Monday, January 17, 2011

Content Management Systems in Major Corporations

Content managements systems are taking over the business world. Content management systems look to accomplish many goals in the corporate world including:
  • Faster updates for web pages
  • Maintain standardization rules
  • Easy-to-use interface
  • Provide web access to web page content owners
  • Creates accountability within the organization
To remain competitive in business, updates with new content, security patches and new features needs to be uploaded quickly with no issues. Content management systems help facilitates this within web pages. Content owners have the ability to make direct changes, completely bypassing a work order. Within many systems, the requestor can send a request through a tool for approval by the content owner.
Content management systems function by using a template. Therefore, specific areas of web pages cannot be changed by the content owner. Since these changes cannot be made, this standardizes the look and feel of all web pages on a specific site. If the content owner(s) could make changes, it may not fit with any other sites in the network thus looking unprofessional.
Additionally, a content management system features an easy-to-use graphical user interface. For instance, WordPress makes creating a website so easy, anyone that is able to turn on a computer can create content. As content management systems evolve, the technology becomes easier to use.
In most major companies, web developers do not write content for web pages. They create a format that is web ready while content owners create the information to fill in that format. Using a content management system, the content owner has the ability to access different areas of the site to publish the content they have created. For instance, directly onto a website or a staging server.
Finally, these systems can create user accounts with specific permissions which results in tracking and thus accountability. Therefore, only certain sections can be edited by certain individuals. All changes made to the system are tracked so the responsible party can be identified. Also, there are many change management tools that will allow the administrator to back out any errors.
Most major corporations feature their information on some type of content management system which streamlines content creation. Since they are easy to navigate and it is easy to create and publish content, most organizations opt for their implementation. Although there is always a group of information technology professionals monitoring the system, content management tools systems practically run themselves.