Category: Content Management

CMS use in Business

Many businesses around the world are motivated to reach common goals—to grow and earn profit. From the creation of marketing plans to increase sales up to the conceptualization of creative advertising ideas to convince customers that they provide the best products in the market, businesses are giving the best of their efforts to get a huge chunk of the market share. Definitely, competition is ever-present in the industry, and if they want to get nearer to the buying public, they have to adapt to the technological changes that sets a trend in the business community.

The Emergence of the Online Trend

Enterprises today cannot take for granted the emerging trend of shopping online. While it provided with them with a universal platform to showcase their brands, products, and services, this on the other-hand can require another effort in creating and designing an effective online page. An e-commerce website became a popular business necessity and it is purpose is not only to sell, but also to provide consumers with updates and useful information about the offers they are marketing.

Why CMS is a Must in Creating a Website?

Like building your own house; the over-all plan, the materials, and the people who will participate in its construction determine the end product. In the creation of the website, a functional enterprise web CMS or content management system play a vital role in ensuring that your website will appear pleasing to the eye of the end users.

Your CMS is the backbone of your website, choosing it right will give you an opportunity to have a website that is easy to manage and is fully functional for the visitors. To answer the question why CMS is a must in creating your website, it reason is very simple—without a CMS, there is also no website to exist.

How to Choose the Right CMS for Your Business?

We mentioned above that it is very important to choose the right CMS, but right can be subjective for different businesses because they may require a platform that is according to the nature of their industry. Moonlighting as a web developer and content writer at the same time, I find it critical to the success of an online page on how they present their website, design-wise and content-wise. When a client asks for a simple website with a few technicality requirement so that they can easily post blogs with given themes to customize, WordPress is a good pick. If they want a personalized design for full-forced online branding, starting from scratch with Drupal can be their best bet.

Moreover, there still are plenty of CMS (though not popular) offers the best experience of a business need. Ever heard of elcomCMS? How about ExpressionEngine? There are long list of amazing CMS out there, and they are just waiting to be unlocked.

Below are few points that a business owner/web developer have to consider in choosing a CMS.

1. Always think of the users. No matter how techie you are and you found a CMS you can easily work with, the only way that it will count is if you will be the lone person to use it. Not everyone is a tech savvy like you, and you have to think of the people who will update the site in the future as well as the online users who will navigate on the site.
2. Make sure that the CMS you will use have the functionality that you need. It doesn’t matter if the CMS has a big or small following, what is important is it can provide you with all the features that you need.
3. Do your homework before settling on a particular CMS, there are myriad of choices out there and doing even a small research can make a big difference on how your website will perform in the future.

Enterprise content management is a term people in small to medium size businesses rarely encounter, but one that is just as critical to them as it is in large corporations. Enterprise content management, also known as ECM, is an overall strategy for managing your documents, video, photographs, graphics, engineering drawings, and any other types of content your company uses. It encompasses categories of data management like document imagining, database management, photo sharing, and any other types of record or data management.

Your ECM strategy will determine many critical factors for your company’s data systems. It covers areas of concern like:

– Data Security
– Storage Systems
– Archival Methods
– Data Conversion
– Data Access Systems

Those are just a few of the elements covered in a good ECM strategy. The best place to start to determine your company’s content management plan is to inventory all types of data used in your company. Do not rely on what your Information Technology department believes. Take time to visit with department heads in every department in your company. Visit with advertising, marketing, sales, manufacturing, customer support, finance, human resources, engineering, and any other departments your company has.

You should expect a few surprises as your inventory your company’s data and content usage. It is common to discover departments have setup their own small internal content management systems, even if it is informally. You need to document how the data is stored, used, and secured. This information is crucial to creating a strategy that is embraced and will succeed in your company. These steps are essential for small companies as much as large companies. Small companies frequently have fewer controls on their data and content management allowing departments to dictate their own systems. It is time to bring them all under a single management umbrella.

