Tech Term: Content Management System

In some situations, competition is good for a business; and, for others, it can be terrible. As marketing, and specifically online marketing becomes more imperative for the success of every organization, all the content that is created for this purpose has to be managed. For this week’s technology term, we take a look at the different kinds of content management services (CMS) and what they do to make managing your organization’s content simpler.

What is a CMS?
A CMS is an application that stores content, provides easy editing options, and third-party integrations to get the most out of your content. It provides a central hub that allows anyone with access the ability to build, alter, and store content. Each type of application needs a strategy. There are two different CMS strategies that you have to be cognizant of:

• Web content management
• Enterprise content management

We’ll look at each strategy and describe why they are useful and how to choose the one right for you.

Web-Based Content Management System (WCMS)
If your organization has rolled out a website, chances are that you had a website creator build it. It uses a WCMS to create and manage all the content found on the website. Since your website is the central hub of your entire web marketing strategy, ensuring that you are getting the features and management capabilities that will allow you to get the most out of your efforts is important to the success of those endeavors. A WCMS provides these opportunities, and more than that, it offers people that don’t have any experience with the creation and management of websites options to do both with no prior training.

With marketing often, a day-by-day process, organizations need to be able to make changes to their websites on the fly. By using a Web-based CMS, you will be able to quickly create, edit, and publish content that is relevant to your current business initiatives while also integrating forms, forums, and even social media in order to get the best degree of customer and prospect engagement.

Some titles include: WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal.

Enterprise Content Management System
Enterprise content management is a bit different, but it does largely the same thing. It provides a construct to manage content in an online environment and gives everyone inside an organization a deep and functional repository of information that’s easy to access and manage. Some of the ways that businesses will use this system include:

• Improving security by managing access to organizational content.
• Making files easy to access and searchable, boosting an organization’s collaboration capabilities.
• Centralizing all organizational content.
• Incorporating a document management system (DMS) to further build a digital content storage platform.
• Creating and storing templates to improve workflow efficiency.

To remain competitive in business today, businesses need to have access to information, and control over that information. The enterprise content management system does exactly that. Since management of content is management of data, having a system in place that allows for comprehensive access to all of an organization’s content works to make that business more profitable.

Some titles include: HP Distributed Workflow, IBM ECM, Oracle WebCenter Content.

At Washington Works, we can provide more information about content management systems, and what software titles will work best for your situation. Call us today at 301-571-5040 to learn more.