MetaVis Technologies: Information Architecture

MetaVis Technologies is launching MetaVis Architect, a graphical tool for designing infrastructure in SharePoint, today at SPTechCon here in Boston. The company was founded in June 2008 by Steven Progrebivsky, the CEO, and Mark Klinchin, the CTO, who have strong backgrounds in migrating data from ECM systems. "One of the needs we saw was in migrating well-defined metata, where content was easily findable, into SharePoint. SharePoint is not as flexible in providing a facility for visually designing an information architecture," Progrebivsky said. MetaVis not only deals with migrations but also with organizing an information architecture and creating a taxonomy from the content that already exists in a SharePoint deployment, he said. Metadata, he pointed out, is a way to control not only the growth of data but to find the data you really need. "The key is to create efficient taxonomies with sufficient metadata, not too much metadata that people don't bother with," he said.
MetaVis is coming to market today with two products: MetaVis Architect and MetaVis Classifier. Architect is the visual designer for SharePoint taxonomy, while Classifier is used for organizing the content in SharePoint. Classifier offers intelligent tagging, the ability to tag and move at the szame time, and offer bulk import plug-in functionality. "A lot of people have developed environments that have grown like mushrooms. Administrators need to move these things into SharePoint into a new architecture that makes sense of it all. A bulk tagger is key to enable data to comply quickly with the new architecture," Pogrebivsky said. A Classifier Web part is due out in July.
-- David