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An introductory homepage about what digital content is and how you use content management systems.

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We tend to look at content management as a digital concept, but it's been around for as long as content. For as long as humans have been creating content, we've been searching for solutions to manage it.

The Library of Alexandria (300 BC to about AD 273) was an early attempt at managing content. It preserved content in the form of papyrus scrolls and codices, and presumably controlled access to them. Librarians were the first content managers.

Fast-forward a couple of thousand years, and the Industrial Revolution and the rise of technology increased the accumulation of information exponentially. The problem of managing it became more critical. The early 20th century was full of great thinkers who examined the problem of communicating and managing information: S.R. Raganathan, Vannevar Bush, Paul Otlet, Claude Shannon, and even Melvil Dewey, the father of the venerable Dewey Decimal System.

So, the need for content management didn't begin with the World Wide Web, but simply shifted into fast-forward when the Web was born in the early '90s. At that moment, the ability to create and publish content tumbled down from its ivory tower and into the hands of the masses. Almost anyone could create a web page about virtually anything.

Content subsequently exploded. I was a college student at the time, and was slightly obsessed with James Bond. Suddenly, I could find reams and reams of information on 007. The sheer amount of trivia was staggering. Of course, I attempted to print most of it, because if it wasn't on paper, how would I manage it?

It wasn't long before I was coediting a popular James Bond website-Mr. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. I learned that keeping track of content was a challenge. An article only existed as an HTML file in the web server's root directory at any given time. I wasn't an IT professional back then, so the only backup outside that file was the one on my local computer. There was no versioning or access control-one fat-finger mistake and the entire thing could be gone.

This struck me as dangerous. Even then, I knew that a website is essentially a content-based business, and with nothing more than a bunch of files lying around, I was effectively performing without a net. Content was our only business asset, and I remember thinking it was so brittle; one unforeseen problem and it could simply "blow away" like a dandelion in the wind.

Additionally, each HTML file was a mass of mid-'90s-era markup, complete with nested TABLE and FONT tags all over the place. There was no way to separate what was content from what was presentation, and each redesign of the site (there were many) involved manually reworking these files. Server Side Includes had helped to a certain extent, but each file was still a massive glob of mixed content and formatting code.

Some time later, I was working for The Microsoft Network as a forum manager for The World of James Bond. We were still writing HTML files in text editors, but Microsoft had introduced its content managers to the wonders of Visual Source Safe, a now long-since-deprecated source code management system. It provided backups, versioning, and file locking.

This clearly made us safer from a risk management perspective, but there was a mental shift too. We had a safety net now. The content we were creating had solidity to it. There was history and context. We were editing and grooming a continuing body of content, rather than just changing it in place. Content didn't exist only in simple files, but lived inside a larger system which provided a set of services to protect and safeguard it. We had gone from hiding money inside our mattresses to depositing it at an FDIC-insured financial institution.

Finally, at some crude level, my content was managed. It was still all mixed up with its presentation, and probably had a host of other problems, but I was at least a couple of steps safer than I had been before. Without me realizing it, Visual Source Safe effectively became my first content management system.

A lot has changed since then, but let's start at the beginning. Along the way, we'll hopefully answer all of the following questions:

What is content management?

What is a content management system?

What are the different types of content management systems?

What does a content management system do?

What doesn't a content management system do?

Many people have tried to draw a distinction between the fuzzy concepts of "data," "information," "content," and even "knowledge." Bob Boiko dedicated the entire first part of his seminal work The Content Management Bible (Wiley) to this question-some 5 chapters and 61 pages.

We're not going to go that far, but we'll summarize by simply differentiating between content and raw data, which is likely the highest-value return we can get out of the question. How is content management any different from managing any other type of data?

There are two key differences:

Created by Humans via Editorial Process

Content is created through "editorial process." This process is what humans do to prepare information for publication to an audience. It involves modeling, authoring, editing, reviewing, approving, versioning, comparing, and controlling.

The creation of a news article, for example, is highly subjective. Two editorial teams, given the same information, might develop two completely different news articles due to the human factors involved in the editorial process. Whereas a computational function seeks to deliver the same output from the same input every time, an editorial process never quite does.

The creation of content pivots largely on the opinions of human editors:

What should the subject of the content be?

Who is the intended audience of the content?

From what angle should the subject be approached?

How long should the content be?

Does it need to be supported by media?

Despite significant advances in computing, these are not decisions a computer will make. These are messy, subjective, imperfect decisions that pour forth from the mind of a human editor sitting behind a keyboard. A small deviation in any of them (the proverbial flapping of a butterfly's wings) can spin a piece of content in an entirely different direction. Content is subjective and open for evaluation and interpretation. It has nuance. It is artisanal.

The editorial process is iterative-content is rarely created once, perfectly, and then never touched again. Rather, content is roughed in and refined over and over like clay on a potter's wheel, often even after being published. Content can change with the passage of time and the evolution of circumstance. What was relevant at one point might need to change or be withdrawn later.

Content is constantly in some state of flux and turnover. It's never "right." It's just "right now."

Compare this process to the creation of the record of a retail sale. There is no editorial process involved with swiping your credit card across a terminal. Furthermore, the data created is not subjected to any other process, will not be reviewed and approved. It is not subjective, it is deterministic. The transaction happened in an instant, a historical record was created, and that's that.

The sales transaction is designed to be as repeatable and devoid of subjective opinion as possible. It will never be edited (indeed, to do so would likely violate a policy or law). It is cold, sterile, and inert by design.

Consequently, management of these two types of information is quite different.

Intended for Human Consumption via Publication to an Audience

Content is data we create for a specific purpose: to distribute it with the intention of it ultimately being consumed by other humans. Sure, it might be scooped up by another computer via an API and rearranged and published somewhere else, but eventually the information is going to make its way to a human somewhere.

Bob Boiko writes:

If you strip away all of the technology and terminology that we use to describe information systems, what do you have left? A simple and utterly commonplace idea: Information systems help you talk to people who are not in front of you.

Our sales transaction from the prior section has no such destiny. It was created as a backward-looking record of a historical event. It will likely not be consumed by someone in the future, except in aggregate through reporting of some kind. It may be retrieved and reviewed individually, but only by necessity and likely on an exception basis.

Our news article, by contrast, was created as a forward-looking item to be published in the future and consumed by humans, through whatever channel (perhaps more than one). It might be repurposed, abbreviated, rearranged, and reformatted, but the ultimate goal for it is to be consumed and evaluated by another human being.

Our content has value in the future. It might be consumed for years (even centuries or millennia), and can continue providing value to the organization far into the future. Every time our article is read, or every time a new employee reads the payroll policy, there is a benefit attributed to the content creator.

Content is an investment in the future, not a record of the past.

A Definition of Content

Bringing these two concepts together, we arrive at our best attempt at a concise definition:

Content is information produced through editorial process and ultimately intended for human consumption via publication.

This definition also points to a core dichotomy of content management: the difference between (1) management and (2) delivery. Content is created and managed, then it is published and delivered. The two disciplines require different skills and mindsets, and the state of current technology is creating more and more differences every day.

We'll revisit this two-sided approach to content management throughout this book.

A content management system (CMS) is a software package that provides some level of automation for the tasks required to effectively manage content.

A CMS is usually server-based, multiuser software that interacts with content stored in a repository. This repository might be located on the same server, as part of the same software package, or in a separate storage facility entirely.

A CMS allows editors to create new content, edit existing content, perform editorial processes on content, and ultimately make that content available to other people to consume it.

Logically, a CMS is comprised of many parts. The editing interface, repository, publishing mechanisms, etc., might all be separate, autonomous parts of the system behind the scenes. However, to a non-technical editor, all of these parts are generally viewed as a single, monolithic whole: "the CMS."

The Discipline Versus the Software

What's important to note is that a "content management system" is a specific manifestation of software designed to enable the discipline of content management. Just like a Ford Taurus is a specific manifestation of a device enabling personal transportation, Drupal, WordPress, and Episerver are specific manifestations of software enabling content management.

The discipline of content management-the accumulated theories, best practices, and accepted patterns of the field-transcends any specific system. In this sense, it's a Platonic ideal: an abstract, subjective representation of how content is to be managed.

The specifics of this ideal can be very different depending on the experiences, preferences, and needs of the observer. This means there's no single, accepted definition for content management as a discipline, just a set of debatable best practices. While people might try to lay claim to a Grand Unified Theory of Content Management, no such thing exists.

Thankfully, this means that skill with a particular content management system can be somewhat transferable. Even if System A differs from System B in extreme ways, they both still need to solve transcendent problems of the discipline, like workflow, versioning, publishing, etc. While specific technical skills might not transfer, working with a content management system requires the exercise and development of skills in the content management discipline.

So, a CMS is a tool to assist in and enable the theoretical ideal of content management. How well any one CMS successfully brings that ideal to life is the subject of great debate and Internet flame wars.

We defined content as "information created through editorial process and intended for human consumption." Note that there was no mention of the Web in this definition (nor of the Internet itself, really).

However, given that this is a book about web content management, it's probably best that we define some different flavors of content management rather than lumping them into one big bucket.

The "big four" of content management might be identified as:

Web content management (WCM)

The management of content primarily intended for mass delivery via a website. WCM excels at separating content from presentation and publishing to multiple channels.

Enterprise content management (ECM)

The management of general business content, not necessarily intended for mass delivery or consumption (e.g., employee resumes, incident reports, memos, etc.). This flavor was more traditionally known as "document management," but the label has been generalized over the years. ECM excels in collaboration, access control, and file management.

Digital asset management (DAM)

The management and manipulation of rich digital assets such as images, audio, and video for usage in other media. DAM excels at metadata and renditioning.

Records management (RM)

The management of transactional information and other records that are created as a byproduct of business operations (e.g., sales records, access records, contracts, etc.). RM excels at retention and access control.

Clearly, the line blurs here quite a bit. A DAM system is often used to provide content for a website through integration with a WCM. Furthermore, some ECM systems have systems by which they can publish some of their information to the Web.

Software systems are known only through their intended use and their perception in the industry. Drupal is well known as a WCM system, but there are undoubtedly organizations using it to manage internal enterprise content. Conversely, Documentum is an ECM system, but some organizations might use it to deliver all or part of their websites.

DAM is interesting in that it is differentiated primarily on the basis of what it does to content. While almost any content management system can store video and image files, and ECM actually excels at it, DAM goes a step further by providing unique tools to render and transform digital assets. Images can be mass-resized and video can be spliced and edited directly inside the system, making a DAM system's point of differentiation one of processes that can be applied to content. Therefore, the core management features of a DAM system overlay quite closely those of an ECM system, with the DAM system layering a level of functionality on top. (Indeed, many DAM systems are sold simply as add-ons to ECM systems.)

There are other, even blurrier shades of gray. Some examples:

Component content management systems (CCMSs)

Used for management of extremely fine-grained content (paragraphs, sentences, and even individual words), often to assemble documentation or highly technical content.

Learning management systems (LMSs)

Used for management of learning resources and student interaction; most colleges and universities manage syllabi and the learning process via an LMS.

Portals

Used for management, presentation, and aggregation of multiple streams of information into a unified system.

Again, the lines here are very blurry.

Only some of what an LMS does is specific and unique to an LMS. Many different WCM systems, for instance, have add-ons and extensions that claim to turn them into an LMS, and many more are simply used as such out of the box.

In the end, a given software system is mentally classified among the public based on several factors:

The market in which it promotes itself and in which it competes

The use cases and examples that the user community creates and promotes

The specific features designed to meet the needs of a particular user or type of content

CMS software is targeted at particular markets or usage scenarios. That has never stopped anyone from using it in ways outside of the one the vendor designed it for.

For the purposes of this book, we will concentrate on mainstream WCM-that software designed to manage a website intended for public delivery and consumption.

(And, at the risk of beating this subject to death, even this designation is blurry. Organizations commonly power social networking platforms from their WCM systems, managing content that ends up as Facebook updates, tweets, or even emails. While this is not technically "website content," our definition will have to suffice.)

Let's break down the core functions of a CMS. In broad terms, what is the value proposition? Why are we better off with a CMS than without?

Control Content

A CMS allows us to get control of our content, which is something you'll understand well if your content is out of control. A CMS keeps track of content. It "knows" where our content is, what condition it's in, who can access it, and how it relates to other content. Furthermore, it seeks to prevent bad things from happening to our content.

Specifically, a CMS provides core control functions, such as:

Permissions

Who can see this content? Who can change it? Who can delete it?

State management and workflow

Is this content published? Is it in draft? Has it been archived and removed from the public?

Versioning

How many times has this content changed? What did it look like three months ago? How does that version differ from the current version? Can I restore or republish an older version?

Dependency management

What content is being used by what other content? If I delete this content, how does that affect other content? What content is currently "orphaned" and unused?

Search and organization

How do I find a specific piece of content? How do I find all content that refers to X? How do I group and relate content so it's easier to manage?

Each of these items increases our level of control over our content and reduces risk-there is less chance that the shareholder report will be released early, or that the only copy of our procedures manual will be deleted accidentally.

Allow Content Reuse

Using content in more than one place and in more than one way increases its value. Some examples:

A news article appears on its own page, but also as a teaser on a category page and in multiple "Related Article" sidebars.

An author's bio appears at the bottom of all articles written by that person.

A privacy statement appears at the bottom of every page on a website.

In these situations, this information is not created every time in every location, but simply retrieved and displayed from a common location.

This reuse of content was one of the original problems that vexed early web developers. Remember the James Bond site I discussed earlier? One of the great frustrations was creating an article, and then adding it to all the index pages where it was supposed to appear. If we ever deleted the article or changed the title, we'd have to go find all the references and remove or change them.

This problem was mitigated somewhat by Server Side Includes, which allowed page editors to insert a snippet of HTML by simply referring to a separate file-the files were combined on the server prior to delivery. Later platforms tried to automate this even further; Microsoft FrontPage, for example, had a feature it explicitly called "Shared Borders."

The ability to reuse content is highly dependent on the structure of that content. Your ability to structure your content accurately for optimal reuse is highly dependent on the features your CMS provides for you.

Allow Content Automation and Aggregation

Having all of our content in a single location makes it easier to query and manipulate it. If we want to find all news articles that were written last week and mention the word "SPECTRE," we can do that because there is one system that "knows" all about our content.

If our content is structured correctly, we can manipulate it to display in different formats, publish it to different locations, and rearrange it on the fly to serve the needs of our visitors more effectively:

We can allow users to consume content in other formats, such as PDF or other ebook formats.

We can automatically create lists and navigation (more generally, "content aggregations"-see Chapter 7) for our website.

We can create multiple translations of content to ensure we deliver the language most appropriate to the current user.

We can alter the content we publish in real time based on the specific behaviors and conditions exhibited by our visitors.

A CMS enables this by structuring, storing, examining, and providing query facilities around our content. It becomes the single source of information about our content; the thing that has its arms around the entire repository; the oracle we can consult to find information about our content.

Increase Editorial Efficiency

The ability of editors to create and edit content quickly and accurately is enormously affected by the platform used. It's rare to find an editor who has unconditional love for a CMS, but the alternative, editing a website manually, is clearly much less desirable.

Editor efficiency is increased by a system that controls what type of content editors can and can't add, what formatting tools are available to them, how their content is structured in the editing interface, how the editorial workflow and collaboration are managed, and what happens to their content after they publish.

A good CMS enables editors to publish more content in a shorter time frame (it increases "editorial throughput"), and to control and manage the published content with a lower amount of friction or drag on their process.

Editorial efficiency has a huge impact on morale, which is intangible but critical. Many editors have a historically antagonistic relationship with their CMSs, and nothing destroys editorial efficiency more quickly than a clunky editorial interface and flow.

Now for the bad news: there are things a CMS doesn't do. More specifically, there are things that a CMS doesn't do but that people mistakenly assume it does, which leads to problems and unfulfilled expectations.

Create Content

A CMS simply manages content, it doesn't create content. It doesn't write your news articles, procedure documents, or blog posts. You must still provide the editorial horsepower to generate the content that it's supposed to be managing.