Why is it so important to take all of these diverse sources of content and bring them into a single system? It saves time, money, and work. How often have you watched as departments point fingers at each other about information that was not shared on a project? Most of the time the individuals involved in these disputes did not intentionally fail to share information. They had no idea they other department did not have access or that they even needed the data. When you have a well-designed content management system for your enterprise, finding the content you need becomes easy.

Instead of spending hours tracking down people in other departments and trying the find the pictures, drawings, or documents, you do a quick search of the system and locate what you need. You many discover you do not have security clearance for the documents, but at least you know where they are and have a process you can use to request access.

Sharing content between departments becomes easier, too. You do not need to email documents and other content. You setup shared folders and projects in your management system. Everyone involved in the project can check out the materials, add annotations, request further information, and create new content all within the project area of the system. Instead of battles between departments about data ownership and project management, you have a unified platform that encourages cross department engagement and makes sharing the data necessary for a project simple.

Your employees can restrict the data they share to individual people, entire departments, or groups of people. Utilizing groups, you can setup security structures that cross department and location boundaries allowing greater collaboration and faster workflow on important projects.

What kind of software is required to build your enterprise content management system? A couple popular choices are Microsoft’s Sharepoint and Oracle’s Content Management. There is a variety of other companies offering top quality solutions, including several open source solutions. You choice of content management system should be based on evaluating the types of data and what other types of systems your enterprise uses.

As an example, if your company exclusively uses Microsoft products likes Microsoft Office, Exchange Server, Outlook, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Project, and Windows Servers, then it would make perfect sense to look at Microsoft Sharepoint for your content management purposes. The integration of products makes implementation easier. Additionally, your IT staff is already trained to work with Microsoft products and support reducing their learning curve on the system.

We want to express a small word of warning. Just because your company uses Microsoft does not always mean it is the best solution. Take extra time to evaluate your types of content carefully. Some systems excel working with images, drawings, and videos, while other systems excel working with documents, web content, and other data. Determine what your company needs to accomplish and then evaluate features.

You should wait to evaluate prices until the end of your evaluation of enterprise content management systems. The purchase price of the software is just a small portion of your overall cost. Ease of implementation, ease of use, and annual fees can make a more expensive software platform the most cost effective solution. Look carefully at the costs for ongoing maintenance of the system. Ask your IT department for an estimate on installation costs and management costs of maintaining the software.

The toughest job is to determine which system your company employees will accept and use. Your real return on investment comes when your employees start using your content management system to improve their efficiency and reduce the cost of storing and managing content. Take a close look at how the software functions from a standard user’s perspective. Is the interface something they are familiar with, or that they can learn quickly. Does the software offer good help screens or tutorials?

Enterprise content management software can help your company take control of your documents, images, and other content that is currently scattered throughout the company. Choosing the right software is a careful balance of evaluating costs, functionality, and ease of use. If you follow our few suggestions to inventory your types of data, evaluate your current software platforms, and test with real employees, you will choose a system that gives you a fast return on investment.

Almost all blogs these days make use of one of the popular content management systems (CMS). Beyond that, many very high profile websites also use CMS. For online journalists, it’s basically a requirement to understand how to use one or more of the many CMS solutions.

People who are newcomers to online content production might wonder why CMS is so popular. Here are a few reasons.

1. CMS separates content from design. Sometimes, webmasters want to change the look and feel of their websites without changing the actual content. In other words, all of the words in the articles that have been posted will remain the same, but the actual design of the website (including color scheme, organization, and framework imagery) will change. One of the biggest advantages to CMS is that webmasters can change the design without altering any of the content. The two items are kept totally separate, so one can be altered without affecting the other. This is an excellent time saver.

2. CMS facilitates ease of editing. The popular CMS solutions (WordPress, Joomla, Drupal) offer editing that doesn’t require the article author to understand the complexities associated with Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). The author uses a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor to author articles. This means that the author can use bold, italics, etc. without being forced to use markup. The author literally sees the article in the editor as it would appear to a reader on the screen.

3. CMS is often offered freely. A lot of web host providers offer one or more CMS applications for free as part of the subscription price. This means that when someone opts to start a website, and utilizes the services of a web host provider, that person already has a CMS available to use. In other words, price is rarely a reason to notuse a CMS.

