Content management includes assembling, organizing, delivering, retrieving, and governing website or enterprise business content.
The internet is the world’s largest resource, featuring trillions of videos, blogs, images, and other multimedia like PDFs. Without content management processes, the digital content lifecycle would go haywire—leaving content on the internet unstructured, inaccessible, and disorganized.
Businesses also generate an enormous amount of data on a daily basis. Few organizations today are prepared to handle the exponential growth in the volume, velocity, and variety of their enterprise data. Fewer still are equipped to manage and account for that data and make the resulting records accessible to the organization as a whole. While information governance is a well-established practice among government entities, it has typically not compelled private sector organizations to invest in enterprise content management (ECM) systems.
In this content management overview, you’ll learn about all the aspects of content management and its integral role in structuring the World Wide Web and enterprise business data.
Download this report from Omdia to discover which capabilities from various content management vendors are important when deciding on a platform for your organization.
Download the reportContent management is essential because it enables you to control digital information creation, publication, and distribution. In other words, it helps you organize your thoughts and ideas so that others can find and consume your content.
Without content management, the internet would be one big jumble of information without rhyme or reason. In the same way, if your business is like most today, you also store data in a number of systems and information repositories—an approach that has become the norm over the past two decades with rapid advancements in information technology. But as data volumes continue to increase, you face significant business risks and loss of efficiency because you simply can’t control all the information contained in siloed repositories. Time is wasted looking for a specific document that has not been managed appropriately—and you may not be fully aware of what other information you actually have. But with a content management solution, you can put all that information into an orderly system that’s easy to access and navigate.
Content management usually follows a seven-step process:
1. Plan: This step involves deciding what kind of content you want to create and where to publish it.
2. Create: This step is about developing ideas and then turning those ideas into content, such as videos and blog posts.
3. Store: Once you have your content, you need to store it so others can access it. Businesses typically store content on a website, repository, or blog.
4. Establish a workflow: This step helps to create content that aligns with organizational policies and maintains quality consistency.
5. Edit: Editing is one of the most critical phases in creating ready-to-view content for both people and search engine crawlers.
6. Publish: This step involves delivering content to users, including website visitors across the internet or employees using a business’s intranet.
7. Archive or delete: The final stage of content management is removing or archiving content when it's no longer relevant.
Content management isn't a fruitless endeavor. There are many benefits of content management, both for businesses and individuals.
Some of the benefits of content management for businesses include:
Some of the benefits of content management for individuals are:
Because managing online and enterprise business content is an in-depth process, organizations must have strategies to control their digital content. Following these strategies is vital to ensuring the success of any content management framework:
A content management framework is a platform that supports digital content creation, management, and delivery. It includes the processes, policies, people, and technologies needed to manage digital content throughout its lifecycle.
There are five main types of digital content management frameworks:
1. Web Content Management Systems (CMS): A web CMS is a platform that helps you create and manage websites. It provides a way to store website files, track changes made to those files, and publish changes to a live website.
2. Enterprise Content Management Systems (ECM): An ECM is a platform that stores, manages, and delivers enterprise-level content. This includes documents, images, videos, and other forms of content that are important to an organization.
3. Digital Asset Management Systems (DAM): A DAM is a type of CMS used to store and manage digital assets, such as images, videos, and audio files. It helps organizations keep track of their digital content and ensure that it is organized and accessible.
4. Social Media Content Management: This framework involves planning and publishing content on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. The goal of social media content management is to help create a robust social media marketing strategy with clear goals.
5. Mobile Content Management (MCM): An MCM platform makes information available on smartphones, tablets, and other smart devices.
Content can be either structured or unstructured. Structured content is heavily formatted, and computers can easily read it. It includes databases, spreadsheets, and XML files stored in a relational database. Unstructured content is not formatted in a specific, predefined way and is more difficult for computers to read. It includes text documents, images, and videos stored in data lakes.
Most content management tools work with both structured and unstructured content. However, some systems are better equipped to handle one type of content over the other. For example, a DAM system is better equipped to handle unstructured content, such as images and videos. On the other hand, a CMS is better equipped to manage structured content.
All organizations have different needs and priorities, so choosing the proper structure is about preference.
Organizations use content management strategies for a variety of purposes. For example, a company might use content management to:
Content management is crucial in delivering information to the right users at the right time. Using an enterprise content management system is ideal for fast-tracking this process.
The OpenText governance-based content management system helps organizations ensure seamless content delivery. We also offer a SaaS based cloud content management system for excellent compatibility, flexibility, and policy automation features, OpenText offers the perfect enterprise content management tool for your growing needs.
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