What is Content Management?

Content Management and Content Managements Systems ((often shortened to CMS) are about separating the information (the content) that you want to display on your web site from the design. For smaller businesses CMS can be about giving you back control over your web site so that you can change content without disturbing that expensive design you paid for. So it can save you money.

For larger businesses with frequently changing information it is about allowing multiple people to edit content. You can have authors, editors and approvers so that content can be prepared in advance and, if authorised, published at a particular date and time.

So Simply put Content Management is about:

Information Creation

Enabling one or multiple authors to create and one or more editors to manage useable information in ways in which they feel comfortable.

Information Management

Translate any information into a consistent format and design

Information Publication

Publish that information at the appropriate time and in appropriate formats.

Simple systems work on the basis of constraining the user to work within a defined template structure and will allow them to simply manage areas of data within their web site. For many smaller businesses this is perfectly adequate. Many web site building tools could correctly be called Content Management Systems (CMS) when used in this way.

But where there are large amounts of frequently changing information, where there is more than one author, where editorial rights are required then we are talking about full CMS systems.

The characteristics of such systems are:

Authors -

• Use tools to edit and create content

Editors -

• Control revisions and updates
• Approve publication

System -

• Tracks versions of documents
• Tracks who has current ownership of each document to prevent unauthorised changes or multiple versions
• Supports workflow
• Provides reports
• Manages the central depository of all data