Content Chaos! Organize Your Content Server Now

Research shows that employees spend almost 20% of their work week on average searching for documents. Businesses and organizations of all kinds use Content Server to reduce costs and improve the efficiency of storing and retrieving these documents. The challenge is when organization structure changes, the content creators relocate, the information within an organization changes rapidly and when an organization's internal and external relationships change. These changes occur at such a rapid pace that the structure of the content becomes disorganized and mis-categorized.

Identifying that content is out of place, unorganized and hard to find is the easy part. The hard part is getting it organized in a timely manner. Over the last 20 years of working in the OpenText Content Server business Syntergy has helped many companies with this problem. Although each organization is unique and has specific requirements there is a general process that can be followed to get data organized quickly. Part of that process involves using powerful tools that can easily extract the content and metadata from Content Sever and then load the reorganized content back just as quickly and easily.

The first step is to develop a plan for reorganizing the data in a manner that is most efficient for your company or organization. In smaller organizations this can be tackled in one project. In larger organizations it needs to be done in logical groupings of data. The most frequent type of grouping is by business unit or department. The reorganization plan typically consists of restructuring the folder hierarchy and modifying the category and attribute definitions. A third step can be identifying aliases and URLs that are defined and placed in the structure as a way to make it easy for users to recognize and find content.

Once the plan is developed we have found that it is easier to export the information out of Content Server using our Data Manager tool and then reorganize, redefine, and update the metadata on the filesystem of a server. We have found that it is much easier to reorganize large amounts of data using a desktop environment than within Content Server. The export feature allows designated users to export the metadata into CSV files. Then, after editing the data in Microsoft Excel or Google Docs, users can use the import feature to load in the changes. Updates to the metadata are recorded in the standard Content Server Audit history.

Data Manager is a great tool for exporting the data because it allows you to manipulate huge amounts of data quickly and easily. From an intuitive single page user interface you can import and export entire folder hierarchies and perform powerful data operations on thousands of objects in seconds.

Some important features of Data Manager are:

  1. Import and Export folders, documents, images, emails projects, images and physical objects
  2. Import and Export standard metadata, version data, category attributes, records details, and physical object data
  3. Import, Export and Update users and groups
  4. Create and update group membership
  5. Run in Real-Time or Scheduled mode Import and Export standard metadata, version data, category attributes, records details, and physical object data
  6. Tuned for high performance: Multi-threaded, distributed architecture handles multiple operations simultaneously
  7. Permission controlled: Allow only designated users to perform specific operations
  8. Provides a complete log file of load/export activities
  9. Flexible configuration allows for easy error identification and recovery
  10. Simple installation as a Content Server module
  11. No additional hardware required

Once the data has been exported, reorganized on the server, metadata updated you can use Data Manager to import the data back into Content Server. You can also use Data Manager to create any new users and/or groups.

For more information on Data Manager visit the product page on our website at https://www.syntergy.com/products/content_management/datamanager/.