Many times, a CMS implementation has ended with a group of people looking at each other and thinking, "So...now what?" Every web development shop in the country can tell you stories about the shiny new CMS that was never once used by the client because they never changed their site after the day it launched. Occasionally, my company has taken calls from clients years after their sites launched wanting to know how to log in to their CMS for the first time.

Related to this, a CMS won't ensure that your content is any good, either. Although a CMS might offer several tools to minimize poor-quality content from a technical standpoint (ensuring that hyperlinks are valid, or that all images have ALT tags, for instance), a CMS cannot edit your content to be sure it makes sense and meets the needs of your audience.

The best-laid plans to create massive amounts of quality content often fall through when confronted with the hard reality of schedule pressure and business deadlines. You need to ensure that your content creation process exists apart from your CMS.

Create Marketing Plans

Even assuming your content is created consistently and managed well, that doesn't mean it actually provides your organization with any value.

A CMS doesn't "know" anything about marketing. While some systems have marketing tools built into them, they still depend on human beings for direction. Effective marketing is a uniquely human practice involving a combination of aesthetics, sociology, psychology, experience, and intuition. A CMS can make executing your marketing plans easier and more efficient, but those plans still need to be conceived, created, and analyzed by a competent human.

A CMS doesn't take the place of a creative team that understands your marketplace, your customers, your competitors, and what you need to do to differentiate yourself. No software can take the place of a good digital marketing strategy or team.

Effectively Format Content

While a CMS can structure content and automatically format it during publication, there is still an unfortunate amount of room for a human editor to screw it up. Most CMSs have a rich text editor or some other interface element that allows editors to format text and images. This can lead to things like:

Editors have never seen a button on an editing interface that they didn't want to press. The only way to limit this seems to be to remove as many editing options as possible, then try to withstand the hailstorm of editor complaints that will inevitably follow.

Provide Governance

"Governance" describes the access to and processes around your content: who has access to what, and what processes/steps they follow to make changes to it. For example:

If Bob adds a news article, who needs to approve this, and what does that approval look like? Does someone copyedit and someone else edit for quality, voice, and tone? Can you diagram this process out on a piece of paper?

If John wants to change how the news archives are organized, and the CMS allows him to do this...can he? What process does he have to go through to do this?

If Jennifer wants an account on the CMS to start creating content, how does she get that? Who decides who is allowed to become an editor?

Every CMS has some method to limit the actions a user can take, but these limits have to be defined in advance. The CMS will simply carry out what your organization directs it to do. These plans have to be created through human interaction and judgment, then converted into the permissions and access limits the CMS can enforce.

Governance is primarily a human discipline. You are determining the processes and policies that humans will abide by when working with your content. The CMS is just a framework for enforcement.

Bush wrote an incredibly influential essay in 1945 entitled "How We May Think" that lamented the lack of necessary information management tools and envisioned a future that turned out to be remarkably similar to what actually happened over the 70 years following its publication. Bush essentially described the World Wide Web about 50 years before Tim Berners-Lee made it happen.

While now defunct, the site was at http://ianfleming.org for many years. There's an archive of screencaps in a public Facebook group, for those interested.

Bob Boiko, Laughing at the CIO (Medford: CyberAge Books, 2007), 99-100.

Early CMSs were not server-based. Some of the first CMSs were client-side templating tools, such as CityDesk, MarsEdit, and Radio UserLand. These were installable software packages that allowed editors to work on content in a desktop interface. The systems then templated that content and transferred the resulting HTML to a server environment, usually via FTP. Today, these are often referred to as "desktop content management" tools. Few of these platforms are actively developed, but most still exist for purchase.

"Flame" was the original term for two people hurling insults at each other in front of a virtual audience through the anonymous magic of the Internet. I think this is now called "Facebook."

An acronym that is the source of countless jokes, which, contrary to what some might say, just never seem to get old.

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We tend to look at content management as a digital concept, but it's been around for as long as content. For as long as humans have been creating content, we've been searching for solutions to manage it. The Library of Alexandria (300 BC to about AD 273) was an early attempt at managing content.

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If not stated otherwise this document is for free use under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike: distribute of derivative works only under a license identical ("not more restrictive") to the license that governs the original work (CC BY-SA 4.0). To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/. Logos are excluded from free licensing.

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This Website provides you with information about some common hardware problems and how to find simple do-it-yourself solutions.

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You don't have to run to the repair shop every time your PC ends up with an issue. Many of the common PC problems have a rather simple solution, and you can fix them yourself with a few simple steps.

To help you troubleshoot common PC problems yourself, I have listed 15 most common PC hardware problems and what your options are if you face any of them.

Read Also: How to Fix Corrupted Windows System with System File Checker

1. PC Overheating

A heating PC slows down the whole system and leads to frequent crashes. Additionally, PC components may also get permanently damaged due to constant exposure to heat.

There are two main reasons your PC heats up, i.e. either the cooling system isn't working properly or the PC is heating to the point your cooling system can't handle it anymore. In either case, I have written a comprehensive article on different solutions to handle an overheating PC. Do check it out.

2. Dysfunctional USB Port

If your USB port stops working, it's not necessary that it's broken. Below are some solutions that can fix this issue:

Method 1: Restart the PC

Restarting the PC is the answer to many problems, and it is a common solution to USB port problem as well.

Method 2: Uninstall USB port driver

Uninstalling the driver of the USB port will force Windows to reinstall it when you will restart the PC. This may fix the problem. Here is how to do it:

1. Press Windows + R keys and enter devmgmt.msc in the Run dialog to open the Device Manager.

2. Here, expand Universal Serial Bus controllers option.

3. Now right-click the entry USB Host Controller and then click on Uninstall.

4. Repeat this for all entries with USB Host Controller to uninstall drivers for all the USB ports.

5. Once deleted, restart the PC and Windows will automatically reinstall the drivers and fix any driver issues.

Method 3: Disable USB selective suspend

USB Selective Suspend is a Windows power saving feature that suspends unused or idle USB ports to conserve power. Sometimes it could stop a USB port from working. Here is how to disable it:

1. Press Windows + R keys and type powercfg.cpl in the Run dialog to open Windows Power options.

2. Here click on Change plan settings next to your current plan and then click on Change advanced power settings.

3. Now, expand USB settings and disable USB selective suspend setting.

4. Restart the PC to see if it fixes the USB port issue.

Note: This option should be kept enabled if you want to save battery power. If it doesn't fix the USB port issue, then enable it again.

3. PC keeps disconnecting from WiFi

If your Wi-Fi is working fine but your PC keeps disconnecting from it, then your PC's network card may not be receiving full power. Windows has a built-in power saver option that gives less power to the network card. You need to disable this feature:

1. Go to Advanced settings in the Power Options.

2. Here expand Wireless Adaptor Settings and then expand Power Saving Mode.

3. Set this to Maximum Performance.

4. PC beeps

The PC motherboard is smart enough to detect problems and sounds beeps in different rhythms to tell you. Here is an article on what it actually means when the PC beeps multiple times.

If the PC doesn't start after the beeps, then it's usually difficult to solve the problem yourself. However, I'm going to list down two of the most common problems due to which beeps occur, and thankfully, you can solve them yourself as well.

Problem 1: Out of place RAM

A problem I recently dealt with. If the RAM inside your PC gets loose or out of place, then your PC will beep 2-3 times and won't boot at all. The solution is simple, open up the PC (laptop users should let an expert handle this) and reinsert the RAM. Here's how:

1. Take out the RAM completely and clean any dirt inside the slot using a cotton bud.

2. Now insert back the RAM and put enough pressure on both ends to ensure it is fully inside.

3. Afterward, close the clips and make sure they're properly locked. Even a slightly loose RAM will be unable to work.

This video should help you properly install the RAM

Problem 2: Recently added hardware

A damaged or wrongly installed hardware component could lead to beeps. Take out any newly added hardware components and see if it solves the problem. If the PC works fine afterward, then either get it installed properly or get it fixed (or replaced).

5. PC Fans not working

If you notice one or more fans in your PC aren't working, then it could be due to the dirt inside. You will have to open up the PC and use a compressed air can or a leaf blower to clean up the fans and other components.

Here's a video to help you with the cleaning process:

If dirt wasn't the problem, then you can also use the SpeedFan app to see what is the problem. The app will let you control the fans to make them work again. Although your PC motherboard must support fan control to use this app.

6. PC not using a portion of RAM

Sometimes your PC may not use a portion of RAM. For example, You may have 4GB of RAM, but your PC only uses 2GB when you check it from the Task Manager. This is usually a Windows setting issue.

Note: If only a few MBs (200-400MB) of RAM isn't being utilized, then it's probably being used by PC hardware and you can't do anything about it.

The solution to this problem is simple - Windows must have been configured to only use a portion of the RAM. Here is how to fix it:

1. Press Windows + R keys and type msconfig in the Run dialog to open System Configurations.

2. Move to Boot tab and click on Advanced options.

3. Now check the checkbox next to Maximum memory and enter the maximum amount RAM you have installed (in MBs).

4. Click on OK and restart the PC to let it take effect.

Good to know: While you are at it, you should also check the checkbox next to Number of processors option and ensure your PC is utilizing all the CPU cores as well. Set it to the maximum number if you want to use all of the CPU power.

If this didn't fix the problem, then there is also a chance one of the RAM isn't installed properly. Try reinstalling it.

7. Overworking fan

Your PC fan runs according to how much your PC is heating. The higher the temperature, the faster the fan will run. In case your PC temperature is fine (you can use HWMonitor to check it), but the fan is running at full speed; then you'll have to manually control it.

You can use the SpeedFan app for this purpose as well. It will tell you the running speed of all the fans inside your PC so you can manage their speed. Don't worry about app compatibility, overworking fan problem only happens with motherboards that can control the fans.

8. PC crashes before loading the OS

If your PC only shows manufacturer logo and then crashes right before it was supposed to load the operating system, then it's a problem with RAM or hard disk. As the OS is unable to load, then either the RAM is corrupted and can't hold the boot loader or the hard drive is damaged and can't load data inside it.

If you have multiple RAM slots, then taking out each one of them one by one and starting the PC will help find the culprit. In the end, you will have to replace the corrupted RAM or the hard disk, whichever has the issue.

9. PC isn't powering on

If your PC is not powering on at all - not even a single light in it, then it must be a problem with the power source.

Desktop users: If your PC's extension cord, power outlet, and other connections are working fine, then the problem may be with the PC's power cable. Replace the power cable of the monitor with the CPU's (if you don't have a spare) to see if it turns on. You'll have to get a new power cable if this fixes the problem.

Laptop users: Take out the battery and put it back before starting the laptop. If this doesn't work, then take out the battery again and connect the charging cable to the laptop. Start the PC on charger power and see if it works. You will have to replace the battery if it fixes the problem.

Note: You should also remove all types of external devices connected to your PC while trying this. A malfunctioning device might cause this issue.

10. Noisy PC

If you hear a lot of extra noise while using the PC, then most probably it is a plea to clean it up. Get it cleaned or use a can of compressed air or leaf blower to clean it up yourself. If you have overclocked your PC GPU and CPU, then they could be the reason for the noise as well.

Here is a video with simple methods to clean your PC:

There is also a chance that a disc inside the DVD ROM is making the extra sound. You can check this article about all the PC components that create noise for more information.

11. Noisy hard drive

If you hear clicking or grinding sound from the hard drive, then it might be time to get a new one. Hard drives have a limited lifespan and loud sounds are the main sign of a near hard drive failure. You can use CrystalDiskInfo hard drive monitoring tool to check the health of your hard drive. The tool will tell you the current health of the hard drive with signs like "Good", "Caution" or "Bad".

You should back up all your data immediately and try to get another hard disk before this one fails on you.

12. Blue Screen of Death

The dreaded Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) can occur due to both software and hardware problems, but usually, it's a hardware problem. Whatever the cause, BSOD requires immediate attention as it's a sign of a big problem.

BlueScreenView is a great Nirsoft utility that will show important information if you have recently suffered a Blue Screen of Death. You should be able to identify and solve the problem using this information. Below are some common reasons for BSOD and their solutions.

Read Also: How to Fix "Apps Not Responding" in Windows 10

1. Corrupted drivers

A corrupt driver may be the cause of BSOD. To find that out, use the following steps:

1. Open Device Manager by typing devmgmt.msc in the Run.

2. Here expand each menu and look for a yellow triangle icon next to each driver.

3. If you find any, right-click on it and select Update Driver Software to update its driver.

You can also use a third-party app like IObit Driver Booster to automatically find and fix driver problems.

2. Too much pressure on the RAM

If you open too many programs that RAM can't handle, then it may freeze the system and show BSOD. For that, you should either stop opening too many programs or upgrade the RAM.

3. Faulty hard disk

BSOD is also a sign of a dying hard disk, use the instructions in problem #11 above to identify hard disk problems.

4. Heating PC

Heating PC also leads to BSOD if too much pressure is put on the components. Use the instruction in problem #1 to solve it.

13. Blank monitor

If your monitor isn't showing anything, then this could be a problem with the monitor itself or the graphics card. You should connect the monitor to another PC to see whether the problem is with the PC or the monitor.

If the monitor isn't powering on at all, then replace the power cable with a working one and see if it helps. Here is a good article on how to fix a monitor that isn't showing anything.

14. Monitor goes black after few seconds

If the monitor goes black after few seconds of display, then it could be a problem with the color quality or screen adjustment. Press the auto-adjust button on your monitor to see if it fixes it. If not, then you will have to change display color from 32bit to 16 bit.

You can connect the PC to another monitor to adjust colors from your graphics card settings. Pressing the auto-adjust may show the display for few seconds. You can use this to your advantage and adjust the color while pressing auto-adjust.

15. Keyboard issues

If your keyboard is making noise and won't type repeated words properly, then there is no problem with the keyboard. You must have enabled toggle keys and filter keys in Windows settings that cause such a problem. To disable them:

1. Open the Control Panel and click on Ease of Access.

2. Here click on Change how your keyboard works button.

3. Now uncheck the checkbox next to Toggle keys and Filter Keys to solve this problem.

Rounding up

Many of the above hardware problems can be easily fixed by tweaking the settings or using a software. However, some of them will definitely require you to pay a visit to the computer repair shop.

It's good to at least know what is wrong with your PC so you can take the measures accordingly. Do let us know in the comments if you faced any PC hardware problem before and how you solved it.

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15 Common PC Problems and How to Troubleshoot Them - Hongkiat

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You don't have to run to the repair shop every time your PC ends up with an issue. Many of the common PC problems have a rather simple solution, and you can fix them yourself with a few simple steps.

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To get an Idea about what digital infrastructure is and what aspects it includes,, this page will forward you to more detailed information of specific topics.

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A definition of digital infrastructure with common examples.

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On this site, you get a more detailed insight in the development of search habits in the internet and the development of search engines during the last decades.

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A comprehensive overview of the history of search engine technology companies. Read about search's origin in 1945 and innovation through today.

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To get a first idea about what search engine optimization (SEO) means, this homepage shows in a very illustrated way, how search engines see your homepage and explain the points that need to be taken into account in order to be found by google and co.

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Search engines are limited in how they crawl the web and interpret content. A webpage doesn't always look the same to you and me as it looks to a search engine. In this section, we'll focus on specific technical aspects of building (or modifying) web pages so they are structured for both search engines and human visitors alike. Share this part of the guide with your programmers, information architects, and designers, so that all parties involved in a site's construction are on the same page.

Indexable Content

To perform better in search engine listings, your most important content should be in HTML text format. Images, Flash files, Java applets, and other non-text content are often ignored or devalued by search engine crawlers, despite advances in crawling technology. The easiest way to ensure that the words and phrases you display to your visitors are visible to search engines is to place them in the HTML text on the page. However, more advanced methods are available for those who demand greater formatting or visual display styles:

Seeing your site as the search engines do

Many websites have significant problems with indexable content, so double-checking is worthwhile. By using tools like Google's cache, SEO-browser.com, and the MozBar you can see what elements of your content are visible and indexable to the engines. Take a look at Google's text cache of this page you are reading now. See how different it looks?
"I have a problem with getting found. I built a huge Flash site for juggling pandas and I'm not showing up anywhere on Google. What's up?"
Whoa! That's what we look like?

