Content Inventory Tools & Software

[Doug Minor]

We're about to undertake a content inventory. I'm looking for tools and software that would be helpful in speeding up the inventory process by crawling our website (specifically our CMS), showing navigation hierarchy, pulling page name, last modification date, meta data, etc.

Has anyone found a good tool/software for doing this work? Something that will export crawled information to .csv or Excel format? Ideally, I'd be looking for something I can install locally on my computer and not on the Web server. The software can run on a Mac or PC platform, with preference for Mac. Can be free or paid software. Would prefer that a trial download is available to evaluate the tool/software.

I've found various ways of manually tracking a content inventory in an Excel spreadsheet (like shown below), but would like to expedite the process of listing the pages if possible.

Content Inventory Columns

• Page ID (a new ID for each section to help see directory structure)
• Page title
• Page URL
• File format (e.g.. HTML, PDF, RTF etc)
• Type of presentation or template used
• Audience (e.g., internal, external, prospective students, etc.)
• Access restrictions (e.g. staff only, students and staff, public)
• Keyword metadata and description for the page
• Position or group responsible for maintaining the page
• Status of document (e.g.. Review, Redundant, Old, Okay)
• Notes – any additional information about the page that needs recording

Appreciate any suggestions.

Thanks,

Doug Minor

Director of Digital Communications

Davidson College

[Michael Fienen]

While it's not going to be a perfect fit, you might still be able to glean some good data out of it. Xenu Link Sleuth. Once it scans, it'll spit out a pretty detail rich report including sitemap, page count, broken links, data makeup, etc.