Multimedia Services: Content Management Service

Content management, or CM, is a set of processes and technologies that support the evolutionary life cycle of digital information. This digital information is often referred to as content or, to be precise, digital content. Digital content may take the form of text, such as documents, multimedia files, such as audio or video files, or any other file type which follows a content life cycle that requires management.

The digital content life cycle consists of six primary phases:

• create
• update
• publish
• translate
• archive
• retire

For example, an instance of digital content is created by one or more authors. Over time that content may be edited. One or more individuals may provide some editorial oversight thereby approving the content for publication. Publishing may take many forms. Publishing may be the act of pushing content out to others, or simply granting digital access rights to certain content to a particular person or group of persons. Later that content may be superseded by another form of content and thus retired or removed from use. Content management is an inherently collaborative process. As a reference, basic roles and responsibilities within the content management process are summarized in the glossary section below: A critical aspect of content management is the ability to manage versions of content as it evolves (version control). Authors and editors often need to restore older versions of edited products due to a process failure or an undesirable series of edits. Another equally important aspect of content management involves the creation, maintenance, and application of review standards. Each member of the content creation and review process has a unique role and set of responsibilities in the development and/or publication of the content. Each review team member requires clear and concise review standards which must be maintained on an ongoing basis to ensure the long-term consistency and health of the knowledge base.

A content management system or service (CMS) is a computer software system used to assist its users in the process of content management. CMS facilitates the organization, control, and publication of a large body of documents and other content, such as images and multimedia resources. A CMS often facilitates the collaborative creation of documents. A web content management system is a content management system with additional features to ease the tasks required to publish web content to web sites. The figure below offers a high-level representation of a generic content management process.