Content expiry process - New Ideas

[Richard]

Hi folks,

long time reader, first time poster

I work on a big Intranet, 300,000+ pages. We are in the midst of
rebuilding a content expiry process, and it's a mess. The existing
process doesn't work, details don't matter but I'm sure many of you
understand what goes wrong.

So here's my question to all of you.

What if the CMS didn't have a content expiry process, what if there
was some other method / process that got content reviewed. What would
that look like?

I'm looking for off the wall crazy ideas.

Thanks

Richard English
Toronto

[Dave Coustan]

Semi-off-the-wall: what about setting up some kind of mechanical turk-like process where anyone or a specific subset of people within the organization can use a simple interface to pick up a piece of content from the stack of items that need periodic reviewing, and review it for freshness according to some simple instructions? In return maybe they'd receive some sort of fractional credit that would be worthwhile to them within the org - credit towards an extra day off, something like that? I guess it would only work if there's little expertise required to determine whether the content needs sunsetting or not, or if the pool of people acting as reviewers had that expertise.

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[Hilary Marsh]

Hi Richard,

On the site I used to manage, we had a similar challenge -- our CMS didn't have an automatic process either. After a lot of thought, we realized that we didn't want content to automatically expire without the opportunity to

• review it
• work with the subject matter experts to determine whether it needed to be rewritten or updated
• think through the implications of the links that would break or disappear if the content expired

We identified four actions for content

1. renew it
2. revise it
3. archive it
4. delete it

Based on that, we asked IT to give us the following things:

• A "content expiration" field in the CMS (which didn't have any functionality associated with it). We filled in the field manually for each piece of content based on the rules we set for various content types.
• A monthly report of content set to "expire" in the coming month
• A way to archive content so it would remain live on the site but not be returned in general searches

(We didn't fully get any of those, but that's another story altogether....)

I hope that helps!


Best,

Hilary

--
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Content strategy for associations, real estate, nonprofits, corporations:
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[Jeffrey Durland]

Something like Dave's suggestion is touched on by Rachel Lovinger in her article for Contents Magazine on disambiguation, I don't have the specific link handy but the magazine is at http://contentsmagazine.com/

I think the point is that there are a few tasks that people are better at than machines, even tedious but easy ones, which are usually what computers are so good at. This usually relates to visual information and/or context, and it's why there's also not a "content audit machine."

JD

[Rick Yagodich]

Richard,

This is one huge question. As most replies so far have hinted at, this
is about human process engineering (hmm, isn't that what much of CS is
about anyway?)

You will need a human process in there - a mechanism to actually carry
out the reviews. If you don't have that, if there are no ongoing
resources to keep the U+1F4A9 under control, any automated process to
put it into review will fail. Of course, once you have the resource
lined up, you will need the mechanism to feed it. Kind of chicken and
egg here.

But first, I would ask a far more important question. Why do you need
300k pages on an intranet? Just how big is this organisation? What is
the business purpose of the intranet? Is it a repository of old crap
that no one will throw away, or is it a real, accurate and usable
resource? The first thing to do with that pile of pages is to get each
one to justify its existence. Set the rules for what the site is
supposed to be achieving and make sure every piece of content is serving
a purpose. Once you have done that, and got the site down into the low
5-figures, those same criteria, adapted over time as the organisations
goals and objectives evolve, can be applied as part of the review process.

One thing I would like to implement on that sort of scale is a digital
linking of goals to objectives to user actions to content; then as any
of those validation points is achieved or becomes obsolete, the content
that was present because it jumped through those specific hoops can be
removed unless it can prove itself against the organisations evolved
paradigms.

Rick

[Richard]

Thanks everyone for their responses so far, this board is a great
resource.

Some good points have been raised, but let me elaborate a bit.

There is a large amount of garbage among the 300,000 files we working
on that as well. And we do have a content expiry process built into
our CMS.
It just doesn't work. We are working through requirements to fix it,
but here's the real crux.

I don't trust our CMS.
It's a piece of junk. And I'm not getting a new one :(

What I am kicking around is, what if I could manage the review of
content outside of the CMS.

[Rick Yagodich]

It would look like deploying another CMS to do the "management" part of
what your current CMS should do. Except that all the CMS content would
need to be manually referenced into the new system, which would need to
be configured from scratch. It could just be a decent database.

But where is the current system failing? In that it isn't notifying
owners properly? Or that you can't enforce the manual part of the review
process?

You need the audit and clean-out, then you need the people who will
actually do the maintenance over time. Without that, no tool will do you
any good.

[Matt Moore]

So here are some ideas:
- Every 12 months delete everything. Unless someone actively nominates an item to be kept. And some else seconds that nomination.
- Charge people a $ fee for each published item that they own. You can have as many items as you like, provided you pay for them.
- Each month, the CEO will visit a page at random on the intranet. If the content is up-to-date, the content owner gets a small reward. If the content is lousy, the content owner has to perform some kind of community service.
- If a page gets no views over a 12 month period then automatically cull it.
- Add a "delete this page if junk" button to every page that any employee can use.

N.B. I am not necessarily recommending any of these, just putting them out there as ideas.

[Lori M]

Hey All,
Gee. 100K plus pages.

That's a whopper.

One company I worked for updated our CMS and needed to migrate to a
new system. So we did a search for all pages in the system. We
extracted data such as last date page was viewed by a consumer/
customer, last date it was updated by an employee, is page an entry
point to an important portal or log in page, etc.

This helped us determine its usefulness to the business owner and to
the customer. Or at the very least, it helped us prioritze our own
work. We looked at the items that were updated most recently and
viewed most by user to determine if the content should be kept,
revised or trashed.

We also charged business via the work we performed. But it was more
about the time to create and update, not the space.
Careful not to cut your site down too far. Content is helpful for
SEO.

Also social media can help.
If some of the content is for on site search results, and you have a
"Was this page/info helpful?" or Facebook Like images, can help you
tell the target audience finds it useful.

Good luck.

[Adrian Howard]

On 11 May 2012, at 22:59, Matt Moore wrote:
[snip]

> - If a page gets no views over a 12 month period then automatically cull it.

[snip]

I implemented a variation of this as a quick'n'dirty hack for an overgrown work wiki and it worked quite well.

Anything that wasn't accessed in 3 months got "deleted".

In this instance "deleted" meant any links to it were excised, and the page was removed. If you went to the old URL you got a "this page was deleted because..." message and a contact form to ask for it to be reinstated. The only way the page could be reached after that was from a specific "search deleted pages" option in the advanced search.

The only real problems that came out of this as I recall were:

1) A couple of folk needed a little hand-holding when it became obvious that most of what they'd written was being deleted. We managed to turn this into a productive conversation in the end - but it started off quite fraught. I think it actually helped that it was an "automatic" system deciding the content was not needed, rather than a human doing it explicitly.

2) The automatic link removal wasn't 100% effective. There were in-line references that needed manual fixes (e.g "See both [DullDocument] and [RelevantStuff] for more information" became "See both and [RelevantStuff] for more information".

3) There were a few useful/important but infrequently visited, pages that were deleted and had to be reinstated and manually excluded from the automatic process. This was work - but not as much work as manually reviewing everything would have been

There was also a nice side effect: Because we left the system running people felt able to experiment a bit more - knowing that unused stuff would be automatically culled. A sort of pave-the-cowpaths for content.

Cheers,

Adrian
--
http://quietstars.com adr...@quietstars.com twitter.com/adrianh
t. +44 (0)7752 419080 skype adrianjohnhoward del.icio.us/adrianh

[Richard]

Thanks all,

I appreciate the responses, some good ideas here.
A few things I had never considered like charging out.