The benefits of a content management system: July 01, 2002 issue of New Thinking

July 01, 2002 New Thinking:
The benefits of a content management system

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Gerry McGovern

Content Critical

Gaining competitive advantage through high-quality web content

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July 01, 2002

The benefits of a content management system

By Gerry McGovern

If you are publishing a lot of content from a number of authors, you should seriously consider a content management system (CMS). A quality CMS can help you streamline your publishing processes. It can allow you to develop an information architecture that is robust, yet flexible. It can allow you to manage your content efficiently and cost-effectively.

A CMS makes it easier for people to create, edit and publish content on a website. Historically, website publishing has required significant technical skills (HTML, programming). A good CMS allows non-technical authors and editors to easily and quickly publish their content.

A CMS makes it easier for you to manage who creates, edits and publishes content. Because it establishes defined publishing processes, you can allocate specific publishing rights to various individuals.

By easing technical hurdles in the publication of content, a CMS can reduce the need for training, while facilitating more people to publish. At the same time, it reduces the daily stream of calls to the IT department for changes to the website.

A CMS reduces time-to-publish, allowing you to get content published faster. This is an important issue for the modern organization. The quicker you get key content published, the more value it creates.

A CMS allows for the design of a common and consistent information architecture (metadata, classification, navigation, search, layout and design). Inconsistent and poorly designed information architectures plague many websites.

A CMS will allow for the consistent management of metadata through content template structures. Of the many benefits this delivers is a significantly improved search process. Basically, if the appropriate metadata is captured on all documents, then people can find the right content a lot more quickly.

Security is an important issue, particularly for intranets. A CMS can facilitate better content security. It can control who is allowed to publish to the website, and who is allowed to see what content.

A CMS can allow you to more easily measure the success of your publishing efforts. You can track who is publishing what, how quickly content is getting published, whether the publication schedule is being adhered to, whether out-of-date content is being removed quickly enough, etc.

A CMS really comes into its own when you have a lot of authors and editors, based at multiple locations, publishing substantial quantities of content on an ongoing basis. Without a CMS, such an environment can become a nightmare to manage.

Without a CMS, what often happens is that there is a publishing free-for-all. The content quality is not properly monitored and becomes inconsistent. The navigation and layout changes from section to section, creating a frustrating experience for the reader.

When does a CMS begin to make sense in comparison to using raw HTML or a package such as Microsoft FrontPage? Well, you need to be publishing at least 10 new documents a week. There should be a minimum of 5 authors/editors publishing this content. As the number of documents, authors and editors rise, a CMS begins to make more and more sense.

If this is you, you need a CMS. But be careful. Content management vendors are often obsessed with developing complex, convoluted and expensive technology. Be warned: a bad CMS can be worse than nothing at all. And there are a lot of bad ones out there.

Gerry McGovern

Next issue: Demystifying content management
Previous issue: The high cost of content management
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As the number of documents, authors and editors rise, a CMS begins to make more and more sense.

Gerry McGovern's books are recommended reading at the following universities

Augustana College, United States
Brandeis University, United States
Drury University, United States
Dublin Institute of Technology, Ireland
Indiana University, United States
Monash University, Australia
Northeastern University, United States
University of Applied Sciences, Germany
University of Regina, Canada
University of Teesside, UK
Manchester Metropolitan University

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