Link Management Tool

Our company uses TeamSite 5.2 and will soon upgrade to 6.1. We have a few thousand pages on the site and spend a lot of time searching for and change html links. It seems to me that there must be a good tool that manages links / hyperlinks visually, and doesn't require touching multiple pages to change.

If anybody has experience managing links using an Interwoven tool, or a tool by another company, with TeamSite please let me know.

thanks

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Comments

Johnny

ahhh you are talking about the holy grail which is site management in teamsite.

There is no specific way out of the box, but metadata is definitely the way to go.

Uniquely defining each "page" and then resolving those definitions during page generation is something that can help, but it usually is implementation specific.

I've heard of Metatagger helping out where you use MT studio to build your site structure taxonomy and leverage off that.

Ive seen some presentations talking about how IWOV plan to provide techniques to manage this, though it may be a little while away (7.0?)

Though if your links are changing so regularly, it might be wise to go back and take a look at the nature of the content to determine why and where the changes happen.

Managing the navigation is normally alot more easier to maintain/control than body links.
(again MT studio or even forms publisher can be used to define the site structure, giving you one place to change your links)

Im sure there are plenty of people here who can discuss their specific solution

John Cuiuli

nipper

Yea, MetaTagger can help here. On a previous project I used MT to get find all the
hrefs, arefs, etc & used that to build a dependancy list. Then attached EAs so you
could search on it.

Of course I do not have any of the code anymore, but it was fairly easy

Andy

Migrateduser

So I think one approach, to build on Johnny and Nipper's comments, you could basically use the pattern extractor within MT to pull all the links and put them in a database.

Using a submit based workflow or perhaps a custom menu item, you could then view the dependencies and/or manually or automatically update the links or files.

Plus you could use MetaTagger to build a classification taxonomy (based on your site structure as Johnny indicated or based on some other taxonomy) and tag the docs- that way so not only will you have a mapping of physical links but also of all documents' content.

There is a lot you can do here.

Nikko

ReggieRWalker

We use a tool called Watchfire (www.watchfire.com) to manage our links (amongst other things) and it integrates very nicely with workflow.

TCavanaugh

Can you provide more information regarding your integration with Watchfire? We are considering such an integration, and plan to use it to verify the validity of links within a document as part of workflow.

Are you also somehow using Watchfire to allow you to update links somehow?

-TC

Migrateduser

There's an integration brief on the IWOV WWW site about a WatchFire integration.

http://www.interwoven.com/partners/profiles/collateral/solution_briefs/wf_iwov_integ_factsheet.pdf

I'll check around to see if there's any more technical material available here at IWOV.

hth,

lissa

watchfire_ps

The basic idea behind integrating Interwoven TeamSite and Watchfire WebXM is to catch content related issues before they get to the production site. The integration is implemented by inserting an automated task (external task) into a workflow which checks the submitted content for issues. Here is a simple integrated workflow - an author submits a new page, WebXM scans the page in the background, the reviewer receives a link to the generated report in an e-mail alert or has the option to open the report from TeamSite.

WebXM exposes a Web Service Interface. The external task mentioned above executes a WebXM client (could be written in Perl) that talks to the WebXM server and does the issue checking.

Examples of the types of issues that one could check for are: broken links, spelling errors, standards compliance issues (improper use of company brand, bad coding, old product references, etc), accessibility issues and so on.

Hope this helps!

Migrateduser

How much does it cost?

Dave Smith
Sr. Software Engineer
Nike, Inc.
(503) 671-4238
DavidH.Smith@nike.com

Migrateduser

I just found out that the WatchFire link checker is not simply a plug-in tool that you can purchase to do link checking in workflow. The product is much bigger and more of an enterprise tool providing a lot more functionality thank just link checking. I wasn't able to get the cost because it appears it would be pretty huge - you can't just get the link checking part of it. To be clear, this is not the way to go if all you need is a link checker to plug into your TeamSite workflow.

Dave Smith
Sr. Software Engineer
Nike, Inc.
(503) 671-4238
DavidH.Smith@nike.com

Harsh_SVRN

Is there more technical information available on integration of WatchFire with Interwoven? Any information on config files that are required to be modified etc.?

Thanks,
Harsh

iw_store

We use a tool called Watchfire (www.watchfire.com) to manage our links (amongst other things) and it integrates very nicely with workflow.

Hi,

I am in a proceess of finding broken links and zero Hit pages using watchfire, I wanted some information regarding watchfire like

-- How to integrate watchfire with teamsite or workflow
-- How can I get work done by watchfire in a best way to find broken links and zero hit pages.

As you have done this, if you share a little bit of information on this will help a lot

iw_store

Hi,

Can some one help me in this? At least at the basic level so that I can go ahead

Alasdair

I have a couple of questions surrounding the integration with WebXM:

1. It seems apparent that WebXM can be integrated with the workflow process to scan content for issues before it is published. However, can it also alert a user to broken links that would be caused by deleting an item.

2. Does anyone know if when scanning the site for broken links (or other issues) if it can identify these problems to the content author automatically. Rather than creating administrative overhead by having to contact authors regarding issues.

3. Also, outside of the WebXM solution has anyone used a different 3rd party product, and integrated it successfully with Interwoven.

Cheers
Alasdair

Mr_Cruise

If you are using standard href links then if you have a good Perl developer you could find all the href links and check the files exist in staging. This may seem crude but you would catch the majority of dead links for as little as 10 days development. I wrote something similar which checked for any refernced assets and allowed these to be attached to the workflow when submitting the content.

Hope this helps

ISCBorisB

If you are using standard href links then if you have a good Perl developer you could find all the href links and check the files exist in staging. This may seem crude but you would catch the majority of dead links for as little as 10 days development. I wrote something similar which checked for any refernced assets and allowed these to be attached to the workflow when submitting the content.

Hope this helps

Hope you realize that you are answering the post that is more than two years old...

Mr_Cruise

Point noted but I felt that the thread was not complete and I was bored ;-)

gzevin

Hope you realize that you are answering the post that is more than two years old...

common, some of the posts are a good as new... they are dated August this year! Smiley Wink