Web Content Management

Content management refers to the capacity to store, manage, and cross-reference documents of all kinds. As such, content management is an essential aspect of data-centric portals. Web content management (WCM) focuses on the capability of authoring, storing, managing, and publishing content to the Web. Web-based content may include HTML pages, ASP pages, images, sound clips, XML files, plain text, and rich media, and may also include other ancillary content such as style sheets and metadata.

Despite the traditional aggregation role of portals, the ability to create and manage unique, Web-based content on the portal is increasingly seen as an essential capability. For example, a corporate intranet site may primarily provide access to line of business systems, but could also use web content management capabilities to enable publishing of internal “breaking news” stories from the firm’s HR group. Furthermore, the WCM system could also be used to aggregate press releases posted on the firm’s external site into a comprehensive “internal news” section of the intranet portal. One of the key services WCM provides is empowering business users to take control over their own content. A sophisticated content management system can excuse Web administrators from the day-to-day publishing of content to the portal. Instead, business users are able to work within the WCM system to handle content creation, approval and publishing tasks on their own.

Therefore, a solid WCM system, closely integrated with other parts of the portal, such as user authentication, personalization, and search, can add significant value to a portal deployment.

Workflow

In the context of portals, workflow is primarily the process that controls how content is approved and published. Workflow is what enables business users to control their own content, because it limits approval and publishing rights based on criteria preset by the IT department. Sophisticated workflow includes alert functions to notify the next approver that content is ready for them to review, customizable approval paths to enable parallel processing, and variable review levels for different categories of content. Workflow can also form an essential part of a collaboration portal, where, for example, multiple parties have to sign off on group work before it is submitted as final.

Other workflow requirements are more transaction oriented. For example, using business rules to define how an order is handled once a consumer inputs it into a commerce portal.

Regardless of the context, workflow must be both easy to access for business users (preferably integrating status reporting and notifications within the tools they already use to do work), and easy to customize and extend for technical workers designing solutions that span multiple systems and scenarios.