What is Content Management – Introduction

Content management can be defined as the course of creating, managing and publishing online content without the need for any programming or technical skills. Content management saves time and money of an organization to a great extent if used appropriately. You can get effective content management easily by deploying a content management system.

A content management system can be custom built or can be readily buy from a vendor if it suits your needs. There are hundreds of content management vendors who offer content management systems of price range varying from a few cents to millions of dollars. So, it is advisable that you have a well defined content plan in place for evaluating and selecting a content management system, else this whole process will prove disastrous.

For example, let us consider that a financial services company has bought a content management system for a few million dollars. The content management system limits the number of publishers and also the number of pages that could be stored and published over a period of time. This way of operation of the content management system creates lots of problems for the company both technically and cost wise. If proper support from the content management system is not available when needed, then the system will collapse. Therefore, it is necessary that the organization heads address the necessities of the company and construct a thorough content management plan.

Essential goals of content management include delivering the right content to the right people, maximizing the value of the content, increasing quality of the content, managing the content effectively from the time of creation to disposal and minimizing risks due to publication of inaccurate, unauthorized, obsolete, or inconsistent content. To attain these goals, the objectives of content management are to order and design suitable new content, enter the content and its associated metadata into a content management system, and internationalize the content. In addition, the objectives are to edit the content for style, consistency, grammar, spelling, and readability, approve, publish and personalize the edited content, access the published content and archive or delete the obsolete content.

In an organization, if large volumes of content are made or if the process of publishing the created content gets very time consuming and inefficient, then that organization certainly needs a content management system. Organizations can also use a content management system to establish a standardized approach to efficiently publish, store and organize content for user consumption.

Content management still concerns most of the internet and intranet site managers due to problems such as information overload and ineffectiveness of search engines in retrieving the required information. Information overload is the one major problem that concerns most organizations, as it hampers employee productivity. Recent studies reveal that an average corporate employee spends about 25 to 35 percent of productive time on searching information required to perform the day-to-day job.

Content management can help improve the content publishing, storage and retrieval process in most of the organizations. Some advantages of content management systems include document version and time controls, content approval workflow, database and template creation, dynamic page generation, link management, document conversion, personalization, usage analysis, and access control and built-in security. These are just some of the benefits offered by a content management system. The content management systems offered by different vendors offer varied benefits and functionalities which you can select according to your needs.

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