Whatever the inventory contains, I need to find by area and owner, pretty basic, I know – but essential.

It needs to alert me when deadlines or expiration dates approach.

It needs a place to put deadlines or expiry dates.

If it could store content iterations, that would be great.

The audit tool needs to have a million fields (copy, date, meta, writer, owner, images, expiration, related to, goal, customer, etc) and they need to be customizable – I want to build my own dashboard.

Don’t know if any of this helps, I’d be glad to help in any way.

-pb

A tool that can audit content on a complex site with multiple content sources and formats would be incredible useful. I’ve found that a lot of the tools that work for a standalone website for an organization don’t accommodate some of the issues posed by media sites with constantly-changing content, UGC-heavy sites, sites that are part of an ecosystem that includes mobile, and so on.

Patrick’s mention of a customizable dashboard sounds ideal, and here are some possible attributes that could be useful:

- a tool that uses pieces of content as its starting point (rather than pages)
- content source
- author/producer, owner, other permissions
- licensing information if applicable
- publication channels (has this piece of content been pushed to the web, and app, social)
- format (text, video, etc.)
- any markup or metadata
- publication and expiration dates

Hope that helps!

A tool that does the following would be incredibly helpful:

Something that works much like an offline browswer (SurfOffline for example). Point it to a site and have it crawl the site. After crawling, it generates a report/list of the following:

-URL of each assets
-# of assets
-# of each Type of assets (pdf, html, asp, ppt, doc, etc)
-meta data for each asset
-date of last update
-# of times asset has been viewed
-date of last viewing
-physical rendering of page (if working like an offline browser, the report would allow one to click on a link in the inventory and the link would render the page as it was captured – jpg would be fine)
-off site links noted (meaning if an onsite asset is referring to an offsite asset – that is noted somehow)
-report could be saved as csv or comma delimited so that it could be imported into excel or a db for manipulation
-tool could run on mac or pc as local client.
-tool would allow it to be run a second time (say weeks or months later) and be able to identify changes that may have occurred from the time the inventory was originally captured.
-tool would allow us to take the inventory and note new content owners/smes
-would allow fields for qualitative auditing. who did we ask to validate the content, what date, what was their decision on the content. would be able to send requests for qualitative auditing right from tool to a content owner (think Microsoft word / Send to mail recipient / attachement

Suz’s list matches up pretty well with my dream tool.

I will say that, in environments where I’m also the one who’s assessing and updating/rewriting the content, doing the content audit primes the pump: I get the experience of going through the site like a user, which helps me think about how I want to reorganize or revamp the content.

Dan, there are some useful suggestions being made over in the linkedin content strategy group discussions as well on this topic: http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Content-Audits-Can-you-do-1879338.S.60047178

Some of you may have seen this, but over the years in the industry, I developed this tool which I feel provides me with the information I need for most types of projects and can easily evolve into a content matrix or future state production matrix: http://www.kevinpnichols.com/enterprise_content_strategy/

You will see content inventory/audit matrix there.

Kevin

Love this subject. I blog about what exactly we mean by “content audit” here, as I find clients often have a different idea of that work and goals behind any upfront current site analysis work: http://happyhelm.wordpress.com/2011/07/09/the-dang-“content-audit”-and-other-terms-we-crazy-content-kids-use-recklessly/

Challenges I have faced when content auditing:
- Client not understanding scope of what the content audit will do and not do
- Spreadsheets becoming so large and detail oriented, they misfunction
- Defining the level of detail one is tracking in a content audit up front and sticking to that
- Being able to log quickly; the URLS, page names, etc.

Can CMSs nowadays slurp a site inventory? This seems like something that would be a big sell for a CMS, no?

Thanks for the conversation around this topic!

I’d love a tool that automatically imports the content titles, SEO titles and the URL into a spreadsheet. The site I’m auditing has 200 posts, but I know sites with 800 posts or more that cannot audit one by one.

Challenges with content auditing? Not sure, this is my first one.