David Lai's Business Intelligence Blog

Proper content management planning is a critical element in the design process of a Business Objects enterprise system, unfortunately because of tight deadlines and lack of experience, many times there is not enough time spent here and users are left with a system that’s unorganized and tough to maintain.

I have experienced this first hand so I would like to write about some simple measures to take in order to plan your content.

Benefits of a well designed content plan include:

1. a dependable and secure implementation
2. prevent info overload from users accessing too many objects
3. unnecessary hits to the data source
4. securing confidential info
5. efficient structure so users are able to search the info they need easily

To stake holders this means:

• Usability – easy access to information in the system will increase effectivness of using the system
• User adoption – an organized easy to use system will help make it easier for users to commit to using the system
• Implementation time – setting a roadmap helps dampen unexpected circumstances.
• ROI – All of the above work together to increase the total ROI of the implementation

Creating a Logical Content Plan
Here we will map out who needs access to what content, then organizing users and contents based on those needs.

Creating a folder structure and organizing objects
First step is to assess the content according to the users who will be accessing the content. This organization will determine the folder structure of the system.
ie: The Accounting department has a set of reports to manage in BO Enterprise, you’ll put them in the Accounting parent folder. Then you might have a subfolder called called Accounts Receivable or Accounts Payable where reports can further be separated.

Organize users by creating a group/user structure
Now we want to create a group structure that will allow you to optimally manage user access to content.

This is similar to the folder structure, in our example we will have an Accounts group.

Set user and group access levels for folders and objects
Next we will want to establish the security access levels for folders and objects contained in your group/user structure. This next step is extremely critical in the planning process, otherwise you may risk setting inappropriate security access levels for your users.

Determining the needs of your users will help you establish who needs access to what folders/objects within the system. For example only users of the Accounts Payable group can access the Accounts Payable folder.

Creating Profiles for structured personalization
Next we will want to plan the security profiles that need to be created so that users will receive the correct data for any personalized reports.

For example, we have users in different regions that want to view a report belonging to their region by default. Here we can setup a profile that has the region variable set to their region (North American groups will have their region value set to “North America”), and apply it to the appropriate users.

Creating corporate categories and assigning objects
Finally you will want to define any corporate categories that need to be setup in the system. Setting up categories will provide users with the ability to search for and access reports and objects that are relevant to them. Categories should be setup depending on the user’s needs.

For example, the finance department may want to easily search for reports that are used in month-end processing, however they are scattered in many different folders. Setting up a category can help group the relevant reports and eliminate the need to go through each folder to look for what they want.

Those are the first steps you can take to creating a successfully planned content management system.

I have provided a template that can help you during your planning process that you can download here