Using the Google cache feature, we can see that to a search engine, JugglingPandas.com's homepage doesn't contain all the rich information that we see. This makes it difficult for search engines to interpret relevancy.

Hey, where did the fun go?

Uh oh ... via Google cache, we can see that the page is a barren wasteland. There's not even text telling us that the page contains the Axe Battling Monkeys. The site is built entirely in Flash, but sadly, this means that search engines cannot index any of the text content, or even the links to the individual games. Without any HTML text, this page would have a very hard time ranking in search results.

It's wise to not only check for text content but to also use SEO tools to double-check that the pages you're building are visible to the engines. This applies to your images, and as we see below, to your links as well.

Crawlable Link Structures

Just as search engines need to see content in order to list pages in their massive keyword-based indexes, they also need to see links in order to find the content in the first place. A crawlable link structure -one that lets the crawlers browse the pathways of a website-is vital to them finding all of the pages on a website. Hundreds of thousands of sites make the critical mistake of structuring their navigation in ways that search engines cannot access, hindering their ability to get pages listed in the search engines' indexes.

Below, we've illustrated how this problem can happen:

In the example above, Google's crawler has reached page A and sees links to pages B and E. However, even though C and D might be important pages on the site, the crawler has no way to reach them (or even know they exist). This is because no direct, crawlable links point pages C and D. As far as Google can see, they don't exist! Great content, good keyword targeting, and smart marketing won't make any difference if the crawlers can't reach your pages in the first place.

Submission-required forms

If you require users to complete an online form before accessing certain content, chances are search engines will never see those protected pages. Forms can include a password-protected login or a full-blown survey. In either case, search crawlers generally will not attempt to submit forms, so any content or links that would be accessible via a form are invisible to the engines.

Links in unparseable JavaScript

If you use JavaScript for links, you may find that search engines either do not crawl or give very little weight to the links embedded within. Standard HTML links should replace JavaScript (or accompany it) on any page you'd like crawlers to crawl.

Links pointing to pages blocked by the Meta Robots tag or robots.txt

The Meta Robots tag and the robots.txt file both allow a site owner to restrict crawler access to a page. Just be warned that many a webmaster has unintentionally used these directives as an attempt to block access by rogue bots, only to discover that search engines cease their crawl.

Frames or iframes

Technically, links in both frames and iframes are crawlable, but both present structural issues for the engines in terms of organization and following. Unless you're an advanced user with a good technical understanding of how search engines index and follow links in frames, it's best to stay away from them.

Robots don't use search forms

Although this relates directly to the above warning on forms, it's such a common problem that it bears mentioning. Some webmasters believe if they place a search box on their site, then engines will be able to find everything that visitors search for. Unfortunately, crawlers don't perform searches to find content, leaving millions of pages inaccessible and doomed to anonymity until a crawled page links to them.

Links in Flash, Java, and other plug-ins

The links embedded inside the Juggling Panda site (from our above example) are perfect illustrations of this phenomenon. Although dozens of pandas are listed and linked to on the page, no crawler can reach them through the site's link structure, rendering them invisible to the engines and hidden from users' search queries.

Links on pages with many hundreds or thousands of links

Search engines will only crawl so many links on a given page. This restriction is necessary to cut down on spam and conserve rankings. Pages with hundreds of links on them are at risk of not getting all of those links crawled and indexed.

Rel="nofollow" can be used with the following syntax:

<a href="https://moz.com" rel="nofollow">Lousy Punks!</a>

Links can have lots of attributes. The engines ignore nearly all of them, with the important exception of the rel="nofollow" attribute. In the example above, adding the rel="nofollow" attribute to the link tag tells the search engines that the site owners do not want this link to be interpreted as an endorsement of the target page.

Nofollow, taken literally, instructs search engines to not follow a link (although some do). The nofollow tag came about as a method to help stop automated blog comment, guest book, and link injection spam, but has morphed over time into a way of telling the engines to discount any link value that would ordinarily be passed. Links tagged with nofollow are interpreted slightly differently by each of the engines, but it is clear they do not pass as much weight as normal links.

Are nofollow links bad?

Although they don't pass as much value as their followed cousins, nofollowed links are a natural part of a diverse link profile. A website with lots of inbound links will accumulate many nofollowed links, and this isn't a bad thing. In fact, Moz's Ranking Factors showed that high ranking sites tended to have a higher percentage of inbound nofollow links than lower-ranking sites.

Google

Google states that in most cases, they don't follow nofollow links, nor do these links transfer PageRank or anchor text values. Essentially, using nofollow causes Google to drop the target links from their overall graph of the web. Nofollow links carry no weight and are interpreted as HTML text (as though the link did not exist). That said, many webmasters believe that even a nofollow link from a high authority site, such as Wikipedia, could be interpreted as a sign of trust.

Bing & Yahoo!

Bing, which powers Yahoo search results, has also stated that they do not include nofollow links in the link graph, though their crawlers may still use nofollow links as a way to discover new pages. So while they may follow the links, they don't use them in rankings calculations.

Keyword Usage and Targeting

Keywords are fundamental to the search process. They are the building blocks of language and of search. In fact, the entire science of information retrieval (including web-based search engines like Google) is based on keywords. As the engines crawl and index the contents of pages around the web, they keep track of those pages in keyword-based indexes rather than storing 25 billion web pages all in one database. Millions and millions of smaller databases, each centered on a particular keyword term or phrase, allow the engines to retrieve the data they need in a mere fraction of a second.

Obviously, if you want your page to have a chance of ranking in the search results for "dog," it's wise to make sure the word "dog" is part of the crawlable content of your document.

Keyword Domination

Keywords dominate how we communicate our search intent and interact with the engines. When we enter words to search for, the engine matches pages to retrieve based on the words we entered. The order of the words ("pandas juggling" vs. "juggling pandas"), spelling, punctuation, and capitalization provide additional information that the engines use to help retrieve the right pages and rank them.

Search engines measure how keywords are used on pages to help determine the relevance of a particular document to a query. One of the best ways to optimize a page's rankings is to ensure that the keywords you want to rank for are prominently used in titles, text, and metadata.

Generally speaking, as you make your keywords more specific, you narrow the competition for search results, and improve your chances of achieving a higher ranking. The map graphic to the left compares the relevance of the broad term "books" to the specific title Tale of Two Cities. Notice that while there are a lot of results for the broad term, there are considerably fewer results (and thus, less competition) for the specific result.

Keyword Abuse

Since the dawn of online search, folks have abused keywords in a misguided effort to manipulate the engines. This involves "stuffing" keywords into text, URLs, meta tags, and links. Unfortunately, this tactic almost always does more harm than good for your site.

In the early days, search engines relied on keyword usage as a prime relevancy signal, regardless of how the keywords were actually used. Today, although search engines still can't read and comprehend text as well as a human, the use of machine learning has allowed them to get closer to this ideal.

The best practice is to use your keywords naturally and strategically (more on this below). If your page targets the keyword phrase "Eiffel Tower" then you might naturally include content about the Eiffel Tower itself, the history of the tower, or even recommended Paris hotels. On the other hand, if you simply sprinkle the words "Eiffel Tower" onto a page with irrelevant content, such as a page about dog breeding, then your efforts to rank for "Eiffel Tower" will be a long, uphill battle. The point of using keywords is not to rank highly for all keywords, but to rank highly for the keywords that people are searching for when they want what your site provides.

On-Page Optimization

Keyword usage and targeting are still a part of the search engines' ranking algorithms, and we can apply some effective techniques for keyword usage to help create pages that are well-optimized. Here at Moz, we engage in a lot of testing and get to see a huge number of search results and shifts based on keyword usage tactics. When working with one of your own sites, this is the process we recommend. Use the keyword phrase:

In the title tag at least once. Try to keep the keyword phrase as close to the beginning of the title tag as possible. More detail on title tags follows later in this section.

Once prominently near the top of the page.

At least two or three times, including variations, in the body copy on the page. Perhaps a few more times if there's a lot of text content. You may find additional value in using the keyword or variations more than this, but in our experience adding more instances of a term or phrase tends to have little or no impact on rankings.

At least once in the alt attribute of an image on the page. This not only helps with web search, but also image search, which can occasionally bring valuable traffic.

Once in the URL. Additional rules for URLs and keywords are discussed later on in this section.

At least once in the meta description tag. Note that the meta description tag does not get used by the engines for rankings, but rather helps to attract clicks by searchers reading the results page, as the meta description becomes the snippet of text used by the search engines.

And you should generally not use keywords in link anchor text pointing to other pages on your site; this is known as Keyword Cannibalization.

Keyword Density Myth

Keyword density is not a part of modern ranking algorithms, as demonstrated by Dr. Edel Garcia in The Keyword Density of Non-Sense.

If two documents, D1 and D2, consist of 1000 terms (l = 1000) and repeat a term 20 times (tf = 20), then a keyword density analyzer will tell you that for both documents Keyword Density (KD) KD = 20/1000 = 0.020 (or 2%) for that term. Identical values are obtained when tf = 10 and l = 500. Evidently, a keyword density analyzer does not establish which document is more relevant. A density analysis or keyword density ratio tells us nothing about:

1. The relative distance between keywords in documents (proximity)

2. Where in a document the terms occur (distribution)

3. The co-citation frequency between terms (co-occurance)

4. The main theme, topic, and sub-topics (on-topic issues) of the documents

The Conclusion:

Keyword density is divorced from content, quality, semantics, and relevance.

What should optimal page density look like then? An optimal page for the phrase "running shoes" would look something like:

You can read more information about On-Page Optimization in this post.

The title tag of any page appears at the top of Internet browsing software, and is often used as the title when your content is shared through social media or republished.

Using keywords in the title tag means that search engines will bold those terms in the search results when a user has performed a query with those terms. This helps garner a greater visibility and a higher click-through rate.

The final important reason to create descriptive, keyword-laden title tags is for ranking at the search engines. In Moz's biannual survey of SEO industry leaders, 94% of participants said that keyword use in the title tag was the most important place to use keywords to achieve high rankings.

Title Tags

The title element of a page is meant to be an accurate, concise description of a page's content. It is critical to both user experience and search engine optimization.

As title tags are such an important part of search engine optimization, the following best practices for title tag creation makes for terrific low-hanging SEO fruit. The recommendations below cover the critical steps to optimize title tags for search engines and for usability.

Be mindful of length

Search engines display only the first 65-75 characters of a title tag in the search results (after that, the engines show an ellipsis - "..." - to indicate when a title tag has been cut off). This is also the general limit allowed by most social media sites, so sticking to this limit is generally wise. However, if you're targeting multiple keywords (or an especially long keyword phrase), and having them in the title tag is essential to ranking, it may be advisable to go longer.

Place important keywords close to the front

The closer to the start of the title tag your keywords are, the more helpful they'll be for ranking, and the more likely a user will be to click them in the search results.

Include branding

At Moz, we love to end every title tag with a brand name mention, as these help to increase brand awareness, and create a higher click-through rate for people who like and are familiar with a brand. Sometimes it makes sense to place your brand at the beginning of the title tag, such as your homepage. Since words at the beginning of the title tag carry more weight, be mindful of what you are trying to rank for.

Consider readability and emotional impact

Title tags should be descriptive and readable. The title tag is a new visitor's first interaction with your brand and should convey the most positive impression possible. Creating a compelling title tag will help grab attention on the search results page, and attract more visitors to your site. This underscores that SEO is about not only optimization and strategic keyword usage, but the entire user experience.

Best Practices for Title Tags

Meta Tags

Meta tags were originally intended as a proxy for information about a website's content. Several of the basic meta tags are listed below, along with a description of their use.

Meta Robots

The Meta Robots tag can be used to control search engine crawler activity (for all of the major engines) on a per-page level. There are several ways to use Meta Robots to control how search engines treat a page:

index/noindex tells the engines whether the page should be crawled and kept in the engines' index for retrieval. If you opt to use "noindex," the page will be excluded from the index. By default, search engines assume they can index all pages, so using the "index" value is generally unnecessary.

follow/nofollow tells the engines whether links on the page should be crawled. If you elect to employ "nofollow," the engines will disregard the links on the page for discovery, ranking purposes, or both. By default, all pages are assumed to have the "follow" attribute.
Example: <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW">

noarchive is used to restrict search engines from saving a cached copy of the page. By default, the engines will maintain visible copies of all pages they have indexed, accessible to searchers through the cached link in the search results.

nosnippet informs the engines that they should refrain from displaying a descriptive block of text next to the page's title and URL in the search results.

noodp/noydir are specialized tags telling the engines not to grab a descriptive snippet about a page from the Open Directory Project (DMOZ) or the Yahoo! Directory for display in the search results.

The X-Robots-Tag HTTP header directive also accomplishes these same objectives. This technique works especially well for content within non-HTML files, like images.

Meta Description

The meta description tag exists as a short description of a page's content. Search engines do not use the keywords or phrases in this tag for rankings, but meta descriptions are the primary source for the snippet of text displayed beneath a listing in the results.

The meta description tag serves the function of advertising copy, drawing readers to your site from the results. It is an extremely important part of search marketing. Crafting a readable, compelling description using important keywords (notice how Google bolds the searched keywords in the description) can draw a much higher click-through rate of searchers to your page.

Meta descriptions can be any length, but search engines generally will cut snippets longer than 160 characters, so it's generally wise to stay within in these limits.

In the absence of meta descriptions, search engines will create the search snippet from other elements of the page. For pages that target multiple keywords and topics, this is a perfectly valid tactic.

Not as important meta tags

Meta Keywords: The meta keywords tag had value at one time, but is no longer valuable or important to search engine optimization. For more on the history and a full account of why meta keywords has fallen into disuse, read Meta Keywords Tag 101 from SearchEngineLand.

Meta Refresh, Meta Revisit-after, Meta Content-type, and others: Although these tags can have uses for search engine optimization, they are less critical to the process, and so we'll leave it to Google's Search Console Help to discuss in greater detail.

URL Structures

URLs-the addresses for documents on the web-are of great value from a search perspective. They appear in multiple important locations.

Since search engines display URLs in the results, they can impact click-through and visibility. URLs are also used in ranking documents, and those pages whose names include the queried search terms receive some benefit from proper, descriptive use of keywords.

URLs make an appearance in the web browser's address bar, and while this generally has little impact on search engines, poor URL structure and design can result in negative user experiences.

The URL above is used as the link anchor text pointing to the referenced page in this blog post.

URL Construction Guidelines

Employ empathy

Place yourself in the mind of a user and look at your URL. If you can easily and accurately predict the content you'd expect to find on the page, your URL is appropriately descriptive. You don't need to spell out every last detail in the URL, but a rough idea is a good starting point.

Shorter is better

While a descriptive URL is important, minimizing length and trailing slashes will make your URLs easier to copy and paste (into emails, blog posts, text messages, etc.) and will be fully visible in the search results.

Keyword use is important (but overuse is dangerous)

If your page is targeting a specific term or phrase, make sure to include it in the URL. However, don't go overboard by trying to stuff in multiple keywords for SEO purposes; overuse will result in less usable URLs and can trip spam filters.

Go static

The best URLs are human-readable and without lots of parameters, numbers, and symbols. Using technologies like mod_rewrite for Apache and ISAPI_rewrite for Microsoft, you can easily transform dynamic URLs like this https://moz.com/blog?id=123 into a more readable static version like this: https://moz.com/blog/google-fresh-factor. Even single dynamic parameters in a URL can result in lower overall ranking and indexing.

Use hyphens to separate words

Not all web applications accurately interpret separators like underscores (_), plus signs (+), or spaces (%20), so instead use the hyphen character (-) to separate words in a URL, as in the "google-fresh-factor" URL example above.

