Enterprise Technology: Choosing the Right Content Management System

Workflow and Collaboration

Companies most often choose a CMS because they want an automated workflow system for organizing content management tasks into a structured approval process, according to the Forrester study.

At financial services company Brown Brothers Harriman, for example, workflow was a key consideration in choosing EBT's Engenda. The new CMS is now running in a pilot project, but BBH will eventually roll it out to the company's entire 10,000-page Web site. Ed Marcarelli, a managing director at BBH, predicts that 40 to 50 people will eventually be involved in the site's day-to-day updating, and "that number will probably grow as we expand the use of Engenda to the intranet."

Getting the details of the workflow right requires serious effort--in part because Brown Brothers Harriman, as a financial institution, must strictly control who can post material to its site. But Marcarelli says anything would be better than the old way of posting content, when pages were written in Microsoft Word and then e-mailed to the technology staff, who transformed the text into HTML using Dreamweaver and placed it on the servers.

"It was a multiple-step process that took a lot of supervision," Marcarelli says. "We were making do, but we didn't want to compromise quality. We think we've solved that problem."

Streamlining isn't the only way to improve workflow, however; companies also benefit from advanced technology. Observers praise the unique architecture of Open Market's Content Server 3.1. Most CMSs are designed to work smoothly with one or more application servers--from companies like Art Technology Group, BEA, and IBM--which handle tasks ranging from personalization and e-commerce to transaction management and load balancing. Application servers manage and serve apps or services throughout an enterprise and the Web.

The Open Market system promises to let nearly everyone in an organization--not just a few dozen or even a few hundred--contribute to a Web site. As the number of contributors grows, the program could pay big dividends by managing contributor requests just as load-balancing software manages end-user requests. Open Market is the only vendor currently offering this highly scalable architecture, but many others are headed in the same direction.

Enterprise Integration

The CMS you choose must also work well with your existing information systems. "Clients are heavily invested in their application servers, and the CMS has to be able to plug into that," Agency.com's Appnel says. That's why his firm regularly works with Interwoven, whose products support various enterprise architectures.

Telecommunications equipment maker Nortel Networks chose Interwoven for the same reason, says Larry Morton, Nortel's manager of Web application infrastructure. Nortel's public Web sites and extranets needed an open-standard tool that would work with any app laid on top of it. "We didn't want to go back to where each new commerce application had its own content-entry system," Morton says.

So should you buy an all-in-one solution or invest in an array of standards-based components? Both approaches have advantages, but the key issue relates to the technological infrastructure already in place. Often, larger content management systems have their own application servers, complicating efforts to tie them into the enterprise. Smaller firms may be able to avoid integration hassles by basing their entire e-business operations on a large-scale CMS system.

Sometimes, companies find, earlier decisions largely dictate what CMS to select. Infoworks project manager Robert N. Campbell says that for sharing internal technical and reference information at his company, engineering giant Bechtel in Houston, "It made sense to stay with Documentum [which relies on outside application servers and Web servers to deliver the content] because a lot of our content is already in Documentum formats."

Personalization and XML

Another consideration in appraising a CMS is how well it tailors content to specific system users, showing them what they want to see based on stored user profiles. Mike Maziarka, director at consulting firm Cap Ventures in Norwell, Massachusetts, says most high-end CMS products handle this aspect of personalization fairly well. The challenge, he says, is to deliver content in a format appropriate to a wide range of reception devices.

The key to success here is XML. This language is designed to provide context for each bit of content, making it clear that the number 86 in a Web document, for example, is a price and not an inventory quantity, the temperature in Miami, or an order to eject someone from the site. "It's like TCP/IP was for the Web," says Nazhin Zarghamee, vice president of marketing for Documentum, "a lingua franca for content management."

The big stumbling block for XML, of course, is what to do about legacy data--the content companies created back in the days when they posted information in flat HTML files. "Most Web sites don't have their content in reusable form," observes Nortel's Morton, "and we need tools to automate the process of making content available to be categorized or tagged." In many cases, the prospect of recoding tens of thousands of pages is too daunting.

Interwoven addresses legacy-data issues with MetaTagger, which automates tagging--adding metadata to--enterprise Web content. MetaTagger enforces tagging of new content as part of standard workflow. For existing content, the program's batch mode simplifies adding tags by establishing preconfigured categories for vertical industries and enabling users to tailor tags to their particular needs.

Managing People, Not Content

In the end, content management is "as much about managing the users as it is about managing the content," says Forrester's Wilkoff. The employees responsible for content are typically scattered across the organization. Unless all parties involved find that it helps them work more effectively, no amount of spiffy technology will make your content management system a success.