Going live with CMS - update

Our CMS has been live for about three weeks and people are starting to use it. It's been fun watching our system administrator go back and forth to one person's office to offer assistance (a big cheese - but I won't mention names). The good news is that he's using the system.

We've bumped into some conflicts between the current ways of doing things and processes for checking in documents. After a few discussions, we've decided not change the processes for the time being. This does mean that were are not capturing some content, however, with time and people becoming aware of the system capabilities I'm sure this will change.

We've also starting to look at migration from paper files into the system. Since folks are accustomed to thumbing through the whole file, it has been decided to scan the file in as a whole. One day we may want to break this file apart, but for now this adds a level of comfort. It also has the advantages of simplifying the scanning job and reducing the number of files in the CMS.

For another set of files, we found a way so that only one document in a group will come up in a search and the other working documents can be hidden from view. This along with version control will minimize the confusion about what document people are viewing.

To continue the education process, we're sending out tips as we find new ways of doing things. For example, we found a way to attach documents to e-mails directly from the CMS. At our monthly all-staff meetings for the near distant future, we're going to be offer short demos. Finally, there's our administrator, who's been great at going from office to office offering advice.

The lesson learned here is that you need a lot of flexibility when implementing a system. With time, were going to have better alignment between our people, processes and this system. If we try to force too many issues now ...