Content Inventories

[cewinch -at- aep -dot- com]

All,

I'm beginning to work on an internal SharePoint site that'll ultimately 
house/provide access to a huge amount of technical content--standards, 
specs, drawings--which are currently scattered among other sites, network 
drives, possibly e-mail, and quite possibly other sources I'm as yet 
unaware of. 

One thing I feel I need to do as part of my strategy/design work is to 
create a content inventory--so I'll know what all there is to 
organize/house/provide access to; all the content types and file types I'm 
dealing with; where everything lives now. The thing is: I've never done 
one before. (And wouldn't you know, I'm under some pressure to get the 
site up and running.) 

In an attempt to get at least a clue, I searched this list's archives; I'm 
afraid that was worse than useless. I also searched the EServer Technical 
Communication Library (http://tc.eserver.org/), and the results I could 
still access seemed to all be about inventorying the content on an 
*existing* web site. Well, although the site I'm working on technically 
already exists, I'm working as if I'm starting from scratch. Just tweaking 
what they've got now is not an option.

So--my questions are these:
1. What all types of information will I want to record about each content 
element? Right now I've got category (categories decided on by me and a 
teammate), content type (spec., drawing, etc.), file type (PDF, TIF, etc.) 
and location.
2. Content management overall is a huge need in this organization...what 
if anything can I do as I go through this to better set them up for 
adopting some sort of CMS, if they should decide some day to do that?

Any other wisdom (or pointers to same) you can provide will be most 
welcome.

Thanks!
Connie
Connie Winch
Senior Technical Communicator
American Electric Power
cewinch -at- aep -dot- com
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