Blog

Rethinking Content Management

Remember those days in elementary school when you were handed a blank sheet of construction paper and a pile of crayons? Some of your classmates had a formula – green grass on the bottom of the page, semi-circle of sun in the upper corner, a mixture of flowers – scenes they had seen again and again. Others seemed to dive in, unconstrained by rules, and come up with something wildly different to showcase on the refrigerator.

When the Vault team first came together, we all felt a bit like that kid with a blank piece of paper in front of us. Our first attempts at designing the user interface and interaction for our cloud-based regulated CMS were pretty much the same formula we had seen over and over – folder pane on the left, document grid in the middle of the page, action menu across the top –the green grass, sun, and flowers equivalent of a CMS. Then we took a step back. We realized just how much we, as users, were conditioned to accept the formulas set by mediocre enterprise systems.

Away from the office we wondered why we could quickly find the perfect item on Amazon in a few clicks, but never find our documents without wading through a sea of unreliable search results. Or how it was so easy to update our Facebook status but so difficult to create a new document. Or how we could share a video of our child’s first birthday with the world on YouTube, but struggle to share a clinical study protocol with a Clinical Research Organization (CRO) that we’d worked with for years. We realized that these consumer sites – Amazon, Facebook, and YouTube, to name a few – understood user behavior. Content management systems, on the other hand, didn’t. The tried-and-true formula that so many CMS providers built just didn’t support the modern user. The consumer web works because it’s easy and intuitive. We needed to incorporate that kind of ease into a controlled and regulated content management system.

So we broke out our crayons and started to draw something completely new. Much like our classmates that started drawing freehand, we started sketching out a new approach to content management. We scoured websites for inspiration – sites with lots of data, files, and images (finally a way to leverage my online shopping prowess at work!). On these sites we were able to filter and refine any field of results in a few clicks and quickly find what we were looking for. So for Vault, we made simple and accurate search, filtering, and easy document retrieval key design focuses. We knew we were on to something when we heard companies of all sizes talk about the importance of “find-ability” over and over again at the DIA EDM conference in February.

Join us as we throw away the clunky systems – those that find nothing of value, require meaningless attributes, and are a pain to use. Stop using technology that does not work and start using something that makes sense!

We invite you to have a look at the Vault Demo of the Week to get a sneak peek at the next great step in life sciences content management. And keep checking back to see what’s new with the content management revolution!