CMS Guide
In today’s information driven world, content is created almost everywhere, every time by everybody. Be it a small business or large enterprise, an armature’s weblog or a professional website or a printed publication for that matter, content is generated from innumerable number of sources. Most of this content is unstructured in nature and is hard to manage in the way it is. Content Management System is a type of computer software that allows all this unstructured, unmanaged content to be sorted out into manageable, usable entities. The software lets its users create, edit, manage and search the content from a well defined user interface. And since computers can provide unprecedented level of automation in generating formatted outputs, this becomes an added advantage of using a content management system. The content can include computer related files, multimedia content, electronic versions of printed content, Web contents etc.
Apart from these things, from the security perspective, A CMS supports the notion of user accounts with different level of access rights over the content to provide controlled access to the stored data. Role based account management is also present sometimes which defines access control on the basis of a particular set of permissions according to the role of the user.
Versioning is supported in CMSs so that different versions of same documents and files can be stored without any ambiguity. And all this content can be published to repository like a company's index for further use.
CMS systems also support the separation of layout of content from its organizing semantics which facilitate the one content - many views functionality. For example, the CMS can apply font, color and other display specific attributes differently according to the context, to the same data.
CMS systems are generally written in a high level language but that varies according to the type of CMS. For example, there are Enterprise CMS systems which are used by big organizations to manage their internal data properly while the Web based CMS systems are generally used to provide facility to manage content of a website in a specific format like a blog etc that help non technical users to manage the web content effortlessly. A third type of CMS system exists which is classified as Component CMS. These work on the contents of other document and organize unstructured data in it in a usable form.
Examples of CMS systems include blogs, mash-ups, wikis as well as in-house enterprise data management solutions etc.
Content management Systems are used in several contexts today. Be it a full scale Enterprise that needs to organize its operational and statistical data or someone who wants to quickly and easily setup and manage a website without diving into the details of web programming, Content Management Systems has found their way into several different application areas. Based on the usage context of CMS, it is termed as an Enterprise CMS or a Web CMS.
A CMS typically comprises of two types of modules: Content Management Application (CMA) which enables the content author, who may not be adept in the use of the web programming language like HTML, to easily manage the creation, editing and removal of website content and Content Delivery Application (CDA), which uses the same information to update the Website.
There exists a third important CMS type known as Component Content Management System. Not much information is available about these CMS systems as they are relatively a new concept.
A component content management system deals with the content within documents. It locates and links content in any level of organization in a fragmented system of contents, and then builds publications out of these fragments of content. After the content has been formulated, it is usually delivered using the web content management and enterprise content management systems to the end user.
Traditionally, CMSs have been focusing on managing data in document form. Though such systems have the capacity of efficiently storing data in document base, such data is useful only if it needs to be retrieved as a whole. However, these systems are limited, rather unsuitable when the need arises for more granular access within the document.
CCMSs are most useful when content is regularly updated and redundant. Managing such content using traditional methods can yield high maintenance costs. For example, airlines systems are a good place to put CCMSs to use as these systems need to update their data frequently. Similarly, CCMSs can also be used to manage tailor-made publications in publication houses. Complex products and services tend to have complex documentation. These services are based on common structures. Hence, the corresponding documentations can be easily constructed from the same base documentation. So in this case too, CCMSs suit better to the requirements of the target system.
Though these are not very frequently used today, CCMSs can be used to significantly improve the efficiencies in various content management scenarios, especially where document redundancy and updates are frequently found.
This website uses cookies that are necessary to its functioning and required to achieve the purposes illustrated in the privacy policy. By accepting this OR scrolling this page OR continuing to browse, you agree to our Privacy Policy