Is Your Content Manageable?

 

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Forrester's report goes on to state that most of the servers do not address all the needs of the enterprises deploying them. Different vendors of CMS have different visions of how this software category will evolve. This creates not only compatibility issues but also maintenance and customization issues. Integrating CMSs with other software (like application servers, etc.) also gives rise to nasty mismatches.

And, as if this is not enough, deploying a basic content management system is not cheap and may easily cost more than $500,000. But the inherent advantage of CMS--the low ongoing update costs--does alleviate this a bit.

Why Manage Content?
Content has forever been a very important differentiator for an e-business initiative, whether it is an intranet or an extranet, a B2C site or a B2B site. The quality and relevance of the content offered by the site always determines the value delivered to its users. It has been a well-known fact for some time, and numerous case studies have also verified it.

Almost all sites have been aware of this fact and have spent a significant amount of time and effort to develop content for their targeted user base. This hyper-growth of content has reached such a level that managing the content, keeping it relevant and up to date has attained an importance that is equal to that of the content itself. Web content management has evolved as a major e-business activity.

Now the real question dogging the Web content management community: Are there management systems that can alleviate their problems?

What Is CMS?
A Web content management system plays a critical role in the success of an e-business because it allows for storage, retrieval, editing, maintaining, controlling and outputting the Web content. Such content could be articles, pictures, links, products, e-mail archives, discussion boards, flash presentations, streaming video/audio etc.--anything that could be put on the Internet and accessed through a Web browser.

The major activities covered under a CMS include:

• Authoring--creating the Web content.
• Metadata tagging--describing the content.
• Editing--changing and updating the content.
• Managing--user and content management.

CMS solutions integrate database, workflow and editorial tools and, because of them, the ongoing content update costs stay low, the content always remains in usable form and the tracking and workflow mechanism becomes an effective development aid.

How Should You Go About Evaluating CMS?
While evaluating CMS, one should analyze several important function categories that include content integration and versioning, workflow, data repository, user management, user interface, applications and deployment. Some of the important things to look for within these categories are:

• Asset management--can multiple users edit content and make changes?
• Does the CMS create an audit trail?
• Is the automatic translation of format X to HTML supported?
• What is the level of ease of content templating, storage, retrieval, staging and version control?
• Does the CMS provide for integration and messaging with other channels of communications?
• How is the data repository managed? Does it integrate well with existing databases, file systems and data?
• How easy is the user management? Does it provide for devolution of user management--can you have users who have users who have users?
• How does it authenticate? What is the security level?
• What type of user interface, editor and authoring tool is provided?
• How effective are tools for planning, mapping modeling and reporting?
• Does it support different business rules and secure transactions?
• How well does it integrate with marketing tools?
• Does it provide for localization, personalization, etc.?
• Does it support scheduling of content publishing, archiving, etc.?

These are only some of the questions that one needs to ask in order to select a CMS. Considering the growing importance and criticality of the CMS, this is an easy task. But there are a host of other questions that also need to be asked, which would go in a much deeper level. And that would be the subject of another column...

Strategic and results-oriented, Sunil has more than 15 years of experience in management and IT consulting. An entrepreneurial consultant, he had founded a business-to-business eCommerce company. Sunil has provided consulting services to large and small firms in the UK, Far East, India, Europe and the United States. His area of expertise includes strategic management, strategic marketing and business planning for high-tech firms. An avid mountain climber and runner, Sunil has climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro and various peaks in the Himalayas and finished the Detroit Marathon. He holds an MBA degree from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and a BS in Electronics and an MS in Mathematics from the Birla Institute of Technology and Sciences, Pilani, India. He can be reached at (703)-395-9812 and by writing to [email protected].