Case Studies

In the "Case Studies" series of my posts, I describe the projects that I worked on and lessons learned from them. In this post, I am going to describe the project of SharePoint deployment at Autodesk.   Autodesk is a software engineering company with worldwide presence. Autodesk worldwide marketing produced a lot of marketing assets. On many occasions, marketing produced assets which either was duplicate of what was already created in the past or assets that were not needed. Marketing assets were stored in a digital asset management system. This digital asset management system did not have a way to track marketing assets.   Marketing decided to use SharePoint which already was deployed at Autodesk as the tracking system for their marketing assets. This would be a tool where they would log an asset they would like to create and it would go through a workflow to vote, review, and approve this asset before it would be produced. After this asset was produced, it would be tracked in this system. Read more

In the "Case Studies" series of my posts, I describe the projects that I worked on and lessons learned from them. In this post, I am going to describe the project of re-structuring content and information architecture of a content management system based on Twiki in Wind River.   Wind River is a software engineering company that used Twiki as their content management system. TWiki is a Perl-based structured wiki application, typically used to run a collaboration platform, content management system, a knowledge base, or a team portal. Read more

In the "Case Studies" series of my posts, I describe the projects that I worked on and lessons learned from them. In this post, I am going to describe the project of enabling search on Applied Biosystems website.   Applied Biosystems website included the search of the company products. There was a search field where a user would enter keywords hoping to retrieve the company products. However, this was not the case. Entering keywords in the search field was not retrieving any results.   My question for the company's webmaster was: what data source feeds this web site? I was told that there was a Lotus Notes database which contained products information and which fed the website and enables search. I asked to take a look at this database. When I looked at this database, I noticed a couple of metadata fields that were not populated: keywords and related terms. Read more

In the "Case Studies" series of my posts, I will describe the projects that I worked on and lessons learned from them. In this post, I am going to describe the project of SharePoint deployment in the Immersion Corporation.   Immersion Corporation is an electronics company specializing in haptics. The company’s content was stored in multiple shared network drives, wiki systems, CVS systems, and personal computers. In addition, documents in hard format are being used because they are not available in electronic format. There is no unified place for storing and accessing content.   Spreading out content in multiple locations made it difficult to find, re-use, and update. This also discouraged further adding of the new content and thus created areas where no documentation existed and the knowledge instead of being shared was being stored in personal computers. Storing the content in personal computers presented a risk of it being lost because it was not backed-up.   Existing content storage systems did not meet users’ requirements. The existing content was not categorized optimally and therefore the browsing function was inefficient. There was no search mechanism to search shared network drives. Read more