While it’s no surprise that pizza and cake provide the essential fuel that powers many software development projects, it is a pleasure when one of our customers has a specially decorated cake made to celebrate the successful deployment of their customized Synaptica taxonomy management software. The project, completed this month, was a collaboration between Synaptica and the content management team at Elsevier, Netherlands.

Please let us know if you have any comments or questions.

Our Partner PPC are offering an excellent series of webinars on SharePoint that we wanted to make you aware of:

Roadmap your Path to SharePoint 2010 Webinar Series - Strategies to Maximize your ROI

Session Two: Designing Information Architecture in SharePoint 2010: Leveraging new features and taxonomy/metadata best practices

Tuesday, September 14, 2010 11:30am - 12:30pm EST

The information architecture for SharePoint 2010 site collections will lay a critical foundation for configuring sites and libraries, as well as for the success of end users’ adoption and their ability to find content. SharePoint 2010’s expanded features include management tools for metadata and keywords. This webinar will discuss the fundamentals of taxonomy and metadata, how these elements map to SharePoint 2010 features, and best practices for designing and implementing taxonomy and metadata within SharePoint 2010.

Presenters: Jill Tabuchi, PPC and Bill Hutchison, AEA

Intended Audience: Business Sponsor, Information Worker, IT Manager, IT Professional

Click here to start the registration process at Project Performance Corporation. This registration is for Session Two: Designing Information Architecture in SharePoint 2010: Leveraging new features and taxonomy/metadata best practices on Tuesday, September 14, 2010.

Contact PPC for more information about how to leverage SharePoint 2010 within your organization by clicking on the logo below.

Patrick Lambe has been analyzing the knowledge, skills and experience needs of the taxonomy profession for a while and as part of this his work he is conducting a survey on the present and future of taxonomy work and the needs of taxonomy professionals. Patrick is the author of a great taxonomy development book titled "Organising Knowledge: Taxonomies, Knowledge and Organizational Effectiveness" and an active writer on the topic of taxonomists and taxonomy development on his Green Chameleon blog.

Patrick, like some members of our own Dow Jones taxonomy team will also be Taxonomy Bootcamp in San Jose this November. Acording to his orginal request for survey responses, participants in the survey will also get a report of the results (which will include additional research beyond the survey).  Patrick writes: "For those of you who believe that taxonomies still have a future, this might make interesting reading, and for those of you who believe a la Theresa Regli that “taxonomies are dead”, we’d like to hear from you on why!"

You can take the survey at http://tinyurl.com/taxonomywork

Image|Flickr|Jima

I recently attended a seminar on the 10 Steps to Business Efficiency with Content, Collaboration and Process given by the good people at AIIM (http://aiim.org) all about ECM strategies and best practices. This was a free seminar, well organized and well attended by a broad spectrum of representatives from all types of organizations, large and small, new and old industries. The topics of discussion too ranged from the most effective way to digitize archival assets; to applications to better allow for federated search across various data repositories; and then there was certainly a lot of discussion around what has become the most ubiquitous of ECM type applications, Microsoft SharePoint.

There were of course the usual quotes and statistics from AIIM, Forrester and Gartner regarding information proliferation and management today: The amount of data being produced is doubling every 18 months; 80% of this data is unstructured and 90% of that is entirely un-managed.

An interesting quote that I will paraphrase here was attributed to Thomas Washington , "The pursuit of knowledge in an age of information overload is less about the process of acquisition than it is about a proficiency of tossing things out." And regarding the storage of all of this information another interesting fact was thrown out: while 1 GB of storage may now cost an average of 20 cents, it costs $3,500 to review that same 1 GB of data and start to make sense of it in the context of your business. (AIIM)

As I listened to the various presentations and vendors I was struck by one thing: none seemed to offer a unified solution for using taxonomy more effectively to structure, classify and categorize the content that was going into these vast data repositories. Certainly it was agreed that there was value to such a process, but it is something that many organizations have still not recognized as absolutely necessary to fundamentally improve the tagging, organization and discovery of information within these huge libraries of data, documents, and other media.

It is our opinion that the integrated use of taxonomy applied to ECM applications, as well as across the rest of the enterprise, using a centralized and standardized set of vocabularies for navigation, search, discovery, meta-tagging and many other applications is a necessity in moving towards a unified means of data normalization and discoverability. To achieve this we offer services to get companies started as well as tools like Synaptica with out-of-the-box integrations to tools like SharePoint, but also more generic means of integrating with external applications via simple APIs and Web Services.

As the proliferation of data only increases over time and the means of digitizing archival records or utilizing native electronic formats becomes more efficient, storage becomes less a matter of cost and more a matter of management. The efficient means of identifying, tagging, categorizing and sorting information will be key to the effective operation of any organization.

A couple months back, my colleague also wrote up the 10 Rules of Successful ECM Implementation after attending an AAIM seminar that we have found quite useful in talking to business and technology owners about content access strategies.

We see many of our customers at the forefront of addressing these issues and working with them, we continue to work towards providing better and easier ways for data managers and end users alike to find what they are looking for. We look forward to sharing some of these use cases as well as hear from you on your successes and struggles!

Image| Flickr | ul Marqa

Here within the Dow Jones Enterprise Media group we deal with almost every kind of enterprise employee catering to their specific information delivery and management needs. From the PR Communications teams who are monitoring what people are saying about their brands across various mediums; Sales and Marketing that need to keep on top of their clients, competitors and industries; Researchers and Knowledge Managers who need depth and breath for their research and of course Investment Bankers and Traders who rely on timely and accurate content. These are just a few of them and if you are not aware of all the diverse tools and solutions we offer, our new Dow Jones Solutions site now gives you a comprehensive look by different roles, business needs and products.

Lucky for us in the Synaptica and Taxonomy Services team, we typically get to work across all different types of clients whose needs can vary drastically specifically on how they are leveraging controlled vocabularies. In future posts, I will be highlighting some of those other segments but for this post i am going to highlight "Why Taxonomy Matters" to Sales Professionals and Relationship Managers.

Have you ever tried to have a conversation about taxonomy with a sales or sales operation person in your company? Well if the conversation didn't turn to taxidermy you are probably lucky! So here are some things you can bring up next time you are in a meeting with your Sales teams and are trying to convince them that Taxonomy Matters to them- try these on for size:

Product Alignment – To better target the right customer, a taxonomy solution provides the backbone to build a faster pipeline

Territory Alignment – Segmenting companies based on region, industry, company size as well as other available categories will increase the likelihood to find the right audience

Field Sales – Combining the accurate information from product and territory alignment with the proper event triggers, sales forces will be able to pinpoint when to discuss a particular product to a potential customer

Want some more use cases for why taxonomy matters to sales? contact us daniela.barbosa@dowjones.com or use the contact form from this blog.