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11.17.03
 By
Bill Kratzer
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.
About the Author:
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.
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| From
the Forum: |
| content management systems |
How do pages that are created/managed by content management systems fare with SE's?
I have never used one before because I am aware that any "?" or other symbol in the URL of pages would hurt ranking; however, I have over 100 sites that are related and it is becoming a management nightmare. ...
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