Content Management: Managing Content Nightmare

Content Management

It was a time when the external storage was worth like gold. Every care was taken to utilize every single bit of the available space. With the advent of mass storage devices, RAID architectures, SAN etc, there is no limit to the storage capacity. The fast pace growing world where the cost for storage is reducing every year, everyone is reckless in storing the content - emails, photos, scraps, blogs. Terabytes of data generated every day. Everyone wants to store everything, but what about retrieval of content when required? what about duplication of content? These are a couple of questions which give business a nightmare.

Many companies are thriving by providing content management solutions. Several Job openings are created every day due to it. So, where to get started -

Here is an introduction to the tip of the iceberg. Let us start with the basics -

1. What is Content?

Content is any soft copy of Images, Documents, Audio, Video, Scanned Document files which are in computer recognizable format generated manually or is computer generated. Any such file which computer can interpret and recognize to perform some action on it is content. For e.g. Any file visible in windows explorer like jpg, HTML, emails, documents etc are all content

Content can be unstructured or structured .

1. Unstructured Content

Unstructured is any content which does not fit in any defined data model, in other words, it does not have row-column table structure like in most of the database for e.g. files like images, documents etc.

2. Structured Content

Structured Content can be organized in defined data model, may be in the form of a relational model of rows and columns. like most of the databases, today support this structure.

2. What is Content Management?

Content Management is set of operations which can be performed on content in order to make things easier to manage it. Content, as seen in browser or explorer, are maintained in the file system by the Operating System.

3. Why is Content Management required?

As the size and number of content file increases, it is very tedious and time-consuming task to manage and sort out the content by merely using a file system. The major deciding factors to use Content Management can be -

Number of Content

Size of Content

Distribution of Content across geographies

Concurrent usage/editing of Content

Access Control on Content

4. What are basic actions provided by Content Management Software?

Typical Content Management Software or Suit may perform following actions on Content -

Concurrent usage or editing of content

Control the access to content by various security policies.

Minimal effort in storing and retrieving of content.

Minimize duplication of content.

Helps in auditing and maintaining logs of action performed on Content

Provide tools to collaborate and enhance communication between users

5. Which CMS Softwares are available?

There are many CMS software available, selection should be made based on the requirement of business.

Some of the leading CMS software are -

EMC Documentum

IBM Filenet

Alfresco

Above discussion is only scratching the surface of CMS.

I will try to explore more on CMS and EMC Documentum and its features in my next article.

Please provide your valuable comments and suggestions and what all can be included in this blog.