February 1, 2002
Recently, Forrester Research examined a dozen commercial Web content management servers (CMS) and came to an interesting conclusion: The current CMS offerings are quite immature. This was not entirely unexpected, as some in the Web CMS area have been suspecting it for quite a while. What makes it interesting--and alarming, to some extent--is the rise in the importance of Web content and the critical nature of its management for the success of an e-business.
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:
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:
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