TeamPortal - why use it?

jshah0209

Hello-

I've worked with Interwoven before and understand content managment for websites. Today, I attended a webcast demo for TeamPortal for Plumtree. I'm not quite sure what role IW can play when it comes to corporate portals.

The demo consisted of 2 examples -

1. User accesses IW repository through Plumtree portlets (called gadgets by Plumtree) and is able to post a Job application to an intranet website. Cool. I understand the role IW plays here. And I noted that IW and Plumtree integration provided a portlet interface to Teamsite. Useful, but not terribly different than regular Teamsite.
2. User was able to use IW to submit a document directly to the taxonomy. Also, user was able to browse through the taxonomy and edit a document without caring where the document actually resided.

In example 2, I can see that IW offers direct access to taxonomy, document tagging and workflow before the document actually hits the taxonomy. However, based on my experience with Portal implementations at clients, I'm unable reconcile the usefulness of these features with how content is usually handled in real life scenarios -

1. Generally, content is not loaded directly into the taxonomy. Employees usually don't create documents for the sake of submitting to the taxonomy. Documents are generally created by users as a product of everyday business processes and responsibilities. Hence they typically reside in document management systems, knowledge management systems or file systems tied to business functions. Why would users want to upload documents to the taxonomy in this manner?
2. For the same reasons, no one edits the taxonomy directly. It would be very inconvenient too. It would be much easier and efficient to keep documents in a repository (file system at the simplest) and have the taxonomy tool 'crawl' this repository.
3. Even if one assumes that a user wants to 'publish' a document, the taxonomy is the wrong place to do it. Let's say the document is an HR Bulletin. If an HR employee uploads it to a folder in the taxonomy, very few people would actually find it since employees don't monitor taxonomy folders on a regular basis. A better idea is publish this document on an HR website that people actually know about and visit often.

The taxonomy is not a publishing tool or a repository. It is a search and navigation tool. A Taxonomy is built by crawling repositories and publication wesites, but does not replace them.

Am I missing something? Any reactions/explanations?

Jignesh

tvaughan

I would disagree with your statement that "The taxonomy is not a publishing tool or a repository. It is a search and navigation tool. A Taxonomy is built by crawling repositories and publication wesites, but does not replace them"

I think a complete taxonomy is a different view of the underlying content than might be provided by a filesystem. I look at content like cells in a database. The filesytem provides one view (in the SQL sense) of the content. Typically, the filesystem is organizationally driven for information architecutre and/or plain-old-common-sense guidelines.

Taxonomies are different views of the content that just provide a different means of navigating through your content. For example, there's no reason why Windows Explorer couldn't be configured to expand and collapse folders on a taxonomic basis instead of a filesystem basis.

I guess my challenege boils down to: "Why can't a taxonomy be a repository?" Think about the 'original taxonomy' of categorizing animals. That certainly is a repository. I would be stoked to see some company involved in web publishing support a navigational system organized around metadata. Maybe that's a new product line??

Does this make sense? Sorry, but I didn't answer your question about why you might use TeamPortal at all ;-)

Tom