Most companies create a large amount of content, or digital information. This content is found in many forms: financial data in spreadsheets, internal memos and external correspondence in word processing documents, customer/client information and product inventories in databases, creative work in graphic, video and audio files and so forth. Much of this information is unstructured, and can include such things as email messages, handwritten documents and drawings.
When your company is small, you generally manage this content at the document level. In the smallest businesses, files may be stored on individual workstations where they're created, although it is likely that you will quickly outgrow this stage. Your next solution is to store user-created content on one or more file servers. You may implement RAID for fault tolerance and you’ll almost certainly have a backup program to ensure that there are redundant copies of your critical data.
As the amount of content grows, the problem becomes how to manage it from the creation process to the need to access it later. Large projects will span multiple documents, often of different types, and involve many different authors and reviewers in the creation process. You may need to reuse content and collections of content. Tracking different versions of individual documents, tracking all the documents that relate to a specific project, and accessing specific content within an in-progress or completed project quickly and easily can be a challenge when you have thousands or hundreds of thousands of documents in your data repository.
At that point, you need to start thinking about a complete content management system (CMS) that will allow you to keep tabs on the location of and relationships between all of the information you’ve collected at the content level. And as with any complex technological solution, it’s important to consider future growth and scalability when you choose the best content management solution for your network.
Evaluating your content management needs
The first step is to determine whether you need a content management system. If your company is approaching or already at the enterprise level, you probably do. Other large companies seem to think so; according to a survey conducted by Information Week recently, large companies in the US are investing in CMS technology to a greater degree than ever — in many cases, spurred on by compliance regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and other electronic records-retention and privacy laws. If your company is part of a regulated industry, CMS can help you document compliance.
The next step is to determine exactly what type(s) of content you want to manage. The term "content management" is used by some software vendors in the broad sense described above, but other content management solutions are designed to deal only with the content of Web sites.
The Information Week survey found that the most commonly used form of CMS is...