Canonical and Duplicate Versions of Content

Duplicate content is one of the most vexing and troublesome problems any website can face. Over the past few years, search engines have cracked down on pages with thin or duplicate content by assigning them lower rankings.

Canonicalization happens when two or more duplicate versions of a webpage appear on different URLs. This is very common with modern Content Management Systems. For example, you might offer a regular version of a page and a print-optimized version. Duplicate content can even appear on multiple websites. For search engines, this presents a big problem: which version of this content should they show to searchers? In SEO circles, this issue is often referred to as duplicate content, described in greater detail here.

The engines are picky about duplicate versions of a single piece of material. To provide the best searcher experience, they will rarely show multiple, duplicate pieces of content, and instead choose which version is most likely to be the original. The end result is all of your duplicate content could rank lower than it should.

Canonicalization is the practice of organizing your content in such a way that every unique piece has one, and only one, URL. If you leave multiple versions of content on a website (or websites), you might end up with a scenario like the one on the right: which diamond is the right one?

Instead, if the site owner took those three pages and 301-redirected them, the search engines would have only one strong page to show in the listings from that site.

When multiple pages with the potential to rank well are combined into a single page, they not only stop competing with each other, but also create a stronger relevancy and popularity signal overall. This will positively impact your ability to rank well in the search engines.

Canonical Tag to the rescue!

A different option from the search engines, called the Canonical URL Tag, is another way to reduce instances of duplicate content on a single site and canonicalize to an individual URL. This can also be used across different websites, from one URL on one domain to a different URL on a different domain.

Use the canonical tag within the page that contains duplicate content. The target of the canonical tag points to the master URL that you want to rank for.

From an SEO perspective, the Canonical URL tag attribute is similar to a 301 redirect. In essence, you're telling the engines that multiple pages should be considered as one (which a 301 does), but without actually redirecting visitors to the new URL. This has the added bonus of saving your development staff considerable heartache.

For more about different types of duplicate content, this post by Dr. Pete deserves special mention.

Rich Snippets

Ever see a 5-star rating in a search result? Chances are, the search engine received that information from rich snippets embedded on the webpage. Rich snippets are a type of structured data that allow webmasters to mark up content in ways that provide information to the search engines.

While the use of rich snippets and structured data is not a required element of search engine-friendly design, its growing adoption means that webmasters who employ it may enjoy an advantage in some circumstances.

Structured data means adding markup to your content so that search engines can easily identify what type of content it is. Schema.org provides some examples of data that can benefit from structured markup, including people, products, reviews, businesses, recipes, and events.

Often the search engines include structured data in search results, such as in the case of user reviews (stars) and author profiles (pictures). There are several good resources for learning more about rich snippets online, including information at Schema.org, Google's Rich Snippet Testing Tool, and by using the MozBar.

Rich Snippets in the Wild

Let's say you announce an SEO conference on your blog. In regular HTML, your code might look like this:

<div>
SEO Conference<br/>
Learn about SEO from experts in the field.<br/>
Event date:<br/>
May 8, 7:30pm
</div>

Now, by structuring the data, we can tell the search engines more specific information about the type of data. The end result might look like this:

Defending Your Site's Honor

How scrapers steal your rankings

Unfortunately, the web is littered with unscrupulous websites whose business and traffic models depend on plucking content from other sites and re-using it (sometimes in strangely modified ways) on their own domains. This practice of fetching your content and re-publishing is called "scraping," and the scrapers perform remarkably well in search engine rankings, often outranking the original sites.

When you publish content in any type of feed format, such as RSS or XML, make sure to ping the major blogging and tracking services (Google, Technorati, Yahoo!, etc.). You can find instructions for pinging services like Google and Technorati directly from their sites, or use a service like Pingomatic to automate the process. If your publishing software is custom-built, it's typically wise for the developer(s) to include auto-pinging upon publishing.

Next, you can use the scrapers' laziness against them. Most of the scrapers on the web will re-publish content without editing. So, by including links back to your site, and to the specific post you've authored, you can ensure that the search engines see most of the copies linking back to you (indicating that your source is probably the originator). To do this, you'll need to use absolute, rather that relative links in your internal linking structure. Thus, rather than linking to your home page using:

This way, when a scraper picks up and copies the content, the link remains pointing to your site.

There are more advanced ways to protect against scraping, but none of them are entirely foolproof. You should expect that the more popular and visible your site gets, the more often you'll find your content scraped and re-published. Many times, you can ignore this problem: but if it gets very severe, and you find the scrapers taking away your rankings and traffic, you might consider using a legal process called a DMCA takedown. Moz CEO Sarah Bird offers some quality advice on this topic: Four Ways to Enforce Your Copyright: What to Do When Your Online Content is Being Stolen.

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SEO: The Beginner's Guide to Search Engine Optimization from Moz

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Search engines are limited in how they crawl the web and interpret content. A webpage doesn't always look the same to you and me as it looks to a search engine. In this section, we'll focus on specific technical aspects of building (or modifying) web pages so they are structured for both search engines and human visitors alike.

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If you want to know more about how to properly use a search engine and how to optimize the results you need, here you can find useful instructions of how to use search engines.

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There are many specific techniques in order to get the search results that you may need. It is very common to not be aware of such techniques and fail to get the best search results for an intended purpose. Google is the primary example in the instructions provided below. Topics that will be covered include using Boolean expressions to formulate a search, tips for non-academic searches, tips for online academic research, and how to use Google Scholar.

Step 1: Contents

1. Boolean Expressions for Search Engines

1.1 Quotation marks

1.2 Positive signs (+)

1.3 Negative signs (-)

1.4 The OR operator

1.5 The AND operator

1.6 The NEAR operator

1.7 Asterisk (*)

2. Tips for Non-Academic Google Searches

3. Tips for Online Academic Research

4. How to Use Google Scholar

4.1 Utilizing "Advanced Search"

4.2 Utilizing "My Library"

4.3 Understanding Links

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Step 2: 1. Boolean Expressions for Search Engines

Boolean expressions can be used with any search engine, not just Google. They enable very specific results. Below are some examples of Boolean expressions and how they can be used.

Step 3: 1.1 Quotation Marks

Note: Use quotation marks to search a phrase exactly word for word.

Step 1: Search "signs of unstable weather" with the quotation marks included. You will see the search engine searches for the exact phrase with no break in between the words.

Step 2: Search the phrase without quotation marks. The results are very different and steer off from what you may want.

Step 4: 1.2 Positive Signs (+)

Note: Use positive signs to include words in a search that are being ignored by the engine.

Step 1: Search "+signs of unstable weather" without the quotation marks. This tells Google to always include the word "signs."

Step 5: 1.3 Negative Signs (-)

Note: Use negative signs to exclude words from a search when Google usually includes them.

Step 1: Search "spots on fur -dogs" without the quotation marks. This will give results for any potential animal except for dogs.

Step 2: Search without "-dogs" in the search. Notice that

the top three results now primarily contain dogs.

Step 6: 1.4 the OR Operator

Note: Use the word OR to allow the search to include another word, or phrase, around OR.

Step 1: Search "missing fur rabbits OR cats" without the quotation marks. This tells Google to search for pages that have information on rabbits, cats, or both.

Step 2: Remove the OR expression. Notice the results fail to list any information on cats.

Step 7: 1.5 the AND Operator

Note: Use the word AND to tell Google to allow both words to be included in the results.

Step 1: Search "painting with acrylic AND oil" without the quotation marks. Notice that in the top three results, two of the results include acrylics being mixed with oil paints.

Step 2: Remove the AND expression. Notice the top three results are mainly results helping searchers decide which one medium is more suitable, rather than both mixed together.

Step 8: 1.6 the NEAR Operator

Note: The NEAR operator is similar to the AND operator, except the NEAR operator allows a range of 16 words between the two words or phrases in the search.

Step 1: Search "allergies NEAR ocean" without quotation marks. The results will include both the words "allergies" and "ocean" within the range of 16 words.

Note: If only the AND operator were to be used, the results could include webpages that don't provide information with an actual correlation between allergies and the ocean. The results could instead include a webpage about the "ocean" with "allergies" listed somewhere on the page and no direction relation between the two.

Note: Without either operator, the results may not be as specific or reliable for the information wanted.

Step 2: Remove the NEAR operator term from the search. Notice that the first result is not a result that would be as beneficial as the search including the NEAR expression. It is rather a personal question being asked instead of reliable source.

Step 9: 1.7 Asterisks (*)

Note: Asterisks are to be used as a placeholder. This is useful both as a wildcard search term or if the word needed has been forgotten. Simply add * where a word or phrase would normally go.

Step 1: Search "Congress voted on *" with the quotation marks. This term will search for all phrases starting with congress voted on, while allowing for any word in place of the asterisk.

Note: Remember from what you've learned earlier that without the quotation marks, the words in the search phrase can be scattered throughout the webpage rather than together

Step 10: 2. Tips for Non-Academic Google Searches

· Keep the searches simple. Boolean expressions are very helpful, but using too many is not practical.

· To further narrow searches, under the already-searched phrase in the search box, click on the "Search tools" tab. This allows you to search by things such as time, relevance, and location.

· To Google search within a website, try "site:[website URL]" and a word, or phrase, you would like to search within that website.

· To search by file type, try "filetype:[file type]" and a following word, or phrase you would like to search under that file type. Examples of file types include jpg, doc, ppt, and pdf.

· To define a word, try "define:[word]"

· To search the current weather, try "weather [zipcode or city]"

· To set a timer, try "set timer for [time]"

· To convert currencies or units, try "[first measurement] to [second measurement]"

Warning: Do not include the quotation marks or brackets in the searches.

· To search for something of money value, include a dollar sign ($) when necessary.

· Use an at symbol (@) to search for usernames within social media.

Step 11: 3. Tips for Online Academic Research

· It may not be recommended to research with primarily Wikipedia, but using Wikipedia is a great way to develop ideas for research.

· Use your school library's website, your library's online database, and Google Scholar.

· Use Boolean expressions for specific results

· Look into newer webpages. To do this on Google, click the "Search Tools" tab under the search bar (the phrase must be already-searched), then click "Any time" and select a time frame.

Step 12: 4. How to Use Google Scholar

Google scholar is located at http://www.scholar.google.com. This is Google's excellent tool provided to research for academic purposes.

Step 13: 4.1 Utilizing "Advanced Search"

Step 1: Get to the main page of Google scholar. Click the down-facing arrow inside the right side of the search box. This will pop up a box with fields to narrow your search based on keywords, authors, published articles, and dates.

Step 2: Notice that when the search is already performed, the same pop up box can be found by clicking on the arrow underneath the search box. Then, click on "Advanced search" towards the bottom.

Step 3: Explore
the functions provided within this drop down box.

Step 4: Search by time and relevance under with the "Any time" tab

Step 5: View your citations and saved library under the "My Citations" and "My library" links

Step 6: Search through a specific school's library by going to "Settings" and then "Library Links" on the new page

Step 14: 4.2 Utilizing "My Library"

Note: If signed into a Google account, it is possible to keep a library of your saved sources.

Step 1: To save a search result, click on the link named "Save" under the description of the search result (underlined in the image below). Click it, the source will then say "Saved" and can be found in your library.

Step 15: 4.3 Understanding Search Result Links

Step 1: Click the "Cited by 1755" link. This will lead you to a page with all the articles that have also cited the main source "Economics of Global Warming"

Step 2: Click the "Related articles" link. This will direct you to a page of articles related to the subject matter of "Economics of Global Warming"

Step 3: Click the "All 8 Versions" link. This will bring you to a page with results of the same article under various websites and file types.

Step 4: Click the "Cite" link. A pop-up box comes up with the MLA, APA, and Chicago citation. You can copy and paste either of these for academic purposes.

Step 5: The "More" link brings up further links such as "Library Search," "Cached," and "Fewer."

Caution: Not always will the "More" link or all of the links under "More" will appear.

Step 6: Click the "Library Search" link. This allows for a search of the source on http://www.worldcat.org. This website is an online network of library resources.

Step 7: Click the "Cached" link. This will display how the webpage looked like when it was last crawled by Google.

Step 8: Click the "Fewer" link. This simply shows less links - opposite of when the "More" link showed extra links.

Step 9: You now explored all of the links and learned their intended purposes!

Step 16: Conclusion

Taking advantage of search operators can great improve search results. Using tools such as ignoring words, specifying a phrase, searching only a specific site, or specifying a certain file type will help narrow search results and provide more resourceful information. Keeping it simple is always important, but using Boolean expressions and advanced search settings can help making finding the information being sought more efficient.

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How to Properly Use a Search Engine: There are many specific techniques in order to get the search results that you may need. It is very common to not be aware of such techniques and fail to get the best search results for an intended purpose. Google is the primary example in the ins...

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As we all know by now, google is the market giant and its way of using our data often leads to discussions. So more and more users are searching for an alternative in order to keep what's left of their privacy. Here you get an idea about other products on the market

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If you're a regular Google user (65% of you globally) then you'll have noticed some changes, both good and bad.
I won't debate the merits of these improvements, we've done that already here: Google kills Right Hand Side Ads and here: Google launches Accelerated Mobile Pages, but there's a definite feeling of vexation that appears to be coming to a head.

Deep breath...

As the paid search space increases in 'top-heaviness', as organic results get pushed further off the first SERP, as the Knowledge Graph scrapes more and more publisher content and continues to make it pointless to click through to a website, and as our longstanding feelings of unfairness over Google's monopoly and tax balance become more acute, now more than ever we feel there should be another, viable search engine alternative.

There was a point not that long ago when you could easily divide people between those that used Google, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves and AltaVista. Now it's got to the point where if you're not using Google, you're not really using the internet properly.

Right now though maybe we should be paying more attention to the alternatives. Maybe our daily lives and, for some of us, careers shouldn't need to balance on the fickle algorithm changes of the world's most valuable company.

Let's see what else is out there in the non-Google world. It's not that scary, I promise. Although you may want to bring a coat.
Please note: this is an update of an article published on SEW in May 2014, we felt like it needed sprucing up especially many of the listed engines (Blekko, Topsy) are no longer with us.
Bing

Microsoft's search engine is the second most popular search engine in the world, with 15.8% of the search market.

But why should you use Bing? Lifehacker has some great articles where they try to convince themselves as much as anyone else why Bing is a serious contender to Google. Plus points include:

Bing's video search is significantly better than Google's, giving you a grid of large thumbnails that you can click on to play or preview if you hover over them.

Bing often gives twice as many autocomplete suggestions than Google does.

Bing can predict when airfares are about to go up or down if you're searching for flights.

Bing also has a feature where if you type linkfromdomain:[site name] it will highlight the best ranked outgoing links from that site, helping you figure out which other sites your chosen site links to the most.

Also note that Bing powers Yahoo's search engine.

DuckDuckGo

The key feature of DuckDuckGo is that it doesn't retain its users' data, so it won't track you or manipulate results based on your behaviour. So if you're particularly spooked by Google's all-seeing, all-knowing eye, this might be the one for you.

There's lots more info on DuckDuckGo's performance here.

Quora

As Google gets better and better at answering more complicated questions, it will never be able to match the personal touch available with Quora.

Ask any question and its erudite community will offer their replies. Or you can choose from any similar queries previously asked.

Dogpile

Dogpile may look like a search engine you cobbled together with clip-art, but that's rather the point as it pulls in and 'curates' results from various different engines including Google, Yandex and Yahoo, but removes all the ads.

Vimeo

Of course if you're going to give up Google, then you'll also have to give up YouTube, which can be a terrifying prospect. But there is an alternative. And a pretty good one at that... Vimeo. The professional's choice of video-sharing site, which has lots of HD video and no ads.

Yandex

This is a Russian portal, offering many similar products and services as Google, and it's the dominant search engine in Russia.

As you can see it offers results in a nice logical format, replete with favicons so you can clearly see the various channels for your branded queries.

Boardreader

If you want to get into the nitty-gritty of a subject with a variety of different points of view away from the major publications, Boardreader surfaces results purely from forums, message boards and, of course, Reddit.

