Today on a phone call, I used a point that I often use- “you can build the most ‘beautiful’ taxonomy ever but if you have nothing to use it for- it is not going to do you any good”. One of the common uses we see for a taxonomy is to use it in conjunction with a Content Management System (CMS) and many of our existing clients have our Synaptica tool integrated into their CMS systems.
Recently at Taxonomy Bootcamp, Stephanie Lemieux from Earley & Associates and Charlie Gray from Motorola presented a great session on ‘Integrating Taxonomy with a CMS for Dynamic Content‘ in which on slide 12 Stephanie pointed out:
Important note….
A CMS is not a taxonomy management tool
-Most requirements will not be met by the CMS, even the big players
-External tool needed to manage taxonomy versioning, scope notes, associative relationships, and more
-CMS taxonomy management is very SLOW…
—1 term with 5 synonyms & 5 translations = 3 minutes
-If the taxonomy is more than 1000 terms, an excel spreadsheet will quickly become unmanageable
—Worse if you are doing multi-lingual
The presentation went on to discuss other key aspects of taxonomy development for content management that i would encourage you to review. The reasons above that were presented as an ‘important note’ are just some of the reasons that many customers with robust CMS implementations use Synaptica to centrally manage their taxonomies.
In addition to the obvious core requirements in taxonomy creation and management that Synaptica covers, we also make available a little known add-on to the core product named the “Synaptica Indexing System”(IMS).
IMS is an add-on component designed to be used with the core Synaptica taxonomy and metadata management tool – and enables the human indexing of content against vocabularies stored and managed in the Synaptica system.
The Indexing Management System (IMS) can quickly be integrated with any content authoring/management tool that is already in place within your enterprise. IMS allows the content manager/indexer to search and browse the vocabularies that are stored and managed in Synaptica , dynamically building a “pick list” of indexing terms that are relevant to that piece of content.
Once the indexer completes the selection of indexing terms the IMS system passes those terms from Synaptica to the CMS to be stored as metadata. IMS can also simultaneously capture summary information about the piece of content and send it back to Synaptica to build a record within the Synaptica system itself. When IMS posts terms to the CMS it can also automatically expand the user-selected terms using related terms from the Synaptica vocabulary system. [Please see Workflow on the second page of this Spec sheet.]
In addition, editors can also submit candidate terms directly from the CMS system that will kick-off the established governance workflow for candidate terms- essentially producing a user tagging process for your key editorial staff without having to log into the Synaptica system directly to submit candidate terms.
So back to my point- the best taxonomy in the world is useless without a purpose and by having your content manager/indexers utilize a corporate wide central taxonomy that is stored in a centralized place like Synaptica, you ensure consistency and accuracy in indexing and identifying content across the enterprise.
I am always surprised when customers are blown-away by the IMS add-on and that they had never heard of that type of functionality and just today the client pointed it out why- we do have any marketing material for IMS on our product sites for this very valuable feature…so we need to fix that!
Daniela Barbosa
https://about.me/danielabarbosa
