Article on Basic Definition of CMS

Posted on June 4, 2003 by David

James Robertson has published an article that provides a concise and basic introduction to content management systems. This is a great piece to refer to management and others who you need to get up to speed on what exactly a CMS is and the general business problems to which it can be applied.

So, what is a CMS?

A content management system (CMS) is critical to the success of almost every website and intranet, and yet many organisations are not familiar with this technology.

So, while we have written many articles on a range of specific CMS issues and strategies, we now take a step back to answer the question: what is a content management system?

In this article we will focus on web content management, and will only touch upon broader content issues at the end of the document.

Finding the Knowledge in a CMS

Posted on May 7, 2003 by David

James Robertson: Where is the knowledge in a CMS?

Interestingly, the knowledge is not in the content itself. Instead, it’s in the processes and practices that surround a content management system.

This article puts forth the idea that the configuration and design for a content management system deployment contains valuable knowledge, more so than the raw content that is loaded into it. In order to deploy a complex system like this you have to learn about how your organization operates, what it is trying to achieve, and collaborate to develop a solution to support those efforts. Very valuable knowledge that should be preserved.

The lesson I take away from this: document your CMS deployment processes and research and archive it for reading later by those who follow you (or yourself five years later). You need to capture the ‘why’s of how you designed things since they may not be obvious to someone maintaining or updating the system who was not involved in the original project. A project blog would do this nicely.