Home

Knowledge Management and Content Management Systems

 

In the area of Knowledge Management, Content Management System (or CMS in short) is one of the key areas in technology because it is the platform where people can record, share and organize their knowledge content.  The web-access nature bypasses barriers in the areas of physical locations and time zones, and allow such activities to happen.

Content Authoring

Suitable Tools those who Contribute Content

To consider whether a CMS is sufficient and suitable for our needs, it is important to look at how it allows us to style and structure the content in a way the content contributors feel comfortable to work with.  In particular, it is about the flexibility at the content contributor's side, not the technical IT people.  It is impossible for the novice users to learn programming, or to go through long time training before they can create their content.  Therefore to assess whether a system is suitable for knowledge management, this becomes the main point to look at.

It is about Structure and Classification

In the area of knowledge management, the ability of the system to build content structure and classification is important.  To organize content properly, we need these 2 features to be:

  1. Can be flexibly customized, and allow changes
  2. That these customization and changes, when it is necessary, can be done fast, just like how good and flexible with the way we work on Word, Excel and PowerPoint

Different content can require different structures.  Even the same piece of content can likely require different structure when used or applied under different scenarios.  For example, people would normally present in different style and format for the purpose of reading, or for training.  Education by itself is a profession.  People who read books, will have different focus with people who do experiments, and different from people who teach.

It makes absolute sense if the users can come up with the structure that they like, and fitting to the scenario, the desired focus and their mindsets.  Therefore for such a system, the ideal scenario is, that users can design and change the structure any time when they need to.  It is not surprising that people need to change many times before they finally come up with a satisfactory one.  Even so, it does not exclude the possible that changes may still be needed for a mature structure due to change in business scenarios or focus.

Apart from content structure, classification is another area which requires management and flexibility.

Drupal is an enterprise level CMS, famous in the world in the corporate and government areas, yet it is a free-of-charge open-source technology with 20+ years history.  This website serves as a presentation of the styles, formats and structures that it can support, together with the modern W3.CSS framework which provides flexibilities in styling.  This website is aimed for KMers for the purpose of fast searching and production, without having the spent a lot of time to learn another IT technology.  Information of this site will be presented in the following approach:

  1. Focus on the needs of content creators or web editors
  2. Common content structure alternatives supported
  3. How these different structure, styles and formats appears on web-based presentation

Essentially, we are combining knowledgement management applications with web technologies for the purpose of a knowledge portal.

To support all these, a proper styling framework is necessary, which is called CSS, and it is about technology.  The difficulty is, it has to fit to our context - content creators do not need to spend a lot of time to learn before they can do their job.  There are solutions in this:

  1. Have these built into the web-based editor's function.  Users will only need to select which button to press, like what we do in Words.
  2. Apply simple shortcodes if they are not too difficult and time-consuming, which is easy to learn and remember.
  3. Have a cheat sheet available with which we don't have to remember them.  When we need it, we just copy/paste.

This is a balance, and perhaps the best achievable balance if we wish to do something reasonable nice, presentable, and satisfactory.

W3.CSS - Easy to Learn & Start Technology for Non-Technical Users

There are 2 CSS frameworks which are relatively easy to learn, and they are Bootstrap and W3.CSS.  Bootstrap has a longer history and W3.CSS is relatively new, but easier and faster to learn and get used to.  In this site, we focus on W3.CSS.  Different site will be available based on the same purpose and principles for Bootstrap.

There are 2 areas in this website - a one site two system structure:

  1. The public front end system where users can see what can be done, and how they look like
  2. There is a back end system for people who works hands-on, and require the methodologies and tools which facilitates their content creation or web editing jobs.  This back end system requires login access.

Those who requires login access can contact KF Cheng, who is the owner of this website.  But to use this, it requires a Drupal system and installation of the required frameworks and modules.  We organize BYOS (Build-Your-Own-System) workshops to teach people how they can design and build their own systems without the need of IT background or technical knowledge.