Overview
The Content Library is the foundation of the response process. A clean and organized Content Library is your key to success within the Responsive app, and it is very important to develop a content management strategy early on. This article describes our various content management options and provides tips and tricks to help ensure your data is properly organized based on your organization's workflow.
Getting Started
The best place to start is to have an open conversation with your team and first decide what data should be imported into the Responsive app.
As you begin to think about content organization, think quality over quantity. What does your data look like now, and is it the data that you want to use for future RFx responses? To reduce the amount of noise in your content, improve your search results, and reduce the number of records you must manage, we recommend deleting any items you don’t want (or need) to load.
Here are some questions to get you and your team thinking about how your data is currently organized, how those concepts can be replicated in the Responsive app, and what should be brought into the Responsive app:
- How are you responding to projects? For example, is it by product, service offered, or are your responses different depending on the geographical location?
- How do you find answers currently? Are you searching a large repository by keywords, or are you using a categorization or folder structure to find the right answers?
- What terminology do you use internally to talk about your content? List them out, and think about whether there are overlaps and what best terms can be used to group the data together.
- Will specific teams need access to certain content in the library that not all teams need access to? Do you want everyone to have access to all content in the library?
- Keeping in mind that the app already uses a keyword search to help you find your data, what other elements of your content can you leverage to organize your data?
- What is the key, gold star content you want in the library? What content is out of date and should probably be removed?
There are many ways you can organize the Content Library, including tags, custom fields, and collections. Some users decide to use only one of these options, while others take advantage of all three. Once you determine your overarching content management strategy, decide which combination of options makes the most sense for you.
Tags
Tags are simple, general, categories that help group your content together. As a best practice, we recommend that all content have at least one tag. Think about how you can supplement keyword searches with some type of categorization. For example, if you’re searching for the keyword Protocol, tags can help add context and focus that search within Security and Compliance as well.
Tips and Tricks for Tags
You don’t want tags so specific that no one can remember or find them. Since tags help group sets of data together, consider how your project sections are laid out. Often, we see clients use these sections to bulk update their content with those concepts.
For example, if you have a section called Company Information, and there are 10 questions in that section that are all in the scope of company information data (such as company address, phone number, number of employees, or tax ID number), you could apply a tag called General Information or Company Information to group them together.
Requestors are going to use all different types of section names, so tags are your way of putting your own terminology onto this data set.
Common Tag Examples
Commonly used tags include Security, Company Information, Support, Pricing, Case Study, Technology, and many more. To learn how to create tags, see Creating Tags in Organization Settings. To learn how to apply and remove tags, see Tagging Documents in the Document Library.
Custom Fields
Custom fields are another option that you can use to group and track data within your Content Library, and are customizable based on your company's needs. We often see custom fields leveraged in tandem with tags to pinpoint data. The available custom field configuration options include:
- Text Box: Short description that can have a prefix/suffix
- Dropdown: Selection from a group of values
- Radio: Selection between options in a shortlist
- Checkbox: Selection of multiple options in a list
- Date: Select a date from a calendar
- Select User: Select one or more users within the Responsive app
- Multi-select Dropdown: Select more than one option from a group of values
- Auto-incremental: Unique identifier
Tips and Tricks for Custom Fields
When creating custom fields make sure you decide whether you want to be able to filter down to it, or be able to report on it. For example, the Dropdown and Checkbox options can be filtered and sorted because they are static values, but a Text Box cannot. Additionally, Dropdown is a great option for organizing content that would apply only to the one item in that drop-down list. And Checkbox is a great option when the content you are organizing might be applicable to multiple items in the list (business units for example).
Custom Field Example
You’ve created a Checkbox custom field with Product Add-On as the display name and the different products as the values.
For more information on creating custom fields, see (New UI) Creating Custom Fields in the Content Library or (New UI) Adding Custom Fields to a Project.
Collections
Collections are an additional way to segment and restrict your data in the Content Library. Collections can be leveraged to add privacy settings to specific groups of data since only users who are added to the collection can view the content within. Collections must be set up within Organization Settings by Admin users.
Collection Example
You create a Legal collection and add the Legal team members to it. Thus, the Legal team can log in to Responsive and see the data, but other users who are not part of the team can’t.
For more information on creating collections, see Creating and Adding Content to a Collection.