WolframAlpha

WolframAlpha is a 'computational knowledge engine', or super clever nerd to you and me. Ask it to calculate any data or ask it about any fact and it will give you the answer. Plus it does this awesome 'computing' thing while it thinks about your answer (which can take a short while.)

It's not always successful, you have to practice how to get the best from it. But at least it's aware of the terrible 90s television show The Dinosaurs.

StartPage

Another search engine that puts privacy at the forefront, StartPage (originally Ixquick) was the first search engine to allow its users to search privately.

With StartPage, none of your details are stored (including your IP address) and no cookies are used, save for a single, anonymous cookie that's used to remember your preferences. (For those who want to go "cookie-free", StartPage has a URL generator alternative to save your settings).

Uniquely, StartPage also offers a proxy for those who want to not just search, but browse, the web in full privacy.

Ask.com

Oh look... Ask Jeeves is still around. Also he's no longer a Wodehousian butler, but a computer generated bank manager. Weird.

It's still a slightly mediocre search engine pretending to be a question and answer site, but the 'Popular Q&A' results found on the right hand side are very handy if Jeeves himself can't satisfy your query. And what a good use of the right-hand side space, huh Google.

SlideShare

SlideShare is a really handy place to source information from presentations, slide decks, webinars and whatever else you may have missed from not attending a conference.

You'll also be surprised what information you can find there.

Addict-o-matic

"Inhale the web" with the friendly looking hoover guy by creating your own topic page, which you can bookmark and see results from a huge number of channels in that one page (including Google, Bing News, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr).

Creative Commons Search

CC Search is particularly handy if you need to find copyright free images for your website (as discussed in this post on image optimisation for SEO). Just type your query in then click on your chosen site you want to search.

Giphy

Because really, when it comes down to it, we could imagine a worse dystopian future than one in which we all communicate entirely in Gifs.

Christopher Ratcliff is the editor of Methods Unsound and former editor of SEW

Related reading

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Say goodbye to Google: 14 alternative search engines

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If you're a regular Google user (65% of you globally) then you'll have noticed some changes, both good and bad. I won't debate the merits of these improvements, we've done that already here: Google kills Right Hand Side Ads and here: Google launches Accelerated Mobile Pages, but there's a definite feeling of vexation that appears to be coming to a head.

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To get an idea about what kinds of data bases exist and what they can be used for, the European Commission offers a page with scientific tools and databases.

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The range of work carried out at the JRC includes the

compilation of databases

development of software and modelling tools

On the basis of our open data principles we publish tools and databases with clear descriptions for each entry here on the Science Hub.

The tools and databases are categorised by name and acronym, but can be filtered by research area, keyword and JRC institute responsible for the coordination of the particular entry.

To search specific datasets or collections, the JRC Data Catalogue opens access to our data.

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The range of work carried out at the JRC includes the compilation of databases development of software and modelling tools On the basis of our open data principles we publish tools and databases with clear descriptions for each entry here on the Science Hub.

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As an introduction, you might want to have a look at this article that gives an idea about the term virtual workforce and provides you with some statistics concerning the effects of this new way of working.

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Editor's note: This piece, the second in "The Future of Work" series, also appears on our sister site, CIO Dive. Stay up-to-date with all the latest news on the enterprise tech industry there. Changes in office design kicked off the series.

Geographic barriers no longer decide where someone can work. In some cases, it's as easy as calling in. Others have gone as far as implementing video robots that roll around the office - a person's face on a tablet atop a Segway-like body.

TINYpulse's "What Leaders Need to Know About Remote Workers" report reveals that remote workers are happier at work and feel more valued, but tend to have a lower relationship with coworkers - an issue that can lead to turnover if not handled correctly.

But solutions are coming.

The potential future of the workforce is marked by corporations streamlining their approach on almost everything, from data storage solutions to communication platforms. With new, flashy tools and shifts in workplace culture, there is an almost unlimited potential for customization, which allows technology to cater almost exclusively to the needs of an enterprise.

But, perhaps ironically, the technology is enabling HR and organizations to put the power back with their most important resource: people.

Who makes up the virtual workforce?

While telework has not reached full acceptance in the workforce yet, it does represent a cultural shift in corporate America. TINYpulse's report challenges the stereotype that teleworkers are less productive or lazy, noting that 91% of workers surveyed believe they get more work done via virtual work than they would in an office setting.

With the growing acceptance of remote work, it is now easier than ever to tap into the global talent market, Dora Wang, employee engagement researcher for TINYpulse and author of the report, told HR Dive. If a company is struggling to find talent nearby, virtual work enables them to look anywhere in the world.

"Speaking from our experience, we have an entirely separate office in Saigon," she said. "Now that we have those improved communication technologies, it's more possible to manage people from a distance."

Employees with family commitments are not the only ones who opt for remote work. Up to 41% cited the freedom of choosing when and where to work as the major pro.

But employers must exercise caution implementing flexible and remote work programs. Those who work remotely because their job requires them to - a sizeable chunk, TINYpulse reports (22%) - tend to score lower on measurements of happiness, including how valued they feel at work and how likely they see themselves working at a company within a year.

A lot of this, Wang says, is likely due to workplace culture problems.

Creating a culture when no one shares an office

Overall worker satisfaction is a major hurdle for virtual work programs. But like other culture-changing initiatives, there is no silver bullet.

Time zones can't be ignored. While working in a time zone three or more hours different than coworkers correlated with a lower happiness score, those with the highest happiness levels worked on teams that didn't share one time zone at all. In fact, those who worked in the same time zone reported one of the lower happiness scores overall.

"It could be that those in distributed time zones are going into this proactively," Wang said. The culture would have been specifically built around working together virtually, making remote work feel more natural and accepted.

"There could be any number of reasons for this trend, but one possibility is that having teammates scattered across locations eliminates the "us versus them" mentality that might spring up when there is one centrally located team and remote employees isolated outside of it," the report notes.

Video technology has long enabled remote workers to feel like part of the action - at least, for short bursts like meetings. But culture is found in the small, day-to-day interactions with teammates. Without a robot that will carry their video visage around the office, a remote worker may miss the natural camaraderie that forms during unpredictable moments.

That's where group chat comes in. Chat tools, like the ever popular Slack and its counterparts, HipChat, Campfire and Yammer, enable constant conversation in a casual format that's more accessible than email. Remote workers can be part of the daily chat and feel like part of the team throughout the day, rather than dispersed moments.

"The chatroom has a better ability to mimic that watercooler feel," Wang said. "The back and forth is there, and that's what we need to work toward."

But Michael Fenlon, global and U.S. talent leader at PwC, says that leaders should not discount the impact of video, either.

"Video really does make a difference. We can see each other, see expressions," he told HR Dive. "I think at a deep level humans are attuned to engaging at that level."

The end of email?

Business leaders and consumers have long griped over the sheer volume of email and the amount of effort it takes to keep up with the constant communication demands. The seemingly inescapable platform demands both time and attention so employees can ensure they remain up-to-date.

A recent study from a Software as a Service (SaaS) enterprise service management provider, found nearly 20% of the 1,500 U.S. adults surveyed said they received more than 100 emails on a daily basis.

Another 35% check work-related email at least one hour a day outside of work hours, Samanage found, totaling more than 30 days of extra work annually.

Nearly 20% of the 1,500 U.S. adults surveyed said they received more than 100 emails on a daily basis.

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Whereas email is a bottomless well, with important messages sinking to the bottom, Paknad referred to messaging platforms as steady streams of communication, with periodic tags or mentions to highlight an important part in the ongoing dialogues.

Companies are looking toward messaging tools like Slack, HipChat and Yammer to revolutionize and streamline enterprise communication. In some cases, organizations want to eliminate email altogether in favor of real-time messaging platforms.

A self-proclaimed "Slack junky," Srinivasan said, communication tools can change the tone of the workplace and help create more cohesive teams.

Google Apps had a similar impact when it was launched, Srinivasan said. "It provided this whole new way of collaborating across borders and time zones on work."

A September 2015 report from CompTIA, a tech industry trade group, surveyed 700 business professionals and found that email is still the primary form of communication. Of those surveyed, 72% used Microsoft Outlook and 41% used Gmail. Just 4% of those surveyed used Slack.

Though email is still dominant in the enterprise, many experts point toward messaging tools as the future.

Slack in particular is growing into an industry darling, with more than 2.7 million daily active users and 800,000 paid seats. Earlier this month, the company raised an additional $200 million in funding on a $4 billion valuation.

April Underwood, Slack's VP of product, said four out of five Fortune 100 companies use the platform, according to a ZDNet report . To advance its product, Slack is looking at potential tools for admins to help manage channels and research how organizations can educate users to most effectively use the tool.

But implementing alternative communication platforms in the enterprise is a process and can demand system-wide changes in organizational behavior.

Companies may hear a pitch about a certain tool and "believe that the tool really is going to fit better with a modern workflow or more remote workers," Robinson said.

But in reality, organizations can struggle with mass adoption of new technology, according to Robinson.

"I do think that communications is shifting and it's going to shift," Robinson said. But it "may be a longer road than you might think when you look at the potential of some of these tools and the potential to really disrupt things."

PwC: Eliminating the office

When instituting virtual work programs, companies may need to monitor how the programs affect office culture. Letting employees work from home could have a "contagion" effect . Fewer people show up to the office thanks to a virtual work option, but those who do show up want face-time with coworkers. But if no one is there, less people will feel obligated to come to the office - potentially stifling culture entirely. The trick is finding a balance that works for your company.

About three years ago, PwC took stock of the workforce to capture the "shifting expectations" around what it means to work, Fenlon said. The result: Eschewing the traditional office space, instead converting them into co-working spaces. No one is required to go to the office so long as they work with their teams to ensure the necessary work is done. Flexibility is in the DNA of their work philosophy.

"The design reflects how our culture has evolved, which includes the technology, like the Google suite of tools," Fenlon said. "It's changing how we work. Not just video, but real time collaboration of work products."

"These days, you don't quit your job. You quit your coworkers."

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80% of PwC's workforce is millennials, he added, meaning that desire for flexibility and the ability to adapt was already present. But the firm also had to convince a group of high-achievers that working outside the office wouldn't make them look like slackers.

The most important aspect of the change involved no change at all - the dependence on and commitment to teams. PwC's model is based on teams that decide how they will achieve goals and complete projects.

"The circumstances vary," Fenlon said. "But even if I am not working day to day in a PwC office, the commitment is grounded in teams. The culture exists wherever our teams are."

TINYpulse's research supported that phenomenon.

"These days, you don't quit your job," Wang said. "You quit your coworkers."

What the future looks like

Along with the introduction of new technologies and methods of communication in the workforce comes the need to set standards and policies, according to Robinson.

Just as people remain closely tied to their inboxes, users can be equally as dedicated to messaging platforms, accessing them constantly, even after the close of business.

"It can be all too easy to allow those work communications to filter into daily life and it's not always healthy," Robinson said. "I think it requires a new level of filtering and curation on the individual's part."

founder Dave Teare has "love" for Slack, but over time he realized that the company used the messaging platform for too many things, sapping productivity. AgileBits, at one point, had 81 messaging channels, not counting private or archived channels, Teare wrote in a .

While Slack allowed for seamless connection, even with remote employees, it wasn't enabling "effective communication," Teare wrote.

The same steady stream of communication that becomes a pressure point for some, allows other to keep their thumb on the pulse of a company.

Though the constant flow of conversation can be overwhelming, at times, Srinivasan said, "it's easier for me to scan Slack and get a sense of what's going on than scan my inbox."

While she can quickly sift through the more important material on Slack, with message tags highlighting what needs attention, an inbox can be oppressive "because of the sheer volume and the variability of quality of what's in an email, Srinivasan said.

"Email addresses are no longer sacred," Srinivasan said. "I think we're increasingly challenged just by the volume of email and the quality of email we're receiving."

But, Srinivasan said,"I don't have spam in my Slack."

Though Slack and email equally have their proponents, the future of the workplace may work to combine the two. An application like Workboard's offering factors "accountability" into the communication stream, Paknad said. The platform aligns employees around a shared results and ensures ideas don't get lost in the constant stream of communication.

A more structured approach to communication, without the rigidity of email, could transform the modern workforce, Paknad said, while still maintaining the fluid conversations taking place on messaging platforms.

Stay informed.

Subscribe to HR Dive to get the latest news in HR delivered straight to your inbox.

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The Future of Work: How new tools created the virtual workplace

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Editor's note: This piece, the second in "The Future of Work" series, also appears on our sister site, CIO Dive. Stay up-to-date with all the latest news on the enterprise tech industry there. Changes in office design kicked off the series. Geographic barriers no longer decide where someone can work.

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You can find more background information about the effects of digitalisation within a company and different strategies here.

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Following the leader is a dangerous game. It's better to focus on building an organization and culture that can realize the strategy that's right for you.

With the pace of change in the world accelerating around us, it can be hard to remember that the digital revolution is still in its early days. Massive changes have come about since the packet-switch network and the microprocessor were invented, nearly 50 years ago. A look at the rising rate of discovery in fundamental R&D and in practical engineering leaves little doubt that more upheaval is on the way.

For incumbent companies, the stakes continue to rise. From 1965 to 2012, the "topple rate," at which they lose their leadership positions, increased by almost 40 percent as digital technology ramped up competition, disrupted industries, and forced businesses to clarify their strategies, develop new capabilities, and transform their cultures. Yet the opportunity is also plain. McKinsey research shows that companies have lofty ambitions: they expect digital initiatives to deliver annual growth and cost efficiencies of 5 to 10 percent or more in the next three to five years.

To gain a more precise understanding of the digitization challenge facing business today, McKinsey has been conducting an in-depth diagnostic survey of 150 companies around the world. By evaluating 18 practices related to digital strategy, capabilities, and culture, we have developed a single, simple metric for the digital maturity of a company-what might be called its Digital Quotient, or DQ. This survey reveals a wide range of digital performance in today's big corporations (exhibit).

Our examination of the digital performance of major corporations points to four lessons in which we have increasing confidence:

First, incumbents must think carefully about the strategy available to them. The number of companies that can operate as pure-play disrupters at global scale-such as Spotify, Square, and Uber-are few in number. Rarer still are the ecosystem shapers that set de facto standards and gain command of the universal control points created by hyperscaling digital platforms. Ninety-five to 99 percent of incumbent companies must choose a different path, not by "doing digital" on the margin of their established businesses but by wholeheartedly committing themselves to a clear strategy.

Second, success depends on the ability to invest in relevant digital capabilities that are well aligned with strategy-and to do so at scale. The right capabilities help you keep pace with your customers as digitization transforms the way they research and consider products and services, interact, and make purchases on the digital consumer decision journey.

Third, while technical capabilities-such as big data analytics, digital content management, and search-engine optimization-are crucial, a strong and adaptive culture can help make up for a lack of them.

Fourth, companies need to align their organizational structures, talent development, funding mechanisms, and key performance indicators (KPIs) with the digital strategy they've chosen.

Collectively, these lessons represent a high-level road map for the executive teams of established companies seeking to keep pace in the digital age. Much else is required, of course. But in our experience, without the right road map and the management mind-set needed to follow it, there's a real danger of traveling in the wrong direction, traveling too slowly in the right one, or not moving forward at all. We hope this article will help leaders steer organizations effectively as they make the transition to becoming more fully digital enterprises.

1. Getting the strategy right

Executives must arrive at a common vernacular for what "digital" means for them. Then, the starting point for success is developing a clearly defined, coherent digital strategy that's fully integrated with the overall corporate one. Without this deep alignment, any subsequent intervention is bound to fall short. Yet companies struggle to get their digital strategy right. Among the 18 practices in our DQ diagnostic, those related to strategy show the biggest variance between digital leaders and more average-performing companies. (For more on the basic tenets of the Digital Quotient, see "Understanding your Digital Quotient," a video with McKinsey's Tanguy Caitlin. For more from Tanguy on how companies can build an effective digital strategy, see " What it takes to build your Digital Quotient.") One obstacle is the exposure and publicity (and, commonly, the big market valuations) that surround the most visible players in today's digital landscape. These companies include pure-play disrupters, such as Nespresso and Uber, and ecosystem shapers, such as John Deere and Schibsted. Impressive as disrupters and shapers might be, those two strategies are feasible for only a select few.

