Personally, because I am a beginner at content management, this book seemed a little too technical for me. It is meant to teach someone the process of content management, but somehow it still seems a bit high-level. In any case, the content itself is a good indicator of how the process works. Here are some highlights:

* It covers the processes necessary to analyze, create, and manage content, as well as present it on the web.
* It includes strategies for separating presentation from content, such as how to analyze documents to break them up into logical units.
* It shows how to create an information model (a schema used for defining the structure of the data) and defining content units (logical units in which content is stored); it discusses creating content in that data model using XML.
* It includes creating content plans that define how data will be organized and presented to users for both static and dynamic sites.
* It focuses on the concept of single source publishing (publishing the same content in multiple ways and formats).
* It talks about how to staff a project with advanced content creation experts.
* It touches upon advanced concepts such as using topic maps to define advanced presentation.

If you are just starting out, this book may be too much for your first stab at learning the material. However, this is a good 2nd book, once the initial idea has been understood.

At first reading, this book was good, but I later found myself confused about the processes Hackos describes. The first chapter is strong in that it provides an overview of the five phases of a content management project, complete with lists of deliverables. The book includes a number of process checklists in the appendices.

When I see a book that lays out a process structure in the beginning, I expect the table of contents to follow that structure. This book fails to do that. It can be difficult in the first reading to know what phase of the process is described in any particular chapter. The last two phases of development--the pilot project and the roll out--are not described outside the introductory chapter.

Since the content management field is apparently devoid of a conventional vernacular, authors get to invent their own terms for things. I had to read several chapters many times to understand what Hackos means by "information type" and "content unit." It was also difficult to see where metadata fits into the picture. Her information model shows an information repository containing "modules of content", such as reports or manuals. Each module of content may contain one or more "information types", such as letters or recipes. Each information type is constructed of "content units", which can be recipe ingredients or procedure steps. But, you start by defining "dimensions", which become retrieval metadata for the information types.

A dimension is essentially an enumerated data type with a set of discrete values. Once you define the dimensions, you can then define information types and, at the lowest level, content units. These dimensions are translated into metadata attached to "modules of content". This is what confuses me. As described in the book the metadata is attached to the highest level of document in the repository, but not the lowest level of content unit. Apparently, the sole function of metadata advocated here is to aid user-level searching and retrieval, and not to support authoring workflow. I find this a significant shortcoming.

In summary:
Strengths: Strong focus on the end user, case studies, process not overly detailed, a chapter on making a business case, appendices full of checklists, & a good introduction.

Weaknesses: Book doesn't follow process flow, the jargon is difficult to grasp, reuse mechanisms are not well covered, uses a weak metadata model, and really only details the first three phases of a five-phase process.

Recommendation: A number of people I work with like this book, so maybe I'm just cranky. I would check out the comtech-serv.com website where Hackos lays out the process for you and provides some detail. You should be able to get a feel for her style and process there.

This book is a great introduction to how smart design of content and its delivery can facilitate its reuse in an organization. The author has a lot of experience and lays out strategy and advice in a very straightforward manner without jargon. Her examples are simple and nicely revealed and formatted. She always has the customer in mind. Throughout the book, one always has the sense of a person behind the deliveries obtaining benefit (this is so often missing, which is why so many of these type of endeavors fail). The book reveals the soup-to-nuts considerations for anyone wanting to create and manage an effective information delivery project.

It gives a good approach how to find the necessary meta-data for your content management system.
But it has nothing to do with modeling.

In fact it gives in certain areas very bad advice.

One example.
For every content unit you will indicate for which product model this information is applicable.

Now if you have 1000 information units that are reused for a new computer model D, you need to add this computer model to
the meta-data of 1000 information units.
The same if a model is taken out of the market.
This is not maintainable. I repeat this is not maintainable.

Good solutions model the relationships between components and in which products they are used
using PDM software, ERP software or in the traditional RDBMS sense and information units have a pointer to this external information.

I also do not see anything on:
- modeling of relationships between attributes
- modeling of relationships between the values of attributes.
E.G. food can have an ethnicity (italian, mexican, chinese, irish, ...)
These could be classified or grouped as european, asian, ...
No word on this.

Even the XML syntax used is not correct, I'm afraid, since these seem to be empty elements.

Covers a broad range of issues, tools, technologies, and concepts. We are all new to some aspect of this emerging topic, and this book provides a point-of-entry for the new as well as experienced content manager.

Particularly noteworthy (at least to me) is the chapter on making a business case for content mgmt, which is increasingly important for technical communicators.