What is Content Management?

Content management is the process of managing information decentrally by multiple authors. A Content management System (CMS) is the technique that supports this process.

Really important information is always complex, extremely reliable, correct and subject to frequent change. Regardless of whether the information is intended for other company staff members and collegues (intranet), for corporate customers (extranet) or the general public (internet), the requirements are always the same:

The information has to be co-ordinated and fed quickly into the network and maintained there and what's more, the whole process has to be carried out decentrally by several authors.

What the internet surfer sees on the internet through the browser is indvidual web pages. Every web page has a basic lay out, which defines several general features, like background colour and/or image, fonts, sizes and colours, fields for text -or graphic elements, navigation bars, buttons, etc.

In traditional web page design, layout (form) and content were combined in HTML. For each change of your web site, whether it was small (changing colors, adding new articles) or big (developing new functionality), your company always was at the mercy of an internet company, whereas they did not always understand what you meant. Irritations and high costs were the result. Nowadays, things are different: the layout is defined and captured as a template. The contents that are to appear on a web page are then linked to the appropriate parts on the template.

So what is content, what is form? The content of a web page are what one sees, the form (layout) determines how and where one sees the content. The principle of separating layout and content is fundamental to a web content management system. This allows users to maintain their content themselves without making an appeal to the IT-person for each slight change.

Each company has its own (branche)-specific requirements. There is no ‘out-of-the-box' content management system that fulfils all yours needs. So what does a CMS do for you, really?

  • Authoring - maintaining content in a digital environment
  • Workflow - managing the steps from authoring to publishing
  • Storage - storing content in a database
  • Publishing - publishing content on your website

Other requirements which your CMS should meet:

  • User friendliness
  • Combination of data from multiple sources
  • Defining authorization profiles
  • Seperation between content, form and application
  • Automatic creation of meta data
  • Content check-in and check-out
  • Versioning
  • Link Management
  • Security
  • Personalisation
  • Scalability