Content Management is a term that is not new to IT and marketing organizations. However, this terminology can take on several different meanings. The context discussed in this paper provides ordinary businesses with the ability to build meaningful Web content to author, structure, approve, archive, and publish content to maintain a fresh and pleasing Web presence. This may even prove to be one of the largest projects that an IT department may be facing. If you are looking to accomplish the following tasks then keep reading:
- Create Content
- Manage Content
- Publish
- Present
Within the last several years many vendors and products have touted Content Management standalone software tools to accomplish these tasks. However, the tools typically have a prohibitive pricing structure and no doubt require strict software customization and business processes that must be followed before deployment.
At the present time there is no Content Management software that can be utilized out of the box to: author, structure, approve, archive, and publish Web content.:
Whether you’re looking for an out-of-the-box Content Manager or a way to a way to decrease the time to production operation of your organization’s specific content management needs, there are several features that you should hope to find in a content management product:
- Hierarchical directory structured content repositories for storing and organizing content, with the opportunity to model Website structures in the content repositories.
- Web-based authoring tools to support the simpler needs of smaller organizations and departments for modifying pieces of the content
- Standards-based WebDAV support, to allow client side tool authoring of content (any Windows or Mac-based client-side HTML authoring tool, Dreamweaver, etc) to be saved directly to the Website Manager’s content repositories
- Versioning support, saving changes to content as each revision occurs
- Publishing Portlets in the Smart Hub portal that can make your portal deployment act as both your content management tool and your customer-facing website
- Content repository-based security to give particular Users and Groups the privileges at multiple defined role levels: Viewer, Editor, and Approver
- Simple workflow approval process support to allow Editors to make changes to new versions of the content and construct approval requests, delivered to assigned Approvers, per repository
- Publishing framework for pushing approved repository content to websites and other external (non-Smart Hub) sites
Businesses have different needs when it comes to Content Management. They also have varied levels of personnel requirements to create, manage, and update the content. Typically, smaller organizations and departments can use personnel not as proficient in HTML programming skills to create and update their contents from a simple Web-based authoring tool. Conversely, larger organizations typically require those more proficient and skilled in HTML authoring to use a more powerful HTML editor for creating and updating Web content. The ideal framework supports both these needs without locking any party into a particular tool set.
For the continued management of Websites, revisions and overhauls of site themes, or frequent updates to static pages that can occur, it is important that a complete content management solution support versioning of content.
Versioning automatically saves previous updates to content, allowing administrators to browse and publish previous changes to production systems. Each new update to a piece of content saves off the previous version. Quotas on the number of versions can be implemented at a repository level, and Web-based management of those versions is provided in an intuitive user interface.
The majority of content management business problems require some form of content approval prior to publishing. In larger systems, this becomes an absolute necessity, as the number of Editors and pieces of content increase. The communication between the people responsible for the approval of a specific repository and its editors can be difficult to manage as the content increases.
The solution is to provide a way for Editors to make approval requests to Approvers involving set of “ready to be published” content. This simple workflow process allows Approvers to know what they should be approving and allows Editors to ensure their changes or additions to repositories are dealt with in a timely and efficient manner.
Organizations have varied security needs and policies for their content management and publishing processes. Therefore, it is important that a Content Manager supports security in multiple progressively complex levels of security. Content repositories can be completely open, allowing global editing and publishing access or it should also be possible to lock down whole repositories and directory structures, defining only specific Users and Groups with Viewer, Editor, or Approver rights.
The following list explains some of the levels of security that you may want to address:
- Role-based access to the content editing, approving, publishing, and repository management tools through the Smart Hub Application Role Management web-based interface
- Content repository-level assignment of Approvers and Editors through a web-based user interface, ensuring content is not seen, changed, or published apart from customer-defined security
- Content Approvers – given all rights to their assigned content repositories for publishing, editing, and viewing content
- Content Editors – with the ability to edit and view content and browse content repositories
- Optional simple open security per content repository, allowing publicly available and/or publishable content repositories
- Multiple configured content repositories, each with varied security definitions and access lists
When choosing a Content Management system you should not choose a product that is easy to install and use, but rather one that is a complete solution for real world business. Vendors focus their sales pitch on the fact that purchasing their content management product will be an out of the box solution for an organization’s needs, but the reality is that customization will most likely occur even with the high end systems.
Feature rich products are often just that; full of unnecessary features that are unable to solve a customer’s business problems. The complexity and business-specific needs involved with managing Websites and HTML content require that custom work be developed on top of these content management products. The customer is left paying for customizations as well as a laundry list of features, base-implementations, and configuration options; most of which are interesting but useless to the end solution, none of which help solve the immediate business problems that the customization addresses.
The best advice to use when comparing or testing Content and Website management tools is to look for a flexible and cost effective base for your content management solution. Don’t look for the monolith for all of your Web-based publishing needs. Choose a solution that allows efficient and simple customization to meet your particular requirements. Use the information provided in this article to decide what’s important to your organization and evaluate only those that address your current problems that you face in today’s business world.
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Bill serves as CommNav’s Director of Software Development. Previous to his role at CommNav, Bill spent eight years in professional enterprise software development at IBM and Tyco Electronics. His areas of expertise include relational database technology, object-oriented software design and construction in C++ and Java. His current focus is on software and product engineering, and project deliverables.
