Content management systems are large multipurpose systems whose primary tasks are to keep content organized and to assist with the collaborative creation of content. Authoring content with the aid of a content management system provides numerous benefits including the ability to route documents via a workflow, track revisions, and create a process to author documents collaboratively . In addition, these systems allow for easy archival and retrieval of information which result in impressive return on investment (ROI) rates. Finally, there is a growing demand for content to be delivered in multiple formats. Content management systems store documents in a variety of different formats and can transform with the click of a button.

Table of Contents

Introduction 3

Why Organize Data? 3

How do content management systems work ? 4

Why use a Content Management System? 5

Current State of Content Management 6

Conclusions 7

Bibliography: 9

Introduction

Content management systems (“CMS”) are large multipurpose systems whose primary tasks are to keep content organized and to assist with the collaborative creation of content. Organization is achieved by allowing users to place documents in defined folders much like a filing cabinet. Users wishing to retrieve documents are able to do so by browsing these folders or using a search tool. A second task of content management systems is collaborative content creation. This refers to the manner in which the system allows multiple people to contribute to the creation of a single document¹.

The remainder of this document will examine in greater detail the two primary tasks of content management systems, provide justification for investing in such systems, and current content management marketplace trends.

Why Organize Data?

Communication is clearly one of the most important aspects of business today. However, in medium to large companies, the exchange of documents can become a tedious and expensive task. Historically, traditional companies would often exchange memos and documents via internal office mail. Mail room personnel would physically walk around and deliver documents to the appropriate recipients. With the mass introduction of personal computers, these tasks were sometimes replaced by email. However, email does not make collaborative document creation between a group of people any easier. At the end of either process, a person must assemble all the components together by hand. In order to do this manual assembly, that person must also posses all the individual components of a document.

Content management systems directly address this issue. One fundamental aspect of a content management system is a workflow. Workflows are designed to route documents between individuals or other processes². As part of this routing, the system is able to track revisions through a system called revision control. This allows users to look back and see how the document has morphed over time. Lastly by passing a document between different individuals, content management systems allow documents to be reviewed and approved. The sum of this process is often called document management because it deals solely with the efficient movement and creation of documents. Some of the first content management systems were born out of document management systems.

Content management systems also deal with documents after they are created. These systems place documents in a hierarchical folder organization usually called a repository. There is usually only one repository for an entire company, but access limits can be imposed on various users. The repository contains documents and meta data such as abstracts, keywords, versions, authors, and dates; all things that are tracked by the system. These pieces of meta data are the means by which the system indexes the documents within its repository.

How do content management systems work ?

In general, most content management systems are broken up into multiple tiers or levels. The lowest level in any content management system is usually the storage engine. This can vary from system to system, but many content management vendors use a database management system ("DBMS") to help with this process. Sometimes, all documents reside natively within the DBMS as records. The content management system simply organizes the data after being retrieved from the DBMS.

When IBM was designing their Franklin content management system, they used a DB2 based DBMS that served only as an indexing system and mapping system. The actual documents were stored directly on a disk. When new content was added, the meta data would be recorded in the db and the content was written to disk. A “pointer” to the place on the file system allowed the database to locate the actual content quickly in the case that user wanted to view the data³.

Users interact with content management systems through a variety of mediums. Some commercial systems, like Documentum and Vignette, have plugins for common applications like Microsoft office, Autocad, Photoshop, etc. In other cases, users can use little client applications that work like ftp. With these applications, users can transfer documents to and from the company's repository. Increasingly, content management systems are adding web clients. These allow authorized users to work on documents from home or other non office locations⁴.

Many content management systems feature the ability to output documents in a variety of formats. For example, a word processing document could be transformed into a portable document format file. A current industry trend is the ability to author content in an “output neutral” format like xml. From there the document can be transformed into a number of different formats including those suitable for print, multimedia (cdroms), and the ever popular world wide web⁵.

Why use a Content Management System?

