1.2 Qualities of a Good CMS

Owing to the high demand, tons of companies have come into play today offering content management services. Fortunately or unfortunately we have numerous content management systems available today in the market each with its own positives and negatives but with the same end goal—ease of managing content.

A good CMS should be meticulously chosen because most are quite costly and involve training overhead so that the end users (mostly business content contributors/editors/approvers) can effectively use them.

Following are some (but not all) of the points that should be considered while evaluating a CMS for one's organization. Always remember one thing—there is no "one size fits all" solution available! One should analyze one's business needs first and then choose from the range of CMS available in market.

A good CMS:

• Allows the non-technical core business personnel to author/publish content without the assistance of IT staff(web developers)

• Separates the actual content from the structure(look-and-feel) by allowing an easy way to create templates and associated rules/presentation files

• Ensures that the content contributors adhere to the organization's website standards and also maintain security and navigational elements

• Ensures a mechanism to publish content in a timely manner so that the website information is always up to date

• Consolidates business data and content in a single storage repository for faster retrieval and also reduces the cost of maintaining hardcopy versions of content

• Allows authoring content via standard web browsers thus reducing training needs

• Creates an audit trail of activities performed on the content/articles for security reasons

• Restricts content editing on the basis of the role/group/division of the user in the business

• Provides a process mechanism to control content authoring, reviewing, and publishing through an automated workflow

• Provides support on multiple OS platforms and web browsers and can be easily integrated with web application servers and third-party software or existing business systems

• Provides a version control/history mechanism to allow rollback of specific content/pages to their older versions

• Provides document control through a simple check-in/check-out user interface

• Schedules automatic publishing/removal of content at specified release/expiry dates

• Allows easy creation/management of CMS users, groups, and roles

• Provides a built-in rich text editing interface to allow content authoring with extensive features like formatting, hyperlinks support, image/file upload, and copy-paste from other authoring applications

• Rules out the need to install any software on the end user machines

• Supports multiple simultaneous users

• Supports indexing/searching on the basis of metadata for the content

• Provides an extensive reporting system for both end users and system administrators