Content Management

What is Content Management?

Content Management can be defined as the processes and workflows associated with creating, organizing, and structuring information so that it can be stored, published, and re-purposed to multiple formats or locations.

This brings us to the next question. How does this affect me? Due to the digital revolution, organizations large and small have collected an immense amount of digital information of many types. Maintaining a non-structured repository for this information involves many hours of non-efficient labor and drives the increase of operating expenses.

From this evolved a market for systems to manage both information and data. Organizations needed a way for its members to create new information and be able to organize this information in a logical manner. They needed the ability to easily locate and access old data and information. Most of all they wanted a central location or repository for this to occur.

Today, content management systems have filled the need for these organizations. Modern content management systems have given the organization a central repository to create, store, edit, and publish information while organizing the items in a logical format. Next we will discuss the key attributes of a content management system.

Content Creation - A content management system should allow its users to easily create or add new information to the system. This should be done in a fashion that equals or reduces the amount of time needed in relation to the previous process. It should also place or reference the newly created in a central repository so it can easily be located and accessed at a later time.

Content Editing - A content management system should allow its users to easily locate a document for editing. The application should have the functionality to track different versions and the accompanying changes. This will give the organization the ability to audit changes and updates to existing information while allowing them to revert back to previous versions if needed.

Content Publishing - A content management system should allow an organization a mechanism to publish content in an organized manner. The system needs to allow for a workflow or approval sequence in the publishing process so that no item is made “public” without being reviewed.

Content Archiving - A content management system should allow an organization to define a logical structure in which to store or catalog new and existing items. The system should be flexible enough so that the defined structure meets the business logic of the organization.

Currently, there are many different systems on the market that range greatly in functionality and price. However, when selecting a content management application one must keep in mind the capabilities of the software and ensure those capabilities meet its business objectives. It is also important to remember that each key attribute in a CMS that is matched with a business process should add value or increase efficiency of the task.

Article taken from CMS Insights written by Brock Brown.