Management
Content Management divides logically into three areas
- Content creation and contribution
- Content management and administration
- Content publishing and serving
Immediacy Editor is primarily concerned with the first of these
stages, with some overlap into the management process. For example,
page properties do play a role in the management process e.g.
deciding when a page should go live, and when it should expire.
The heart of any content management system is the ability to
manage and centrally control the distributed input of all content
contributors. This section gives an overview of the content
management features provided by Immediacy Manager.
Immediacy Manager provides a suite of functions that allow
enterprise wide management of content. The main functional
management areas are:
Immediacy Manager exists as both a Windows client application,
and a fully parallel web application. Administrators can launch
whichever is most convenient. The web-based interface allows remote
administration.
Site Configuration
Site configuration defines a number of basic parameters for the
site, including the default template and style sheet, development
site location, physical system directory, published site location,
default archiving setting, output type and so on. Once set up these
settings do not change frequently. However they can be viewed and
edited at any time using Immediacy Manager.
Users and Permissions
Immediacy Manager contains powerful permission and rules based
set up that allows for multiple levels of site control and
management. A site administrator will set up initial users and user
groups, assigning any combination of permissions to both a user and
a group.
Usually a group will be set up to have control over one or more
specific sections of the site e.g. marketing, investor relations,
press, technical etc. Alternatively groups can also be defined
around functions e.g. designers, administrators, approvers,
editors. Users may exist inside or outside of a group. Within a
group, regardless of the permissions assigned to users they are
limited by the overall "envelope" of the group permissions.
For example, the marketing group as a whole may have
administrator control over the marketing section of a site, but
read only access to technical, legal and other sections. Within the
marketing group some users may have administrator rights, others
design, edit, read only and so on. All of these permission levels
will apply fully within the marketing section of the site, but
outside of this section all users, including those defined as
administrators within the group, will be limited to the read only
access rights of the group as a whole.
Group administrators can add users to, and remove users from,
their own groups and assign permissions to them.
Content Approval
Content approval encompasses both content and properties
approval. Whenever a page or its properties are edited, its status
changes to 'draft' mode. One or more editors may continue to make
and save changes until the page is considered complete, at which
point an editor will submit it for approval.
Once submitted for approval the page may be approved, returned
for amendment, or rejected, by designated approvers. The content
approval workflow process allows pages to be approved by a single
inPidual, or by multiple approvers who may also be required to
approve it in a specific order. The page becomes 'live' after it
has completed its approval process.
Immediacy Manager provides approvers with a side-by-side before
and after comparison of edited pages.
During the content approval process approvers with editing
permission can alter both content and properties including
keywords, description, title, page live date, page expiry date, end
user access rights, show or hide the page in the menu, mark a page
as subscribe-able, mark a page change as newsworthy, add a page to
latest news, and add a page to site headlines.
Archiving, Retrieval and Backup
Immediacy Manager supports archiving at page level. When a page
is approved the previous copy of the page along with any images, is
versioned and backed up in the content repository. An administrator
can view the version history and roll the page back to any previous
version. When a rollback occurs the current version is also
archived allowing a later 'roll-forward'. Apart from site recovery
use, this feature provides valuable additional content flexibility.
For example a page may be changed to support a seasonal or
short-term activity, such as a special offer or a marketing
campaign. The page is edited for this purpose, approved, and made
live. When the offer or campaign ends the page may be rolled back
to its previous version. Later on it can be rolled forward again if
the campaign is repeated.