Introduction to Content Management Systems
Thousands of software products fall into the category of Content Management Systems (CMS). This article discusses how to choose one to run your web-based applications, whether those include a customer/client portal (extranet), employee portal (intranet), database integration, or a mere public website.
What is CMS?
- A Content Management System can be an Aggregation Tool. It can link your data storage systems together. For example, if you want to generate automatic reports that pull information from your email repository, case management repository, document repository, and your workgroup calendaring system, you can. If you
- A Content Management System can be a Secure Client Portal. Your clients could authenticate (securely log in using their own username/password combination), be greeted by their own Client Portal, securely download their documents (which you have published explicitly for them) directly from your website, securely upload their own files (such as a QuickBooks snapshot or a scanned PDF), view their billing/invoice status, and even make a secure online payment to your firm.
- A Content Management System can be a Collaboration Tool. You and your clients can collaboratively discuss topics in an orderly fashion, and those conversations and resulting "Frequently Asked Questions" can be available to the public if you so choose. You can create your own online forums (email-enabled discussion groups), where your employees and clients can interact with each other on predefined or arbitrary topics.
- A Content Management System can be a Public Website Content Manager. A CMS, when properly implemented, allows your team members to spend only the minimum time necessary to update the actual content on your website, instead of spending a lot of time messing with the layout, navigation, graphics, colors, fonts, security permissions, workflow, and dataflow. Those portions of the CMS should be handled by graphics professionals and web security experts.
- A Content Management System can be an Employee Intranet. Stop managing your firm via spreadsheets and Word documents, which lock your firm's data in "silos", preventing quick manipulation of data! Use database-driven web interfaces to store and interact with your management tools in a "terminal" (final, permanent) way. Your employees can go to an internal website to view everything about their status within the firm. You can use database-driven.
Selecting a CMS
The website www.cmsmatrix.org is an excellent resource that allows you to compare the functionality sets of most known website CMSes. Many of the ones listed there are “free”, in the sense that you pay no software licenses to use their software. All of them require specialized knowledge and customization to implement successfully, some more than others. For any one of the 5 uses listed above, expect to generally pay about $15-30K for a professional implementation of one of these tools.
The Future of the Internet Browser
The internet browser, be it Mozilla (Firefox) or Microsoft's Internet Explorer, is well on its way to becoming the universal interface for computers. Most applications are moving towards being web-accessible, and the sooner your firm's management and customer interface systems move to the web, the better.