We just added a whole new area where you can find the latest documents sorted by Topic from our SDN & BPX Article Library. If you click on the top level navigation entry called “Articles” you’ll find a link to the “Articles by Topic” page in the left hand navigation. Here you’ll find articles, SAP How-to Guides and presentations sorted by some 20+ topics. Many of you have been asking for something like this where you can see, for example, the most recent articles on business intelligence or organizational change management. All of the content on these pages is dynamically generated so it’s constantly being updated every time a new document is uploaded to our Library on one of these topics.
These pages are essentially “smart queries” on the metadata that we store for each of the documents in our content management system. These queries are only possible because the metatags were recently overhauled and the metadata properties for documents in the repository were cleaned up. So, how did this project all begin? Below is a little background on the project and what we’ve done so far.
You may have heard that last year we undertook a major project to migrate content from the SAP Service Marketplace (SMP) to the SDN & BPX Library. Well, that also meant we needed to consolidate the metadata schemas. We sat down and mapped the metatags, a process that was generally pretty straightforward since both repositories had metatags for title, date, author, etc. However, things got tricky when it came to content metatags such as Topics, Product Names, IT Practices & Scenarios and these new SAP NetWeaver Shows its Capabilities that were being introduced. We quickly discovered a lot of overlap amongst the tags and determined that in order to properly align we needed to re-structure our tags and values. The trickiest part was mapping our “old” product-based structure to the new capabilities since we wanted users to be able to find documents using both structures.
So, after an intensive mapping exercise we have finally ended up with a much cleaner and more useful metadata schema. We have the following content-related metatags: SAP Product, Topics/Capabilities, Industries and Tasks. Each of these has numerous values and a document can be assigned multiple tags which helps improve findability.
Of course all of this doesn’t work properly unless all of the documents are properly tagged. This meant we had to undertake a major clean-up effort and do a lot of re-tagging in our repository. The results of this can be seen in a number of places. Check out the Article Library where you can view documents by various criteria including date, topic, format, skill level and source. We also have included a section on the right side on many of our area pages that highlights the most Recent Articles on that particular topic. The Download Catalog is also using smart queries and metadata to generate the various pages within the catalog. So, with the work that we’ve done so far we’ve laid the foundation for more effectively using our smart query tool (also known as “Dynamic Catalog” within the Web Page Composer) to provide automated, fresh content.
And, the work is not yet done as we’re constantly working on improvements and are still cleaning up our repository. The next project is an “Articles by Product” section which will be coming soon, so watch for that.
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