Know Your Tech: CMS

Marketing is increasingly critical to a business’ success, especially when it comes to the use of content as an impressions generator. This makes it all the more important for your content to be well organized and managed. Here, we’ll go over a few options you have as far as content management systems are concerned, and how they make maintaining your content strategy that much simpler.

What is a Content Management System?
A content management system, or CMS, is an application or program intended to assist you in properly producing, editing, and storing content. A CMS serves as a centralized access point for those with authorization to manage your content strategy, helping you to leverage it more effectively. Each CMS falls into one of two types:

• Web content management
• Enterprise content management

Depending on your business’ needs and circumstances, one of these choices will be the superior option for you to leverage.

Web-Based Content Management System (WCMS)
Drupal, Joomla, WordPress
If you’re in business today, chances are pretty good that you have a website, and that you hired a website creator to build it. The WCMS is how all of your content on the website is put together and organized, and because your website is the cornerstone of your online marketing, you need to be sure that this content is equipped with the management features and abilities that will boost its success. The other benefit to leveraging a WCMS is that they are largely user-friendly, which means that learning to manage a website is made into a much simpler process.

Because marketing needs can shift in days, or even hours, organizations like yours may need to make rapid changes to their site. A WCMS allows those changes to be made quickly and easily, keeping your content up-to-date and relevant, while incorporating engagement tools like social media, forms, and discussion boards.

Enterprise Content Management System
HP Distributed Workflow, IBM ECM, Oracle WebCenter Content
While there are a few small differences, the basic function of an enterprise content management system is effectively the same as a web-based one. Not only does it provide an organizational information repository for all of the members of the organization to access, it also provides the same content management capabilities. They are often leveraged by businesses in order to:

• Manage access to organizational content, improving security
• Improve collaboration through improved file access and searchability
• Centralize an organization’s content
• Build a digital content storage platform through the incorporation of a document management system
• Improve workflow efficiency by creating and storing templates

Enterprise content management provides both access and control over a business’ information, a must in the competitive market of today, helping to boost their success and profitability.

If you have any questions about the different content management systems and software solutions that may benefit your business, you can always lean on the experts at i-medIT. Call us at 630-549-6199 for more information.