Companies get their digital strategy right by answering three important questions. First, where will the most interesting digital opportunities and threats open up? Second, how quickly and on what scale is the digital disruption likely to occur? Third, what are the best responses to embrace these opportunities proactively and to reallocate resources away from the biggest threats? The vast majority of companies will address this third question through more targeted strategic responses, including these:

A smaller-scale disruption of your own business model to enter a new space or redefine an existing one. Shenzhen-based Ping An Bank, for instance, founded the digitally centered Orange Bank to target younger consumers of financial services with simple, high-return products and a one-minute account sign-up-all without traditional branch networks or complex product portfolios.

Fast-following to ride the wave and capture some of the value created by an industry's evolution. The UK department store John Lewis deployed thoughtful, targeted "clicks and mortar" levers to make it possible for a highly loyal and attractive customer base to order from its website and get deliveries at stores and company-owned grocery outlets in their local communities.

Aggressively reallocating resources from digitally threatened assets to more digitally interesting ones. Bauer Media Group, in Germany, has systematically reallocated resources away from potentially vulnerable analog media assets to develop a portfolio with a digital advantage. Its overall revenue base has shrunk, but its topline growth is materially higher, and its market capitalization has better equity multiples.

Boosting the effectiveness of existing business models through digital approaches and tools. To help visitors atDisney resorts and theme parks, the Walt Disney Company, for example, developed a suite of digital tools. These include the FastPass+ service, which allows visitors to reserve access to theme-park attractions, and the MagicBand, a tech-enabled wristband that facilitates reservations and customer routing at Disney World. Roughly 50 percent of Disney World's visitors elect to wear it. The more efficient routing helped the resort's Magic Kingdom to host about 3,000 more guests each day of the 2013-14 holiday season.

Clearly defining the best-fitting digital strategies is important, in part, because successful ones give rise to differentiated management practices: if you get the strategy right, the managerial interventions become clearer and vice versa. Consider the following examples:

A bold long-term orientation counteracts short-term financial-performance imperatives and frees companies to take calibrated risks and to invest at scale in digital initiatives and the IT architecture.

Direct integration with the strategy puts digital at the center of the business, fostering natural forms of internal collaboration as well as corporate governance that places digital topics alongside other business requirements. Strategic priorities and investment decisions are now part of the same process.

A relentless focus on customer needs helps companies innovate constantly where it matters most. While data from early adopters sometimes does mislead businesses that try to serve them, more often than not their behavior soon begins permeating the mass market. That's especially true if multigenerational links can be made through consumer use cases (for instance, direct consumer videoconferencing, texting, and e-chats).

Once companies have arrived at a clearly thought-out strategy, they must commit themselves to it wholeheartedly. The days of tinkering at the edges are gone.

2. Capabilities at scale

For digital success, certain capabilities-especially those that build foundations for other key processes and activities-are more important than others. Foremost among them are the modular IT platforms and agile technology-delivery skills needed to keep pace with customers in a fast-moving, mobile world. The IT platforms of most companies we surveyed have major gaps, reflecting (and reinforced by) a widespread failure to prioritize digital initiatives within broader IT and capital-expenditure investments.

What further separates high performers in our survey is their ability to engage customers digitally and to improve their cost performance in four areas.

Data-empowered decision making

High-performing digital companies distinguish themselves by keeping pace as their customers undertake the digital consumer decision journey. For example, they anticipate emerging patterns in the behavior of customers and tailor relevant interactions with them by quickly and dynamically integrating structured data, such as demographics and purchase history, with unstructured data, such as social media and voice analytics. These companies skillfully assess the available resources, inside and outside the business, and bring them to bear on issues that matter to their markets.

For example, in 2012, Reckitt Benckiser, a maker of popular cold and flu remedies, used search data from the medical website WebMD (with almost 32 million monthly visitors at that time) to track cold and flu symptoms across the country and anticipate where outbreaks were likely to occur. Then the company released targeted geography- and symptom-specific advertising and promotions (including an offer for free home delivery) in those places. Along with a strong cold and flu season, this initiative helped Reckitt Benckiser, during one four-week period, to increase its US sales of cough and cold products by 22 percent, compared with the previous year.

Connectivity

A closely related skill is connectivity. Digital leaders embrace technologies (such as apps, personalization, and social media) that help companies establish deeper connections between a brand and its customers-and thus give them more rewarding experiences. Such connections can also deeply inform product development.

For example, Burberry's Art of the Trench campaign, launched in 2009, encourages customers to visit its online platform and upload photographs of themselves in trench coats. Fellow shoppers and fashion experts then comment on the photos and "like" and share them through email, as well as social-media outlets. Users can also click through to the main Burberry site to shop and buy. These innovations are becoming ever more deeply embedded in the company. Burberry may not have gotten everything right, but, overall, this approach-combined with other innovations-helped the company to double its annual total revenue in six years.

Process automation

Top-performing digital players focus their automation efforts on well-defined processes, which they iterate in a series of test-and-optimize releases. Successful process-automation efforts start by designing the future state for each process, without regard for current constraints-say, shortening turnaround time from days to minutes. Once that future state has been described, relevant constraints (such as legal protocols) can be reintroduced.

Using this approach, a European bank shortened its account-opening process from two or three days to less than ten minutes. At the same time, the bank automated elements of its mortgage-application process by connecting an online calculator to its credit-scoring models, which enabled it to give customers a preliminary offer in less than a minute. This system cut costs while significantly improving customer satisfaction.

Two-speed IT

Today's consumer expectations put a new set of pressures on the IT organization as legacy IT architectures struggle with the rapid testing, failing, learning, adapting, and iterating that digital product innovations require. Our diagnostic shows that leading companies can operate both a specialized, high-speed IT capability designed to deliver rapid results and a legacy capability optimized to support traditional business operations.

This IT architecture and, in certain cases, the IT organization itself essentially function at two different speeds. The customer-facing technology is modular and flexible enough to move quickly-for instance, to develop and deploy new microservices in days or to give customers dynamic, personalized web pages in seconds. The core IT infrastructure, on the other hand, is designed for the stability and resiliency required to manage transaction and support systems. The priority here is high-quality data management and built-in security to keep core business services reliable.

One UK financial institution used this two-speed approach to improve its online retail-banking service. The bank opened a new development office with a start-up culture-an agile work process tested and optimized new products rapidly. To support this capability for the long term, the company simultaneously evolved its service architecture to accelerate the release of new customer-facing features.

3. A fast, agile culture

While strong skills are crucial, companies can to some degree compensate for missing ones by infusing their traditional cultures with velocity, flexibility, an external orientation, and the ability to learn. While there is more than one way to build such a culture, many companies with high scores on the DQ diagnostic have succeeded by adopting test-and-learn approaches drawn from software-development movements such as DevOps, continuous delivery, and agile. Once, these were confined to the periphery of the business environment. Now they bring a cooperative, collaborative disposition to interactions between talented workers at its core. Previously siloed functions, departments, and business units can learn a new spirit of cohesiveness.

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These test-and-learn approaches incorporate automation, monitoring, community sharing, and collaboration to unify previously isolated functions and processes into a fast-moving, product-oriented culture. By promoting shared ownership of technology initiatives and products, such environments democratize data, minimize complexity, facilitate the rapid reallocation of resources, and enable reusable, modular, and interoperable IT systems. To set this kind of culture in motion, executives can focus their efforts on four key areas.

External orientation

As companies develop their collaborative cultures, they position themselves to participate more meaningfully in broader networks of collaboration, learning, and innovation. The shaping role in these networks, or ecosystems, may be beyond the reach of most incumbent companies. But they can play other value-creating roles by performing specific modules of activity, such as production or logistics, within a more broadly orchestrated ecosystem.

Collaboration beyond the boundaries of companies need not occur only in a broadly orchestrated setting. Companies can also benefit from smaller-scale collaborations with customers, technology providers, and suppliers. In addition, they can mobilize workers they themselves don't employ-the distributed talent in networks of shared interest and purpose. SAP, for instance, mobilized the user community it developed to help launch its NetWeaver software.

All this requires digital leaders to recognize what they're good at themselves and what others might do better and to improve their ability to partner collaboratively with people and institutions. They must also be able to separate the real opportunities, threats, and emerging collaborators and competitors from hype-laden pretenders.

Appetite for risk

Our DQ research finds that digital leaders have a high tolerance for bold initiatives but that executives at laggards say their cultures are risk averse. Although established companies may not be likely to shape or orchestrate broad ecosystems, they must still face up to the implications of disruptive forces in their markets and industries-and the risks that arise in dealing with them. In a world of more data and less certainty, companies have to make decisions and respond to disrupters all the earlier and the more decisively.

Test and learn-at scale!

At the heart of agile cultures is the test-and-learn mind-set and product-development method, which can usefully be applied, or translated, to nearly any project or process that incumbents undertake. Instead of awaiting perfect conditions for a big-bang product launch or deferring market feedback until then, digital leaders learn, track, and react by putting something into the market quickly. Then they gauge interest, collect consumer reactions, and pursue constant improvements. Rigorous data monitoring helps teams quickly refine or jettison new initiatives, so that such companies fail often and succeed early.

Nordstrom's Innovation Lab, for example, launches customer-facing initiatives in a series of one-week experiments. To build an app that helps customers shop for sunglasses, the innovation team set up temporary camp in the retailer's flagship Seattle store. There, it mocked up paper prototypes and had shoppers tap through them as you would a live version. Customers shared feedback on the features they found most helpful and pointed out problematic or unintuitive elements in the prototype. Coders used that information to make real-time adjustments and then released a new live version of the app for customers to test-drive on the spot. After a week of continual tweaking and re-releasing, it was ready for the store's sales associates.

Internal collaboration

Teamwork and collaboration are important in any context, digital or otherwise. Wharton's Adam Grant says the single strongest predictor of a group's effectiveness is the amount of help colleagues extend to each other in their reciprocal working arrangements. But collaborative cultures take on even greater importance as companies look to boost their DQ, since many lack the established digital backbone needed to unify traditionally siloed parts of the organization, from customer service to fulfillment to supply-chain management to financial reporting.

Less than 30 percent of the 150 companies we've surveyed say they have a highly collaborative culture. The good news is that there's plenty of room for improvement. Some of it comes from technology: by moving into cloud-based virtualized environments, for example, companies can provide appropriate contexts where teams come together and participate in collaborative experimentation, tinkering, and innovation. In this way, they can learn and make decisions quickly by evaluating data from customer experiences.

4. Organization and talent

Beyond strategy, capabilities, and culture, leading digital companies use a wide set of coherent practices in talent, processes, and structure.

Talent connections

High-DQ companies sometimes feel the need for a digital leader on the executive team who combines business and marketing savvy with technological expertise. But while executive leadership is important, the most critical thing is midlevel talent: the "boots on the ground" who can make or break digital initiatives and are ultimately responsible for bringing products, services, and offers to market.

In today's environment, finding that talent isn't easy. To facilitate the search, companies should recognize that, in many instances, digital competency matters more than sector knowledge, at least in the early stages of a digital transformation. Only 35 percent of digital talent in the companies we analyzed had digital experience outside them.

High-DQ companies are also creative about training and nurturing talent. A number of years ago, for example, P&G launched an employee swap with Google to shore up P&G's search engine-optimization skills, while the Internet giant gained a deeper knowledge of marketing. Such opportunities build competency while expanding the methods and possibilities open to companies that take advantage of them.

Companies must also nurture digital talent with the right incentives and clear career paths. Here, some incumbents may have more advantages than they realize, since these young people seem eager to help iconic brands in fashion apparel, luxury cars, newsmagazines, and other categories to reach digital audiences. When that's done well, companies establish a virtuous cycle: the nurturing of good talent attracts more of it, allowing organizations to build quickly on the initial foundation to secure a stable of digital leaders. That critical mass, in turn, serves to draw in similar candidates in the future.

Real-time monitoring

Leading digital companies track and communicate digital key performance indicators frequently-in some cases in real time. They measure those KPIs against digital priorities and make sure senior management reviews and manages their performance.

When Starbucks rolled out a new point-of-sale system, for example, managers videotaped transactions and interviewed employees to fine-tune the checkout process. That feedback allowed the company to trim ten seconds off any mobile or card-based transaction, allowing employees to process sales more quickly and saving customers 900,000 hours of time in line each year.

Nontraditional structures

While no one answer works for all companies, high-DQ businesses carefully and deliberately build organizational structures that reflect where they are in the digital transformation. Some acknowledge that the core business cannot transform itself fast enough to capture new digital growth. For example, many successful traditional media organizations have carved out their digital businesses from more mature content operations.

Axel Springer used its digital business model as the dominant organizing principle in its recent reorganization-an approach that promotes the emergence of the distinct culture, performance-management system, and governance that growing digital businesses require. In the meantime, Axel Springer's strong legacy businesses can adapt and evolve to master the new digital landscape separately.

Finally, some incumbents-such as L'Oréal and TD Bank Group-have created centers of excellence and appointed chief digital officers. Others, like Burberry, operate governing councils charged with thinking big and ensuring that senior leadership buys into the digital plans. These structures often change over time as companies evolve. What might start out as a newly incubated competency, such as social media, eventually matures and becomes integrated into the broader business.

The journey to digital maturity requires a whole-hearted commitment from a company's leadership and a sustained investment in people, capabilities, technology, and cultural change. To get started, an organization must be honest about its DQ, clear about its long-term strategic opportunity, and open to iterating and refining solutions along the way.

To learn more about the Digital Quotient organizational assessment, please visit the McKinsey Digital site.

About the author(s)

Tanguy Catlin is a principal in McKinsey's Boston office; Jay Scanlan is a principal in the London office, where Paul Willmott is a director.

The authors wish to thank McKinsey's Juliette Valains for her contributions to this article.

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Following the leader is a dangerous game. It's better to focus on building an organization and culture that can realize the strategy that's right for you. With the pace of change in the world accelerating around us, it can be hard to remember that the digital revolution is still in its early days.

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This article leads to further links regarding the topic of internal and external communication, including an intranet guide (free download).

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The modern workplace is changing rapidly, through both technological advances and shifting work culture.

An emphasis on efficiency and productivity has brought with it an obsession with collaboration. Companies across the globe have scrambled to add new methods for collaboration and communication to their arsenals, producing what is now evident as a collaborative surplus.

A recent study by the Harvard Business Review highlights the degree to which companies have increased collaboration in recent years. They cite collaboration specifically between workers and their managers as having increased by 50% or more in the last two decades. Additionally, employees now spend nearly 80% of their time on collaborative activities. That includes tasks such as answering emails, making phone calls, and giving or receiving feedback. The concern with these statistics is that employees are being left with very little time to actually work. This is backed up again in the HBR study by research showing that 20-35% of value added contributions come from only 3-5% of employees. So while more collaboration is taking place, fewer people are turning that into productivity.

Of course, these are cautionary statistics. Just because employees spend too little time working, as opposed to activities that are supposed to support work, does not mean that collaboration (even this level of collaboration) is a bad thing. There is no evidence in the HBR study to make that kind of causative statement. In fact, another well respected study by the McKinsey Global Institute found that productivity levels rose by as much as 20-25% among workers who use online social tools to collaborate. If companies with results this positive are increasing productivity through collaboration, achieving directly opposing results to those of the HBR study, this forces one to ask whether those studies focused on different types of collaboration - one which aids productivity and one which detracts from it.

The answer to this question is that collaboration and communication are like most other practices with the potential to drive businesses forward - they need strategy to back them up. Purposeful collaboration builds productivity, while collaboration purely for its own sake and without pointing toward a greater goal is detrimental. At Interact, we've seen our clients use our internal communications tools in myriad creative ways - often meeting with great success. They have become a part of the group that used collaboration to boost productivity. It's an honor to learn from them in how they use those internal communications tools. Thanks to them, here are 10 great examples of internal communications tools in action.

