Taxonomy Structure

Greetings all,

We recently upgraded our make shift portal from a JSP, to a small web application (using struts, tiles, etc...) that is sitting on tomcat. I realize that we are going to eventually go with a true portal engine, but we are a couple years away from that. As part of making our portal (what we call a portal anyways), the business wanted it to be able to display targeted content based on the division. Our application is capable of displaying content based on division, but we don't have any content inside TeamSite that is targeted by division.

With all that being said, I have been given the responsibility of setting up TeamSite so that we can allow the business to publish divisional content. My question is basically this, does anyone have suggestions on how to structure the content inside TeamSite (Taxonomy)?

For instance, lets say that I have 4 divisions (North, South, East, and West). If there is content that will be the same accross all divisions, would it look something like this:

\Internet\common (this is where all common content would go)
\Internet\North\...
\Internet\South\...
\Internet\East\...
\Internet\West\...

Or would it be more practical to publish the content in each divisional folder (all managed by workflows). I would also like to make sure that I set it up in such a way that when we go with a true portal, that I will not have to change it again.

I hoping that someone has gone through the growing panes of this and can help me in the right direction.

Thanks

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gzevin

befor suggesting anything, I'd investigate your database/application logic structure. As it's your application that ultimately delivers the content, so it needs to know HOW to bring it up - i.e. which attributes to use when the content is being brought up.

Greg Zevin, Ph.D. Comp. Sc.
Independent Interwoven Consultant/Architect
Sydney, AU

ttriemst

Thanks for the input. I should probably clarify a couple of things first.

1) We currently do not use a database to store content. We just deploy the content how it is stored inside teamsite.
2) Our current portal is a simple web-app deployed on Tomcat. The web app is currently using Struts and Tiles to determine what content to deploy. We read a value from LDAP, that tells the web-app what division the user belongs to. The web-app then determines what division the user belongs to, and displays the appropriate content.

I have been asked to come up with a "Taxonomy" that will work in our current environment (what we currently have is pretty bad). Is what I am trying to do, is create a new taxonomy structure in such a way, that we will not have to redo it when we go with a true portal engine, backed with a database.

I guess my question that I am trying to find out is, has anyone experienced these types of growing pains? We know that our end result will be a portal engine, and the content will be deployed to a relational database. What would be a good approach to changing the taxonomy now?

Hope I am conveying what I am thinking.

Thanks for any insight.

gzevin

you can probably even retain the current folder structure, as the real portal server will likely use metadata. I'd simply start applying appropriate metadata to all assets, and massage the metadata later on, appropriately.

Greg Zevin, Ph.D. Comp. Sc.
Independent Interwoven Consultant/Architect
Sydney, AU