Our definitions of content, how we relate to it and how we manage it has changed significantly over the last decade or so. Blogs, wikis, personal websites, social networking, bookmarks and a host of similar phenomenon has given us a set of tools to author, discover, share and review content. We have changed as individuals into authors, editors and reviewers in our own right. We are now taking these phenomena into the enterprise. Agile, lightweight web 2.0 (or is that 3.0?) mechanisms of expression and collaboration are taking the place of traditional, structured intranets, knowledge and document management systems and e-mail and shared storage based systems. More importantly, the design and implementation of a content management system need no longer be a long, protracted battle that consumes a lot of development effort. So we should be seeing easy to use, rapid and fairly inexpensive deployments of content management systems right? Given the wide array of tools available today, it should be fairly simple to setup a CMS right? Content management should be a solved problem by now right?

Wrong!

It is still not easy to put together a coherent content management strategy that is cost effective. One of the companies I consult with is in the education space and is a content management system implementor’s dreamland. There is a large variety of content, several authors, a significant need to reuse and repurpose content, content published in several formats from printed books to online websites and a whole array of portals and websites both internal and external. Best of all there seems to be no existing content management system there that must be dislodged and redesigned – the authors of content work in their own silos, content is on disk drives and no one really knows what is available. But wait, that is not strictly true. The marketing organization charged with updating the external websites recently implemented a CMS system that made it easy for authors to edit content on the website, and isn’t there Joomla that is being used to manage the content on the e-learning portals and what about that SharePoint implementation that the corporate portal is built on? So there are many CMSes but no Content Management.

At this company, we realize the need to manage content and we feel the pain when we do not manage content. Is a million dollar system from some of the “usual suspects” of enterprise content management the only way to go or is there a open sources solution that fits our needs in a more cost effective manner? As an architect, what are the content management problems that need to be solved, how do we solve them, what trade-offs will we need to make, what solution do we pick and what will be the cost of this decision?

This series of posts is about looking at content management technology as an enterprise architect. I shall share some of the problems we need to solve and evaluate content management systems in terms of their capability in addressing these problems. We will take an under the hood look at some common and some not so common CMS tools. This is not a feature comparison of CMSes, if you are looking for that – you can get a good one at http://www.cmsmatrix.com.