Web Content and Enterprise Content Management Systems
A Web presence is absolutely essential for competitiveness of today’s enterprises. A Web portal helps enterprises to expand awareness of their brands, offer support and services to customers, create a forum for feedback and discussion about their products and services, and sell their products and services online.
The Web portal can also be used as a medium for communication with employees, business partners and suppliers. It can offer email, instant messaging facility, educational materials, discussion forums and so on.
Even business transactions with suppliers can be facilitated through specialized facilities at the Web portal.
With all these advantages, any enterprise that does not have a Web presence would suffer a serious competitive disadvantage.
Web Content Management
The varied objectives of the enterprise Web portal require careful management of its content. Specialist teams would have to be created for creating and maintaining content intended for different audiences.
One problem in this connection is that operating personnel in marketing and other functional departments might not have the expertise to create Web content. It is here that a Web Content Management System - Web CMS - becomes relevant.
A Web CMS would allow even persons who are not website-savvy to create websites and Web content, with desired look and feel. It would incorporate facilities for creating, editing, storing, versioning and publishing content, and allow the organization to offer the rich functionality that users expect these days from websites, and do it with just one application.
The Web CMS can help with workflows and compliance issues, and work with the enterprise’s commerce systems and other business applications. By enabling non-technical business users to manage many of the tasks, it also reduces the overall burden on the IT department.
Implementing a Web CMS in Your Organization
The business purpose of each website must be defined in advance, starting with the desired final user experience and working backward. This user experience can be defined by answering questions such as:
- What is the user trying to achieve or do?
- What content does the person need to achieve or do it?
- How should this content be presented for easy comprehension and working?
- How can navigation to desired content be made intuitive and easy?
It is good user experience that leads to widespread adoption of the system, and consequent benefits.
An editorial team must be in place to review content and make editorial changes before it is published. Additionally, departmental and functional people must be associated both at the planning and subsequent operational stages.
Compatibility with existing IT infrastructure would facilitate implementation and subsequent operations. There are several Web CMS vendors in the market and compatibility and support issues should determine selection of a particualr vendor.
A Web CMS is used to create organizational websites that reaches prospects, employees, business partners and customers wherever in the world they happen to be. It is an important component of Enterprise Content Management systems. A Web CMS can help provide rich functionality to Web portals, and easy development of websites by even non-technical business people.