Consultancy Services » Content Management Systems
We work with Content Management Systems (CMS) for business content like marketing collateral, software designs, business documents, policies, procedures and technical manuals.
These enterprise class tools start from simple systems with just one seat through to tools that span organisations like HP or Nortel.
But what is content?
Content is your written collateral; marketing brochures, designs and system architectures, or instructions for anything within your organisation. It is normal for this collateral to be dispersed through your organisation in different folders and using different tools and appearances, although for many it would be Microsoft Office documents.
You can reuse your content
Write once, use many times. Sound good? Consistent?
The ideal is to store each fact just once and reuse it. Imagine the reduction in email traffic. Eliminate repeated decisions. Reduce the potential for litigation. With a content management system, you find repeated information and eliminate it.
To implement reuse is easy: First, your content needs to be well written. Your staff may need training, you would definitely need to create a guide on writing style and it helps to have peer review by a trained writer. Next, your content needs to be in smaller chunks with meaningful titles so that it can be recombined and used in different contexts - for instance software designs and user manuals can share interface descriptions. This is easy to achieve with guidance. Finally, you need a tool, a content management system, that can combine these topics into books or collections. To get started, most organisations draw a line in the sand for their general content and invest in importing their most essential legacy information first.
You can collaborate and manage
By converting to database-backed, component content-management your team can now work on different topics that are part of the same deliverable. No more passing documents backwards and forwards, reviewing and commenting, and reformatting (corrupting and fixing).
The term 'management' in 'content management' can refer to content and your team. For content, you have sophisticated search, reuse, templating, states and versions. For your team, workflow engines, reporting and release state security. You can use as much or as little as you need.
You can publish to multiple channels
Writing in word processors leaves more fastidious writers spending 70% of their time making sure the documents look how they want and lazy writers sending out scratchy documents with unpalatable content, inappropriate titles and meaningless yet misdirecting use of indents, fonts and bolding. Microsoft Word has 2500+ commands in the menus (source: Microsoft MVP).
Content management systems insist on a standard structure or at least fixed styles that raise the bar for the lazy and eliminate the 70% for the fastidious. Even when we include the CMS administration we recently saw a 50% productivity improvement in a team of 5 writers (source on request).
The appearance is then handled by the publishing. Whether you publish to a word processor, online help, PDF or web, no further intervention is required.
Translation
Content management systems are often justified simply through translation cost savings. Reducing repetition through reuse, which means translating only changes, gives easy cost savings. Herein lies the trap. It appears that companies implement clunky, unusable content management system based on these benefits. We recommend you focus first on the ease of use and gaining acceptance, the translation benefits follow naturally.
Our approach
Currently we believe the most effective and mature tool on the market to be Author-it although we are always candid about any shortcomings.
We also work with XML content management systems for DITA XML and DocBook derived DTDs which, although they support structured writing and open standards, do not offer the same ease of use or functional richness as Author-it.
We are keen to pursue and support Free Open Source Software (FOSS) solutions and offer discounts for this work. If you have the desire to collaborate on FOSS for business content management then please contact us.