5 ECM New Year's Resolutions

Happy new year! Most people use the first post of the year to go over their own blog statistics of popular posts... but since my blog's fiscal year ends in April, I decided to do new years resolutions instead. Below are 5 ECM maintenance tasks that I'd recommend:

1) Test your backup plan!

Yes, I'm certain you have one -- whether it's written in stone or just in the minds of your administrators -- but the only way to be sure you have a backup plan is to simulate an outage, and see how long it takes you to get up and running.

2) Eliminate some metadata fields

You know you have them... custom fields that seemed to make sense at the time, but now are not used at all. Go through your custom fields, see which ones are commonly used, and which ones are not. Odds are good that you can eliminate the unused ones... although be sure to make a backup before you delete information!

3) Normalize your metadata model

This is similar to #2 above... How many metadata fields are either blank, or only have the default data? Do you really need them? Do you still have items tagged as being authored by people who are no longer employees? Isn't it about time to simplify and clarify the values in your option list, and re-tag all items with the new values?

4) Audit the security access of your users

Who has what access to which pieces of content? If you are like most people, a lot of your users -- especially power users and test users -- have more access than they really need. Be sure to go through your LDAP repository, and make sure people don't have more access than needed.

5) Create a report of popular content

One good way to improve user adoption is by creating reports on "what's hot." Another option is to run reports to see what people have the most popular content, and then share with your team. There's nothing like a little competition to encourage people to contribute higher quality content ;-)

What additional resolutions would you recommend? Find the comments...