What's the fuss about... content management?

<i>As websites and intranets become ever more complex, Quocirca analyst Jon Collins this week asks whether content management software will become indispensable...

Content management owes its parentage to two converging technology areas, namely document management and the web. The latter needs no introduction. As for document management, fair to say it is a well-mined seam for those that know it, and a minefield for those that don't. To document management we owe one principle: everything is a document.

This principle is central to understanding content management. Put it this way: every form of data - from an email or a spreadsheet to an audio file or a banking transaction - can be considered a document. This becomes even more important when we take into account something else inherited from document management - eXtensible Mark-up Language. XML is the ideal packaging mechanism for all these 'documents'.

Enough about technology. For now let's consider what content management is for. Over the past five years, many millions of websites have been evolving from simple, text-and-graphics-based informational sites ('brochureware') to complex resources linking many forms of information and enabling a far richer end-user experience (if you will). Against this backdrop, the content - that is, the text, graphics, audio, video and other data - needs to be managed. It needs to be created, verified, delivered, maintained and bumped off when it has reached its sell-by date.

As the internet evolves, these tasks become ever harder. Not only is there ever more content to manage but the evolution towards richness of content has also increased the scale of the challenge. It is far easier to manage a few pages of text than a multi-layered, multimedia 'experience'. Even the simplest of sites have a tendency towards complexity, over time.

As the solution to these ills, content management enables content to be stored, managed and maintained appropriately. It also permits the process of content development to be controlled.

The litmus test for whether you need a content management application is simple - can you recreate your website as it was on an exact day six months ago? If you want to know why you would need such a facility, just wait six months and try to find that article that was so interesting at the time. It may be, in the future, that such a capability becomes a legal requirement for any commercial organisation.

Content management can be thought of as a springboard. It is not entirely necessary to manage content in a structured fashion or to use tools to automate it. However, content management facilities enable organisations to do more with less, to manage more information and deliver it more reliably.

Enterprise-scale content management applications can be expensive, hence commitment is required from the top not only to cover the costs of the products but also to implement the necessary processes to enable their benefits to be realised.

Content management is as much about process as product. Not only is there the content development and delivery process to think about but also the other processes (the workflows) of the organisation will be impacted, in particular, the customer-facing processes such as marketing, sales and support.

The deployment of a content management application should be considered as an integrated part of a company's strategy for using the web.

As content management is web-based it needs to work with application servers, ecommerce engines and the other paraphernalia of the web. Linkage between content management and CRM is inevitable, in a drive to get that 'experience' unique for each and every user - and, of course to log every key-click they might make.

Content management is often linked to portals, which are no more than windows onto content from a user perspective, or to content farms, from an application perspective. Content management is a relatively mature, and hence stable, market and suffers less from teething problems than a number of other application areas. Issues with content management tend to come more from the way it is implemented - implementation of the wrong process, or failure to integrate with external systems and workflows can cause more problems than it solves.

A further issue concerns the distribution of content. Content distribution networks, either implemented internally or outsourced to companies such as Akamai, relieve pressure on websites by offering alternative locations for the content. This can solve difficulties of accessing content from specific geographies, not to mention easing the load on a company's core website.

What of the future? Content management may have the basic model correct but it must adapt to fit with new technologies and new business models as they come on stream.

It is already being affected by the arrival of broadband technologies as these enable new forms of content such as streamed audio and video to be delivered. Web services and application service provision will also impact on content management, not so much in its principles but in the way it is implemented.

It is likely that content management will remain forever one of those technologies that hides under the bonnet, even integrated into the operating systems of the future. Equally likely is its positioning as a technology that no company can afford to do without. <p>

Also in this series:<br>
What's the fuss about... third-generation?
http://www.silicon.com/a56389
What's the fuss about... broadband?
http://www.silicon.com/a56294
What's the fuss about... mobile and wireless?
http://www.silicon.com/a56132
What's the fuss about... server consolidation?
http://www.silicon.com/a56018
What's the fuss about... selective outsourcing?
http://www.silicon.com/a55915
What's the fuss about... security?
http://www.silicon.com/a55808
What's the fuss about... virtualised IT infrastructure?
http://www.silicon.com/a55628
What's the fuss about... storage networking?
http://www.silicon.com/a55420
What's the fuss about... disaster tolerance?
http://www.silicon.com/a55340
What's the fuss about... CRM?
http://www.silicon.com/a55238
What's the fuss about... UnitedLinux?
http://www.silicon.com/a55136