MT Driven Policies and Procedures FAQ

April 12, 2004 | 2 Comments

I get lots of questions about the hospital’s Movable Type driven intranet, especially the policies and procedures bit. Too many to keep answering them in individual e-mails. So I’m going to answer them here. I hope this is helpful.

Question #1

I think you mentioned that most of your policies and procedures are stored in word documents.  Will MT search the content of these documents?  Will it search the content of pdf documents?  If not, how is searching done?  Completely upon keywords?

The Answer: Movable Type does not search the full text of the Word documents. This is a good thing in my mind. Our old search feature did this and it resulted in too many results for most searches. This was one of the major reasons for reworking the P & P section in the first place.

What it does is search through the abstract we create for each policies and the keywords we attach to them. This gives our administrators much more flexibility, as before they had to add keywords directly to the Word document.

Question #2

Do you use sub categories and if so, how?

The Answer: At this point in time we don’t use sub categories. We did talk about this, but there are only a few instances where we would need them, so we decided against it for now.

We may choose to use them in the future and I’ve been looking into the MTSubCategories plug-in to do so.

Question #3

Do you have an “index” of all the policies and procedures?

The Answer: We have several. As of right now we’ve got our main index page to show the most recently updated policies and the top ten most used policies. From there we’ve got index pages for each category of policy.

In the future we may have an A-Z index of all the policies and we’ve talked about the possibility for indexes based on user group. For example a subset of nurses could have their own page with policies that relate only to them. With MT these kinds of indexes are very easy to set up.

Question #4

What do you use the keywords for? Are they only for the search?

The Answer: It’s not only for searching. We use the keywords, in conjunction with the MTRelatedEntries ByKeyword plug-in to display related entries on a policies abstract page.

This has been very helpful in getting people to the right policy. At times it’s hard for our users to remember the name of a particular policy and this helps them get back on track if they get lost.

Question #5

How does a policy actually open?  Does it automatically open in Word or have you set it to open in the browser?

The Answer: It opens in Word.

Question #6

Why did you choose Movable Type? Why not use a Wiki?

The Answer: Movable Type was a natural fit for what we needed to do here and it’s something that I’ve got a whole lot of background with.

It was also low cost and low risk. We’re a non-profit hospital and whenever we can save money we look at that in a good way. MT was something that we knew and something that many of our stakeholders were familiar with as we’ve used it before to great success.

I’m not sure a Wiki would have been right for this project. They seem to offer a bit too much control to the user. We wanted something that would be very easy to roll out to our administrators and be easy to use on the front end as well. MT offers pretty much all the flexibility we needed.

I also don’t know jack about Wikis, so…they might have been just fine. I imagine you could do something similar with WordPress or many other “blogging” tools.

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