Content Management

By bringing the Internet into their business strategy, companies create the opportunity to move quickly within their markets to sell more effectively, increase customer loyalty, dominate a market niche, and even reach new markets.

The content within large corporations and public sector organizations is often spread too far and wide within the structure (people, departments, SBUs) and geography of the company to be properly exploited.

Taking content already developed for another media, such as print, and rapidly adapting it to a Web site or PDA presents unique business challenges that require unique technical solutions. Gathering that raw content and refining it into coherent, usable information is the role of content management systems (CMS).

In its purest form, CMS is a set of software tools and business rules that automate the content lifecycle, including creation, acquisition, formatting, storage, approval and publishing. This may include document management through common workflows, media management based on a centralized contentbase and templating for content creation and publishing.

In the broader sense, content management is a suite of applications that allow corporations to effectively manage and deliver large amounts of diverse information to different media through the most effective and timely means.

A typical CMS architecture will provide some or all of the following benefits:

• Managing large volumes of documentation, often in regulated environments. This is traditional document management.
• Managing large volumes of documentation for delivery over a Web-based interface within an organization. This is traditional document management, but with the Web as a new delivery channel.
• Supporting knowledge management tasks by allowing people across an organization to contribute knowledge to an intranet and giving widespread access to that content. This has been partially supported by the traditional document management vendors, but more Web-focused content management vendors are addressing this market.
• Providing control necessary for typical corporate Web sites that hold information on the company, its products, news information, sales and marketing materials. For most organizations this is an extension of their existing marketing activities. Generic Web content management vendors address this market.
• Controlling content for e-business applications-both B2C and B2B. First addressed by newer Web-focused companies, established vendors are getting in the game, particularly those from document management backgrounds.

As a market leader in content management solutions, DeepBridge combines expertise in contentbase development, workflow definition and multimedia publishing to create solutions based on business needs. To better understand how content management works and how it fits within the current business environment, refer to DeepBridge's White Papers .