Content management is a huge market that companies are investing in now more than ever. The reason is that by investing in a solid web content management system they are able to get more customers for less money and ultimately drive up their return on investment.

Because the production of information is flowing at a rate never before seen in the history of mankind, managing tat information and keeping it organized has become a priority that is at the forefront of many companies’ minds.

Therefore, the web content management industry will continue to see massive growth in sales because more and more companies will be needing new, more effective systems to replace the older, obsolete ones.

Workers will also greatly benefit from a better management of the content that is used at the company where they work. By gaining easier access to the information as well as more efficient ways of sorting through it they will be able to be more productive and generate more revenue for their employers.

The fact is that out of all the content that is produced today, well over half of it is only in digital form. What’s more is that ratio of digital to printed content is only going to keep growing as time goes by.

But even though digital content takes up much less physical space than the more traditional printed content, it is easier to get lost in the sheer amount of it. Therefore keeping it organized will become a more important priority than printed content ever needed. It’s really easy to make a mess when there is more information available to shuffle around.

One of the expected trends is that the prices of content management systems will grow massively in the coming years. Some studies estimate that growth at as high as fifteen percent. The reason for that expected growth is simple; more and more companies are being ushered into the digital world and are in dire need of a way to manage all of their content and files.

What’s more is that the growth won’t just come from companies that are new to using content management systems. Once again the expectation is that almost a third of the companies that are using older systems will be looking to upgrade the way they manage their content. Their hope is to make their processes more efficient and of course increase their overall revenue.

But integrating any new technology requires massive amounts of planning and preparation on the part of the companies. Most businesses have thousands upon thousands of files that will have to get transferred from their old system into their new one. The difficulty in this task is to do it without interrupting the everyday operations of the company.

Another potential problem that companies who are looking to purchase a new CMS will have to face is the fact that not all are created equal. The third party enterprises that create and setup these management systems aren’t all of equal quality and competency.

Some horror stories of businesses purchasing content management systems for millions of dollars only to find out that their purchase was poorly optimized and limited the scope of the activities that they could use it for. What’s worse is that in some cases, the actual provider of the CMS went out of business which left the company who bought it from them alone and without support.

The result is that countless companies who have bought bad systems ended up having to start over again and purchase brand new solutions. That not only means more costs in the form of buying the system, but also in planning its integration as well as the transfer from the old to the new.

But beyond simply going for better systems in general, these new systems will be required to adapt to the ever changing landscape of delivery platforms. There is a constant stream of new devices coming out from tablets, to phones to net books.

Therefore the trend in content management will be that the systems used will need to be highly adaptable and fluid in their design. This will be essential for all the companies who want to reach their target audience regardless if they use a more traditional computer or the newest tablet device.

In addition to the physical devices used to deliver the content, the focus on the ever expanding social media world will be equally important. This means that companies will absolutely have to get a firm grasp and establish clear strategies on how to best use the various social networks to drive customers and repeat business.

But a problem that companies will face on the social media level is that the users of those networks are easily distracted by the barrage of advertisements and distractions that are presented to them. Therefore to keep the attention of the prospective customer, the content delivered will absolutely have to be of higher quality.

Also, the content delivered will have to come at a faster pace. People are consuming information at a faster rate than ever before. That means that maintaining engagement will require more than just quality but also frequency.

The real challenge will be in how all of these new channels of information will be integrated together to create a seamless experience for the user. In addition to that, the said experience will have to be tailored in a way that doesn’t detract the user from the main purpose of the businesses’ web presence, which is to make more sales.

Finally, all of this information will have to be presented in a way that is accessible and looks good on the variety of devices available. This will be a constantly evolving challenge as new types of phones and devices are constantly coming out.

There might even be massive changes on the horizon in terms of the devices used by customers, as hinted by products like the google glasses. Companies will have to be constantly on their toes to make sure that they are tailoring their web content management systems to take advantage of each and every marketing avenue that they can.