1. Automating mundane tasks

In any given office, in any given department, there are bound to be many low level tasks that take up employee time but unfortunately cannot be avoided. They range from reserving rooms and equipment to booking absences and filling out HR forms. The Houston Zoo made use of "I want to" tabs on their intranet to combat this and help workers focus on their core tasks. According to Kara Masharani, a web developer at the Zoo, " You can click to do routine tasks, from reserving a cart for a visitor, to ordering new business cards, requesting uniforms, or logging a support ticket with the IT team. Completing routine tasks is much faster and easier with Interact, so we can spend more of our time doing what we love: caring for animals and visitors."

This may not seem like collaboration in the same way as exchanging feedback on a project, but in bringing together departments (such as IT and others) to make processes more efficient, Houston Zoo is a perfect example of purposeful collaboration.

2. Sharing internal knowledge around the water cooler

There is no question that sharing knowledge properly has demonstrable ROI for businesses. According to a recent study , Fortune 500 companies lose around $31.5 billion per year by failing to share knowledge. Like other aspects of collaboration, though, knowledge sharing has to be purposeful to be effective and not wasteful.

Using internal communications tools like social networks are a good way of accomplishing this as they allow employees to organically form communities around different purposes and share knowledge specific to those niches. Dex Media did this seamlessly on their intranet, and according to their VP of Corporate Communications, " Now, employees across the business have a voice and a place where they can share their ideas and opinions. They can post, comment and ask questions on The Buzz (Dex Media's intranet) without asking anyone's permission, which sets the agenda for greater openness and trust between managers and their teams... People are setting up team and project sites, commenting on posts and asking questions, and we are developing a more contemporary, entrepreneurial, forward-looking business culture as a result."

3. Connecting with the people

A frequent problem, especially in large matrixed organizations, is transparency. As organizations get larger, it becomes more difficult for the average worker to be in contact with senior management and executives. This keeps expectations and guidelines unclear and impedes success. For management, it keeps them from understanding the realities of how the organization works on the ground and adjusting strategy accordingly.

An internal communications tool that is working to bridge this gap is the use of forums through company intranets. According to telecommunications giant Cable & Wireless, "Interact Forums in particular have helped to foster collaboration between teams and managers. People are happy to comment and share their views, and senior managers frequently answer points raised there. If a post gets 20 votes, it's also forwarded to the senior management team for review, which means employees at all levels of the organization can contribute to our success."

It's easy to see how this qualifies as purposeful collaboration. Cable & Wireless bridge the gap between employees and those on a higher level in order to clarify and streamline. This is very different from the collaboration of seeking endless approvals or sending email after email. This truly helps employees understand which portion of their job has the highest impact and how they fit into overall company goals.

4. Internal communications tools across borders

The reality of how a lot of companies now operate has been affected significantly by globalization, with teams spread over multiple countries and time zones. Even domestically or within the same city, remote work is becoming more popular. It's increasingly normal for businesses to allow their employees significant flexibility in working from home. This presents an opportunity for purposeful collaboration in the form of keeping workers in different locations connected to one another. Some companies are thinking even bigger than that. What began as a need for connectivity has evolved into a space for knowledge sharing.

Maxxam Analytics, for example, makes extensive use of the Team Sites on their intranet as places where colleagues can meet members of their team who may be in different locations and work to further the goals of the team and the company. According to Maxxam's Communications Director, Corinna Bork, " If an employee in Montreal discovers a new, more efficient way of doing something, they can now talk about it on Catalyst (Maxxam's intranet). Colleagues in Mississauga or Burnaby can find out what's working best and consider changing their processes accordingly - it all feeds into improved efficiency and better services for customers."

5. Good news

Many of the internal communications tools we've seen in action thus far have the common element of keeping employees informed on a variety of topics. Keeping employees in the know allows them to perform their jobs well by keeping them abreast of current tools and regulations, but it also builds employee engagement. News of regulations and business topics can be peppered with fun goings on at the company or a look into the real world impact of their mission.

Returning to Houston Zoo, it's possible to see an inspiring example of this. Not all employees can regularly attend staff meetings, when important news is disclosed. They use their intranet to combat his, posting biweekly news updates there. This includes topics such as a new species arriving at the zoo or an animal birth. These are great ways to get the staff excited and keep them enthusiastic about their work, therefore at peak performance.

6. Ensuring transparent internal communications

We saw with Cable & Wireless how they make use of internal communications tools to build transparency at their organization - allowing employees to ask questions of senior management through their intranet. Theirs is an excellent example of bottom-up communication. Maxxam Analytics brings us another approach to the same concept with their CEO blogs. More organizations are making use of CEO blogs as a way of connecting upper level employees with the rest of the company. This is an example of collaboration on a high level, ensuring that all workers understand the CEO's vision for the organization. Corinna Bork of Maxxam said, " Our CEO uses Interact Blogging to share strategic information and to promote efficiency and client-service initiatives across the business."

This type of collaboration is purposeful as it serves to keep the organization working toward a set of goals they all understand, while using a standardized set of tools. Top-down communication may not work for every purpose, but it is very effective in communicating vision and establishing uniform guidelines.

7. A penny saved is a penny earned

Sometimes the purpose of collaboration can be something other than productivity in the short term. When executed properly, collaboration positively affects all areas of a business. A variety of internal communications tools support collaboration, regardless of where it's effective.

March of Dimes provides a great example of how they used their intranet to save costs for the organization. In fact, eliminating outdated content and moving to a more streamlined platform helped save the organization 60% on hardware costs. This is what can be seen as a "collaboration audit." March of Dimes reviewed their collaboration to ensure that it was purposeful in a variety of ways and that their internal communications tools were working for them. They demonstrate how purposeful communication is an ongoing process, rather than a "one and done" action.

8. Internal communications tools - create one version of the truth

With email and other ways that documents have traditionally been passed back and forth among members of an organization, there is the danger that multiple people will all be working off different versions of a document. Inconsistency in working materials means inconsistency in results, and the negative consequences can range from fairly miniscule to significant.

Imagine, for example, that two workers in a financial firm are working with two different sets of regulations and that because one is outdated, that worker breaks a law and costs the firm a large sum of money in fines. To combat this, companies often utilize a Document Management System or Content Management System.

In the case of TaxAudit.com, this comes as a part of their intranet. Director of Strategy, Matthew Estes, says, " Our success depends on staying current, so we needed a centralized way to store and update critical documents for our teams... When you send out information by email, there are always some people who don't get it - like new employees for example. Now, with Interact, everyone has the information they need to work effectively." Using their Document Management System, TaxAudit.com is able to ensure that all employees see the same thing when they look for a document - a single version of the truth.

9. Recognizing contributions

Work is stressful. This is a given. One of the key points of a drive for employee engagement is ensuring that this stress doesn't lower team morale as this happens all too easily. With morale lowered, workers are less productive and less likely to work to their full potential. Not only that, but low morale significantly raises the probability of employee turnover. So what is to be done to mitigate the risks of low morale, even during periods of stress?

One of the simplest solutions is employee recognition. When workers know that they are valued and that their hard work has paid off for themselves and others, this can contribute significantly to keeping their spirits raised and keeping them engaged. Luckily, there are internal communications tools that easily allow workers to recognize one another's effort. TaxAudit.com used the Rewards feature on their intranet to its fullest potential. As Estes explains, " We've found that Interact Rewards is a hugely successful way to increase employee engagement. We've seen a ton of spontaneous altruism, with employees giving colleagues 'WOW Points' for volunteering for projects or going beyond the call of duty. We also did our bit, investing around $40,000 dollars in prizes to make the initiative work. We now have more than 80% daily engagement on the intranet and counting."

10. Ensuring employee participation

How does an internal communicator or a manager ensure that their messages to employees are actually being read? After all, the effort that goes into carefully crafting a communication or establishing a new procedure is for naught if no one pays attention. This is essential to purposeful collaboration; all parties need to be on board with the same goals in order to work well together.

Using Mandatory Reads through one's intranet or Document Management System is a solution to this problem as it allows communicators to see who has read important messages and follow up with those who haven't. The recipients of those communications will see notifications of Mandatory Reads every time they log in to the intranet until they sign off on having read them. Kantar Health used Mandatory Reads to great success.

As Kimberly Nicholl, Internal Branding and Communications Specialist at Kantar explains, "The Mandatory Read is a really great feature for us, which no other solution offered. Previously we had to rely on emails, which were then printed out, signed and returned back to head office to ensure our employees had read our privacy policy. This was a lengthy and a highly time consuming process. The Mandatory Read is perfect as it means we can be rapidly notified when staff have read the documents, saving us time and effort and also saving on printing and environmental costs."

Achieving purposeful collaboration with the right tools

Purposeful collaboration takes many forms, which depend on the needs of the organization. They all can have a tremendous, positive impact. Though a lot of planning and assessment before the fact contribute to the success of collaboration efforts, having the right tools helps significantly. All the companies here understood where purposeful collaboration could contribute to their business and carefully assessed what tools they had available that would accomplish their goals. Following their lead will help to assure successful collaboration, keeping organizations among those that see a boost in productivity.

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10 great examples of internal communications tools | Interact Software

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The modern workplace is changing rapidly, through both technological advances and shifting work culture. An emphasis on efficiency and productivity has brought with it an obsession with collaboration. Companies across the globe have scrambled to add new methods for collaboration and communication to their arsenals, producing what is now evident as a collaborative surplus.

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This scientific article discusses the Benefits and barriers of internal communication tools in large companies.

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For some further reading, you find a little outlook of where the exploding demand of storage place leads to.

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Researchers have decoded the genomes of mammoths and a 700,000-year-old horse using DNA fragments extracted from fossils in the past few years. DNA clearly persists far longer than the bodies for which it carries the genetic codes.

Computer scientists and engineers have long dreamed of harnessing DNA's tininess and resilience for storing digital data. The idea is to encode all those 0s and 1s into the molecules A, C, G, and T that form the twisted, ladder-shaped DNA polymer-and this decade's advances in DNA synthesis and sequencing have bought the technology forward by leaps and bounds. Recent experiments indicate that we might one day be able to encode all the world's digital information into a few liters of DNA-and read it back after thousands of years.

Now interest from Microsoft and other tech companies is energizing the field. Microsoft Research announced last month that it would pay synthetic biology start-up Twist Bioscience an undisclosed amount to make 10 million DNA strands designed by Microsoft's computer scientists to store data. Top memory manufacturer Micron Technology is also funding DNA digital storage research to determine whether a nucleic acid-based system can expand the limits of electronic memory. This influx of money and interest could lead to research and progress that eventually drive down today's prohibitively high costs and make DNA data storage possible within the decade, researchers say.

Humans will generate more than 16 trillion gigabytes of digital data by 2017, and much of it will need to be archived: Think: legal, financial and medical records as well as multimedia files. Data is stored today on hard drives, optical disks or tapes in energy-hogging, warehouse-size data centers. These media last anywhere from a few years to three decades at most. Plus, says Microsoft Research computer architect Karin Strauss, "we're producing a lot more data than the storage industry is producing devices for, and projections show that this gap is expected to widen."

Enter DNA. It lasts for centuries if kept cold and dry. And it could in theory pack billions of gigabytes of data into the volume of a sugar crystal. Magnetic tapes, today's densest storage medium, hold 10 gigabytes in the same amount of space. "DNA is an unbelievably dense, durable, nonvolatile storage medium," says Olgica Milenkovic, an electrical and computer engineering professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

That is because each of its four building-block molecules-adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G) and thymine (T)-is only a cubic nanometer in volume. Using a coding system-at its simplest, say A represents bits '00,' C represents '01' and so on-scientists can take the strings of 0s and 1s that form digital data files and design aDNA strand that maps an image or video. (Of course, the actual coding techniques scientists use are much more complex.) Synthesizing the designer DNA strand is the data-writing part. Scientists can then read the data by sequencing the strands.

Harvard University geneticist George Church jump-started the field in 2012 by encoding 70 billion copies of a book- one million gigabits -in a cubic millimeter of DNA. A year later researchers at the European Bioinformatics Institute showed that they could read, without any errors, 739 kilobytes of data stored in DNA.

A few teams have demonstrated fully functioning systems in the past year. In August researchers at E.T.H. Zurich encapsulated synthetic DNA in glass, exposed it to conditions simulating 2,000 years and recovered its coded data accurately. In parallel, Milenkovic and her colleagues reported storing the Wikipedia pages of six U.S. universities in DNA and-by giving the sequences special "addresses"-selectively reading and editing parts of the written text. Such random access to data is critical to avoid having to "sequence a whole book to read just one paragraph," she says.

In April Microsoft's Strauss and computer scientists Georg Seelig and Luis Ceze at the University of Washington reported being able to write three image files, each a few tens of kilobytes, in 40,000 strands of DNA using their own encoding scheme-and then reading them individually with no errors. They presented this work in April at an Association for Computing Machinery conference. With the 10 million strands Microsoft is buying from Twist Bioscience, the team plans to prove that DNA data storage can work on a much larger scale. "Our goal is to demonstrate an end-to-end system where we encode files to DNA, have the molecules synthesized, store them for a long time and then recover them by taking DNA out and sequencing it," Strauss says. "Start with bits and go back to bits."

Memory maker Micron is exploring DNA as a post-silicon technology. The company is funding work by Harvard's Church and researchers at Boise State University to explore an error-free DNA storage system. "The rising cost of data storage will drive alternate solutions, and DNA storage is one of the more promising solutions," says Gurtej Sandhu, director of Advanced Technology Development at Micron.

These researchers are still looking into cutting the error rates in encoding and decoding data. But the major pieces of the technology are in place. So what is keeping us from shoe box-size data vaults containing DNA-loaded glass capsules? Cost. "The writing process is about a million times too expensive," Seelig says.

Here's why: Making DNA involves stringing together its nanometers-size molecules one by one with high precision-not an easy task. And although the cost of sequencing has plummeted due to the booming demand for medical applications such as disease screening and diagnostics,DNA synthesis has not had a similar market driver. Milenkovic paid about $150 to get a string of 1,000 nucleotides synthesized. Sequencing a million nucleotides costs about a cent.

Interest in data storage from Microsoft and Micron might be just the kind of impulse needed to start lowering costs, Seelig says. Clever engineering and new technologies such as microfluidics and nanopore DNA sequencing, which help miniaturize and speed things up, will also be key. Right now it takes several hours to sequence a few hundred nucleotide pairs-days to synthesize them-using multiple instruments and manual preparation of DNA. "You'd want all of this in a pretty small box, otherwise you'd lose the advantage of DNA's storage density," Seelig explains.

If it all works out, Microsoft's Strauss imagines companies offering archival DNA storage services within the next decade. "You could open your browser and upload files to their site or get your bytes back, like cloud storage," she says. Or, with as yet unrealized breakthroughs in DNA synthesis and sequencing, "you could buy a DNA drive instead of a disk drive."

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Tech Turns to Biology as Data Storage Needs Explode

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Researchers have decoded the genomes of mammoths and a 700,000-year-old horse using DNA fragments extracted from fossils in the past few years. DNA clearly persists far longer than the bodies for which it carries the genetic codes. Computer scientists and engineers have long dreamed of harnessing DNA's tininess and resilience for storing digital data.

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On this homepage, you find information about digital content definitions and latest developments. It also gives definitions, explanations and lists of articles about different topics concerning digital content.

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Digital Content, Content Marketing, Content Management, Digital Publishing -- Strategies, Tips, Trends

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The site for digital media, marketing, and publishing professionals seeking information on digital content creation, management, and monetization.

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After having learned about CMS, you might want to know what the job as a content manager consists of. In that case, you might want to read this article (in german).

