. Hey! I can throw it away, hurray! But, why is this pile so small?”

Who would have thought that something so thin as a sheet of paper could grow into such a gigantic horror? No, it doesn’t reproduce in the file cabinets at night when the moon is full – the groaning you hear is really the sound of the floorboards sagging. So do yourself a favor: just say no to paper. One day, someone will have to go through it all. Better that you start now to cut the paper pile down to size.

… than just document formats and technical words. It’s all about using collaboration, coordination, and communication to create business value in the form of the written word.

“It’s so easy to use that we don’t need any documentation!”