What is content management?
What Content Management means depends on whom you are talking
to. Set out below is our view of the key elements and processes in
web content management.
Content Management divides logically into three areas:
- Content creation and contribution
- Content management and administration
- Content publishing and serving
The meaning of the terms is reasonably self-evident. Each of
them encompasses a number of processes; typically they include the
items shown below. The actual processes provided by a solution vary
from product to product.
Creation and Contribution
|
Management and Administration
|
Publishing and Serving
|
- Page creation and editing
- Template creation
- Text entry
- Image creation
- Style sheet creation & editing
- Submission for approval
- Content properties & attributes
- Meta data
- Live date and expiry
- Personalisation attributes
- Product attributes
- Marketing attributes
- End user access permissions
|
- Content approval
- Properties approval
- Content workflow
- Security, roles assignment, editing permissions
- Versioning, archiving and backup
|
- Content output to final media
- Publishing to production server
- Search capability
- Personalisation
- Replication
- Syndication
- Load balancing
- Caching and acceleration
|
The boundaries between these areas are not always rigidly fixed.
For example, a user editing a page may add some custom marketing or
personalization attributes to a page as part of the content
creation process. These may be further modified and edited by
someone in an administrative or approval role.
In response to the need for content management solutions a
growing number of products are appearing in the market place. Some
of these are based on existing document management products that
have been modified for the web, others have grown out of web
editing tools, still others have come from a code management and
software version control background.
Almost none of these products covers every aspect of content
management as defined above. For example quite a number have
limited authoring capability, making use instead of third party
creation tools such as Macromedia Dreamweaver®, or Microsoft
Office® programmes for content design and creation. Load balancing
and cache acceleration are also outside of the scope of most
content management products. All of them, to varying extents, offer
the management and administration functions, which are essential to
ensuring accuracy of information and site coherence.
Immediacy delivers significant functionality in all three areas,
with particular emphasis on content creation and content
management.
The Immediacy toolset consists of a number of interlocking
components, which together provide the foundation blocks for
building a web site from the ground up.
- Immediacy Editor - the primary tool for
content contribution and editing
- Immediacy Manager - the suite of management
and administration functions
- Immediacy Server - a set of components
including client and server side applications that provide specific
site functionality.
Between them these components cover all aspects of the content
life cycle. For the purposes of this document they are defined as:
design; create; manage; and deploy.