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Manche Berufsbezeichnung ändern sich schneller als man Visitenkarten nachdrucken kann. Junior Marketing Manager, Social Media Manager, Content Manager, wer soll sich da noch auskennen? In diesem Artikel möchte ich Ihnen erzählen, was ein Content Manager (Ich) so den ganzen Tag tut.

Wie alles begann

Vor langer Zeit war es einfach: Wenn Unternehmen ihr Produkt oder Neuigkeiten in die Öffentlichkeit tragen wollten, wandten sie sich an die Werbung. Diese erschien in Zeitungen, Magazinen, Radios und TV. Dann kam das Internet, ein Medium das von überall zugänglich war; noch dazu kostenlos. Die Werbung versuchte auch dort ihre Werbebotschaften mit Banner und Pop-Ups zu platzieren; großteils jedoch erfolglos. (Wer will schon Werbung?).

Mit der Zeit realisierten Unternehmen, dass sie im Internet selbst ihr Publikum erreichen konnten (Social Media, Blogs, Videos etc.). Dazu brauchten Sie allerdings Leute, die diese Kanäle bespielen und mit Inhalten versorgen konnten. Der Beruf des Content Managers war geboren.

Der Alltag eines Content Managers

Natürlich wird Ihnen jeder Content Manager eine andere Geschichte erzählen. Ich hoffe jedoch, dass Sie eine ungefähre Idee bekommen was Sie erwartet, sollten Sie beschließen einen Job als "Content Marketer" anzunehmen.

Webseiten optimieren

Bevor wir mit unseren Kunden ein Content Marketing Projekt starten, muss der bestehende Content evaluiert und optimiert werden. Dazu erstelle ich ein Content Audit. Nach dem Schulnotensystem bewerte ich den Inhalt der bestehenden Seiten aufgrund von Textlänge, Struktur, Google Ranking und SEO-Faktoren.

Wie das funktioniert können Sie hier nachlesen: Wie ich unsere Web Performance in 140h fast verdoppelt habe [Anleitung]

Blogposts optimieren

Oft sind Blogbeiträge zu optimieren, die einfach schlecht formatiert oder nicht suchmaschinenfreundlich geschrieben sind. Es gibt viele gute Texter im Internet, aber wenige die auch SEO-Kenntnisse besitzen.

Lesen Sie dazu meinen letzten Beitrag: Warum Journalisten als Content Marketer scheitern

Fotos aus Datenbanken suchen

Für nahezu jeden Content verwenden wir Fotos; die meisten davon aus Fotodatenbanken. Manchmal kommt es mir vor, als hätte ich jedes einzelne Stockfoto bereits gesehen. (Warum müssen die Leute immer in die Kamera schauen und warum haben alle klaviertastenweiße Zähne?) Ja, um halbwegs brauchbare Fotos zu finden, muss man sie entweder selbst machen oder verdammt lange suchen.

Leseempfehlung: Freie Bilder: 5 Quellen für Ihren Blog

Analytics

Sowohl unsere Kunden, als auch mein Chef möchten wissen, wie gut wir voran kommen. Die aktuellsten Zahlen (Traffic, Leads, Conversion Rates etc.) finde ich in den folgenden Tools:

Conversion Rates optimieren

Dieser Punkt unterscheidet meinen Job vermutlich von vielen anderen Content Managern. Denn unser Ziel ist es nicht nur ein Publikum aufzubauen und es mit tollen Inhalten zu bespielen. Wir möchten unser Publikum auf der Customer Journey bis zum Abschluss (Kaufentscheidung) begleiten.

Dazu bieten wir hilfreiche Downloads an, wie zum Beispiel Whitepapers. Es wäre schön, wenn alle Besucher diese herunterladen würden. In der Realität ist es aber ein ständiges Tüfteln an den Call to Actions und Landing Pages.

Keywordrankings optimieren

Unsere Content Strategie basiert darauf, dass wir keine Werbung verwenden, sondern wie anfangs erwähnt mit hilfreichen Content im Internet gefunden werden. Dazu müssen laufend die Top Keywords (Suchbegriffe mit denen Sie gefunden werden wollen) beobachtet werden.

Ist ein Keyword im Google Ranking auf Platz 10 oder schlechter, muss ich mir etwas überlegen. Liegt es an dem Content? Haben wir zu wenige Verlinkungen auf diesen Beitrag? Oder wurde der Beitrag nicht richtig für Suchmaschinen optimiert?

Mit Keywordrankings könnte man sich stundenlang beschäftigen.

Redaktionssitzungen organisieren

Da ich weder Arzt bin noch Installateur, werden die Blogbeiträge unserer Kunden von Journalisten und Bloggern geschrieben, die sich in der jeweiligen Branche auskennen. Meine Aufgabe als Content Manager ist es Redaktionssitzungen zu organisieren, wo die Themen festgelegt werden.

Für die Terminkoordination und Freigabe verwenden wir Trello. Ein Tool, das ich sehr empfehlen kann!

Newsletter erstellen

Immer gegen Ende des Monats gehen alle Newsletter raus. Wir verwenden dazu ein fertiges Template, wo wir nur noch die neuesten Beiträge einfügen müssen. Meistens kommt noch ein netter einleitender Text hinzu, der vom Chef geschrieben oder freigegeben wird.

Wie man einen nützlichen Newsletter gestaltet, erfahren Sie hier: Bitte, ich möchte einen Newsletter

Blogposts schreiben

Ein bis zwei Mal pro Woche schreiben wir auf unserem Content Marketing Blog. (Also den, den Sie gerade lesen.) Für einen Blogpost brauche ich (ungestört) einen Tag. Manchmal auch länger. Die Themen legen wir am Anfang der Woche fest. Da frühstückt unser Team gemeinsam und wir besprechen was ansteht.

Leseempfehlung: Was ich beim Schreiben von 200 Blogartikeln gelernt habe

Emails, CTAs und Landing Pages erstellen

Seit wir mit HubSpot arbeiten, ist das Erstellen von Emails, Call to Actions und Landing Pages ein Kinderspiel. Trotzdem gibt es eine Menge, was man dabei beachten sollte. Die wichtigsten Tipps finden Sie hier:

Social Media Kanäle betreuen

Social Media ist für uns eine tolle Möglichkeit unseren Content zu verbreiten. Als Content Manager müssen Sie nicht auf jeder Social Media Plattform aktiv sein. Sie sollten jedoch zumindest wissen, wie man auf diversen Kanäle postet, Werbeanzeigen erstellt und die wichtigsten Kennzahlen misst.

Ständiges Lernen

Im Content Marketing ändert sich ständig alles. Damit wir Up-To-Date bleiben, lesen wir regelmäßig die besten Content Marketing Blogs und besuchen Webinare. Ein Mal im Jahr müssen wir unser HubSpot Certificate erneuern.

Hier können Sie selbst den Test machen: HubSpot Inbound Certification

Fazit: Was zur Hölle ist ein Content Manager?

Wie Sie sehen, ist mein Alltag recht bunt. Wenn wir einen Blick auf die eben erwähnten Tätigkeiten machen, ist ein Content Manager jemand der viel schreibt, optimiert, organisiert und ständig lernt. Es ist ein junger Beruf, der aus dem einfachen Grund entstanden ist, dass Unternehmen heute selbst zu Medien geworden sind.

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Manche Berufsbezeichnung ändern sich schneller als man Visitenkarten nachdrucken kann. Junior Marketing Manager, Social Media Manager, Content Manager, wer soll sich da noch auskennen? In diesem Artikel möchte ich Ihnen erzählen, was ein Content Manager (Ich) so den ganzen Tag tut.

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Example of successful Use of digital Media

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Example of successful Use of digital Media

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This is the story of a company and its successful use of digital media.

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Whether you're a startup or a Fortune 500 company, every business needs to communicate effectively with their clients, employees and vendors. Since I started my company, MOD Restoration, I spend hours each month researching the best communication tools out there to enhance our customer experience and internal processes. I'm happy to share them with you so you can focus your time on the more fun stuff - like growing your business.
Phone System
When MOD started in 2009, it was comprised of two 24 year-olds and an IKEA desk. On day 1, I decided that we needed to sound like an established conglomerate. The solution? A professional phone system with a full-blown auto attendant. I couldn't afford a $6000 PBX System, but I did discover Virtual PBX systems, which have the same sophisticated features as a regular PBX system at a fraction of the price. We went with Nextiva and still use them today, more than three years and 12 employees later.
Email Hosting Provider
People are funny. We prefer to go back and forth by email for hours, when we can just pick up the phone instead and get an answer in 3 seconds. I'm guilty of that too, and have no idea why! Point is, email is extremely important. MOD started out using GoDaddy's email service but switched to Google Apps when we needed a more reliable and sophisticated email provider. Apps is really great for any size company, from a one-man show to a company with 500+ employees. If you still have an AOL or email account, it's time you switch to an @YourCompanyName email address!
Website Platform
I've had my fair share of bad website experiences, and threw away lots of money (specifically to some web developer from Nagpur, India!). I finally realized that you really do get what you pay for, so I hired a legitimate English-speaking web development firm to build my website, MOD Restoration (built on Drupal).

We're in middle of rebuilding our blog in WordPress since it comes with all the social media bells and whistles. Aside for it being lots of fun, blogging is really important for our businesses. It engages the client, infuses personality into your brand, and by default, gives you brownie points with Google. At the end of the day, we all want to rank highest on Google's organic search results, and blogging will definitely help by creating relevant content. For example, if you were searching for a company to reupholster your Herman Miller Classic Sofa, Model 0693, you'd likely type in Google "Herman Miller Sofa 0693 Reupholster". And who comes up first on the organic search results (below the yellow paid ads)?
File Sharing
Before the days of Dropbox, I'd literally have to email every file that I wanted to share - even if the person was sitting 2 feet away from me! And if the files were too large, I'd have to put it on a flash drive or figure out how to access our FTP. It was a royal pain. Dropbox (and now Google Drive, for half the price!) allows you to share actual folders and files that reside on your computer. When you add or update a file, it updates on the shared person's computer instantly! Amazing.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
With hundreds of emails coming and going on a regular basis, we couldn't keep track of what we told to which client, whom we sent a follow up email to, or whom we needed to reach out to. Once we started hiring staff, it got even worse. With multiple cooks in the kitchen, we were always afraid of double dipping responses to the same client. A CRM system finally solved that problem. We can interact with existing clients and prospects, keep track of sales, marketing and customer service support. We use ZoHo, which is a simpler version of Salesforce, and more affordable for growing companies.
Project Management System (PMS)
When we started out, everything I needed to do was scribbled on a sticky note. When my screen was covered from top to bottom with yellow stickies, I'd email myself reminders of what needed to get done. It reached a point when I sent 1 email to myself for every sticky, since I wasn't sure which I'd end up reading, the sticky or the email. It was time for a PMS. I wanted something dummy-proof and cost effective. I was thrilled when I found Redbooth (formerly known as Teambox), a PMS that integrates with Dropbox. Now my entire team uses Worketc - a more comprehensive project management system - and we can't imagine life without it. Don't get me wrong, we still do use yellow sticky notes for special occasions.
Email Marketing
You know those mass emails that you get on a daily basis and instantly send to your junk or spam folder? Those emails are sent using an email marketing program, which is actually the only legitimate way to send mass emails to people who (hopefully) signed up to your newsletter or want to hear from you. There are so many email marketing companies out there ( SmallBizTrends lists a whole bunch), but I personally love MailChimp. It's free for under 12,000 emails a month, it's super easy to use, and their monkey is kinda cute.

These communication tools have helped increase my company's productivity, efficiency and sales, and I'm hopeful that they will do the same for you. Of course, if you are currently using other tools that you love, please do share them with me!

For all the latest trends on mid-century furniture & reupholstery, follow me @modrestoration or on facebook.com/meetmod

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Must-Have Communication Tools For Every Business

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Whether you're a startup or a Fortune 500 company, every business needs to communicate effectively with their clients, employees and vendors. Since I started my company, MOD Restoration, I spend hours each month researching the best communication tools out there to enhance our customer experience and internal processes. I'm happy [...]

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Here you find the link to a short summary of the book “Hacking the human” – a book about social engineering and informational risk.

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Hacking the Human | Social Engineering Techniques and Security Countermeasures

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Information security is about people, yet in most organizations protection remains focused on technical countermeasures. The human element is crucial in the

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Deloitte- a consulting community of different companies - publishes its security report where the topics cyber security and digitalisation are being discussed.

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Für den Deloitte Cyber Security Report 2018 wurden deshalb erneut Entscheider aus Wirtschaft und Politik zum Thema befragt. Wie hat sich das Bewusstsein für Digitalisierung, Cyber-Bedrohungen und Schutzmaßnahmen entwickelt? In welchen Bereichen wird noch Nachholbedarf gesehen? Erfahren Sie im Folgenden mehr zu den Highlights aus dem Bericht.

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Cyber Security Report 2018 | Deloitte Deutschland

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Für den Deloitte Cyber Security Report 2018 wurden deshalb erneut Entscheider aus Wirtschaft und Politik zum Thema befragt. Wie hat sich das Bewusstsein für Digitalisierung, Cyber-Bedrohungen und Schutzmaßnahmen entwickelt? In welchen Bereichen wird noch Nachholbedarf gesehen? Erfahren Sie im Folgenden mehr zu den Highlights aus dem Bericht.

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Another topic discussed by Deloitte are strategies to maintain security standards on an international base.

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Cyber security is a government task. This is something countries in Europe agree about. But how can the state ensure cyber security in the interplay between business, science, and society? What are the threats to citizens and businesses in cyberspace? There are many different answers and approaches to these questions within Europe.

This first part of the report is supplemented by a second part in which we have developed possible scenarios of cyber security in Europe in 2030. With these two publications we hope to make a contribution to the much-needed debate between the state, the economy, and society, but also between individual state protagonists. Ideally our reports will help us all to find the right answers to the challenge of cyber security - or at least to ask the right questions.

When you are interested in the English Version of the report, please click here:

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European Cyber Defense Report 2018 | Deloitte Deutschland

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Cyber security is a government task. This is something countries in Europe agree about. But how can the state ensure cyber security in the interplay between business, science, and society? What are the threats to citizens and businesses in cyberspace? There are many different answers and approaches to these questions within Europe.

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The upcoming security trends and challenges for 2019 can be found in a study made by welivesecurity.com.

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To know more about VPNs and firewalls, this page has useful information for you.

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This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. The present presentation reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.

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The department of health and care offers a list of common digital tools and explain how they might help you do your job.

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1. What a digital tool is

2. What digital tools are suitable for different tasks

3. How to use digital tools in your everyday work

What are digital tools?
Digital tools are programs, we bs ites or online resources that can make tasks easier to complete. A lot of these can be accessed in web browsers without needing to be downloaded, and you can access them both at home and in work.

It is important to use online tools safely - see the Security module for more info.
Digital tools and DH tools
Information Works pace and DH eXchange are the main departmental tools for records management. You can access knowledge and information management training on the intranet . The tools listed below are a complement to these and should help you to make quicker, better informed decisions.

Most of the tools below have free tutorials on their website, with very clear instructions. If you still get stuck, try Youtube, or ask your digital champion.
Collaborating on projects and documents Organising meetings, people, and calendars

: for organising web conferences and holding meetings online, which is especially useful when meeting with external colleagues and where there's a need to save travel time, or for staff who work remotely. You can also use google hangouts for this, or
Keep on top of all your work and 'to do' list, and present ideas Interact with others Video
This video by Google demonstrates some of the ways that you can use their tools to be more efficient in the workplace.
Further information
Naturally we all need to be sensible about how we use third party tools. If you have any concerns, the Security tab has more information, as does the Department of Health policy on use of third party tools.

The digital team is always on the lookout for new tools to make us more productive at work. Keep your ears and eyes open- we'll be telling your champions about them as we find them too!

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TOOLS: Knowledge of common digital tools and how they can help you do your job

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What a digital tool is What digital tools are suitable for different tasks How to use digital tools in your everyday work What are digital tools? Digital tools are programs, we bs ites or online resources that can make tasks easier to complete.