Commercial content management vendors like Documentum, Vignette, Hummingbird, and IBM do a very good job of justifying the large cost associated with these complex systems. A case study performed by Nucleus Research showed that the Public Services company of New Mexico (“PNM”) was able to improve distribution of their content, while maintaining compliance with government regulations, all with an annual return on their investment of 105%. In addition, the report concluded that the company would have paid back their investment in as little as 11 months.

PNM used Hummingbird's content management system to archive old microfiche files and some 55 thousand boxes of paper into a modern repository with 10 libraries spread out over different departments of the company. The result was an efficient and easy solution to search and retrieve documents. The more modern system was able to save the company space and the cost of storage. In addition, customer support was greatly improved by the ability for representatives to look through a large index of data. In the end, the system also scaled nicely reaching 21 libraries and an average of 1.2 million new documents added each month ⁶.

Current State of Content Management

Content management, much like most information systems, has been recently been reborn as an Internet technology. Today's large content management vendors are pushing for the use of their products as the main management solution for large websites. These companies have formed alliances or developed their own products to allow content stored in managed repositories to be viewed through custom web applications such as web portals. Portals have become popular because they allow for intelligent content display. Users can specify categories of data which they wish to see and between the portal logic and a content management system those desires can be realized.

In addition, vendors have made a lot of progress with creating large scale clustered systems which enable document repositories span multiple machines. Documentum has designed their latest CMS to support geographically distributed repositories which are typically used for multinational corporations that need to manage all content locally. Documentum also supports replicated repositories which aim to keep repositories in sync by copying data. Finally, Documentum also supports federated repositories which delegate the administration to a local administrator, but all the data can be viewed as one big repository⁷.

Lastly, as in many other sectors of the software industry, open source content management solutions have become increasingly noticeable. Zope, a content management system based on the Python programming language, has been used by several large scale enterprise clients. Boston.com, a news portal owned and operated by the Boston Globe, uses Zope as a content manager for stories that arrived via a variety of news feeds. With Zope, editors were able to quickly put together new editions of its online publication⁸.

Conclusions

Content management systems have made a lot of progress since their birth. They are now able to span large geographic areas, manage millions of individual pieces of content, in fractions of the time it would take to perform the same tasks by hand. One clear hope for the future is that vendors work to improve the overall usability of these systems. Content management systems are extremely complex and key improvements could be made to their setup/installation processes, hardware requirements, and overall speed. Hopefully then, the future will bring about the adoption of content management systems to a massive number of industries that would otherwise look to different solutions.

Bibliography:

Butler Group - “Defining the Document and Content Management Ecosystem”. 2002 . <http://www.crm2day.com/library/EpuuAZEkEZuQAxmjTk.php>

“Content Management Systems” Wikipedia. (May 4^th, 2004) <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_management_system>

Kartchner, Chris. “Content Management Systems: Getting from Concept to Reality”, Journal of Electronic Publishing. June 1998, Vol 3, Issue 4. (May 4th, 2004) <http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/03-04/kartchner.html>

“ROI Case Study: Hummingbird Public Services New Mexico” Nucleus Research (May 5^th, 2004) <http://www.hummingbird.com/alt_content/binary/pdf/collateral/roi/pnm.pdf>

Weitzman, et al.. “Transforming the Content Managment Process at IBM.com” Case studies of the CHI2002|AIGA Experience Design FORUM p.8 2002.

Zope Boston.com Case Study, Zope Corporation. http://www.zope.com/Customers/CaseStudies/BostonComCaseStudy.html

2Butler Group - “Defining the Document and Content Management Ecosystem”

3Weitzman, et al.. “Transforming the Content Managment Process at IBM.com”

4 Clarke, Sue. “Documentum. Documentum 5” Content Infrastructure: Technology Audit.

5 Kartchner, Chris. “Content Management Systems: Getting from Concept to Reality”.

7 Documentum. “A Guide to Evaluating Enterprise Content Management Software”