We are closing in on twenty years since the creation of the World Wide Web and forty years since the core innovations that are the Internet. In the last ten years, however, these technologies have spurred the digitization of virtually everything. So with such huge volumes of information, how does one manage them? CMS and DAM systems are available for this and they are impacting the way media is managed and deployed.
Even more than that, management systems that allow organizations to collect, store and manage communications-related content are essential to digital marketing, electronic commerce and corporate communications. Content management is the engine for driving new electronic communications, including social media.
Years ago we would recommend dynamic content and early content management as a way to reduce costs of website development. As CMS has gotten more popular, our recommendations are more about overall management channels of electronic communications. We used to use phrases like ‘If you can Find It Again, you can Reuse It’ and ‘Create Once, Publish Often’ in relation to DAM and CMS. It used to be that we had to build these systems from scratch, which increased cost and limited their use. But now the chief features of these systems are readily available as cost-effective software products.
We are also seeing the features of many different systems merging together. Some of the major virtues of digital management systems are features like abstraction of file types and information structures; check-in, check-out and versioning of content records; separation of content from channel-specific formatting; flexible organization of assets; permissions and access control; workflow and approval chains for additions and changes; and open API’s for external access to management functions and assets. These features allow us to use these systems as a platform for designing client-specific applications.
It turns out that the CMS products space is very crowded. A quick look at CMSWatch.com and CMSWire.com will show over 100 products in the content management space. These vendors can be sliced and diced in a variety of ways. There are enterprise vendors from Microsoft, Oracle and IBM to Vignette, Interwoven and Documentum. There are midmarket and upper tier vendors from FatWire, Percussion and Ektron to EpiServer, PaperThin and CrownPeak Technology. And there are Open Source options from Alfresco and DotNetNuke to OpenCms, Joomla and Drupal. So once the decision to utilize a CMS platform is made, how do you decide which system to use?
At Trekk, we have always looked at the total cost of ownership when choosing technology. This means that there are many considerations beyond the cost of the software. We consider support, training, popularity, sustainability, maintenance, availability of developers and deployment options to name a few. Over the last several years, this has led us to favor the Microsoft .Net platforms for development and the Ektron CMS400.Net products for a core management platform. A chief virtue of both choices is the extreme emphasis on XML for data representation and storage.
I tend to call CMS400.Net an XML repository rather than a content management system. And while most often considered a web development tool, we use it for far more than just web content deployment. By using XML-based content, we can use XSLT and other transformation techniques to produce virtually any electronic document format. As an example, we can manage press release content with custom structures for head, subhead, byline, body and contact information. We can use the system to create new content via automated imports or manual creation, manage approval workflows and publication rules, and then automate the formatting of the press release into web pages, HTML email, print ready PDF and RSS feeds for SEO and SMO .
The core platform is very popular, widely deployed and well tested. It can handle most functions of a traditional internal IS system, and do it in a flexible manner by simple changes and XML Schema definitions. The core platform allows us to create a long-term vision of business systems that manage the flow and interplay of XML documents. Think of the corporate paper-based system of old, with multiple copies sent through various approval chains. Now think of XML documents replacing those paper forms. To me, this is a much more natural way of conceiving BPI architectures. At Trekk, we create these architectures to solve marketing and corporate communications challenges.
One of the ways that we use this architecture is what print service providers call web-to-print. Or simply, e-commerce applications that result in print-ready file streams for fulfillment. There are a number of vertically integrated web-to-print products that often align to specific variable data print toolkits. We tend to look toward horizontal tools such as Ektron to create more robust and flexible solutions. We are extending this to what we have been calling web-to-everything, to-everywhere and to-everyone.
To us, cross-media is about delivering communications not only to multiple formats and channels, but to all channels as needed by specific customers. By utilizing CMS and XML, we can design and deliver complex and custom solutions by concentrating on the designs of the content delivery and specific interfaces and workflows. We do not need to be concerned about the low-level details of storage and retrieval, searching, permissions and security. And soon, more of these platforms will be available via cloud computing vendors, so scalability, backup and recovery will not be a worry either.
Sound interesting?
Posted by JA Stewart at 06/28/2009 07:24:31 PM |
