Content Management Systems (CMS) have greatly evolved over the last few years. Some CMS provide extensive features while others
promise ease of installation and out of he box functionality. Any software package is only as effective as its alignment with long-term business
goals and objectives.
At Mainward we understand that content management systems are most valuable in situations where a site is volatile and the content lifecycle
process is complex. In some cases, a meticulous and precise information architecture may satisfy your needs.
A CMS is based on the concept of a unified content and metadata repository. The term content and information here are broad enough to include
actual product content, product and marketing information, editorials, authored notes or articles, manuals, and anything that represents a unit of
information to the end user. There are typically multiple workflows that feed content into this repository.
• Unification of diverse information sources in a central location
• Tagging/indexing/qualification of data through a common set of terms or taxonomy
The former is designed to minimize the creation of unique content delivery channels that cannot be leveraged, while the
latter is designed to support the content access adaptors in retrieving or manipulating information from various application
sources.
• Creation (including authoring, syndication, aggregation)
• Categorization (including metadata)
• Workflow (including approval, review and editing)
• Tagging (including qualification, integrity of tags, indexing)
• Storage and access (database or revision control system)
The objective of the CMS implementation is to provide ability to author, review, publish, organize, expire, archive and
version content, with the capability for rollback controlled by a flexible workflow.
The directory structure needs to reflect the sitemap. Flexibility and
scalability are the most important features of the directory structure.
The Presentation Templates are based on the HTML pages developed.
These templates contain placeholders for CMS driven content. It is
essential to create modular pages so that they could handle variable
content sizes.
Data Capture templates allow an administrator to input content and
metadata. The content contributor can enter their information into a
data capture template and select multiple Presentation Templates to
apply the content. The Data Capture Templates are created for all
pages that serve content from the CMS. Every organization has
unique data requirements.
The execution of business processes to manage content is achieved
by using a specific workflow component. The process entails setting
up users and permissions to manage the authoring, reviewing and
publishing process.
A predefined process should strictly guide the population of the
content. Repurposed existing content is automatically migrated using
custom scripts that are built to extract content while new content is
manually entered.
There were two major components for deployment: the Presentation
Templates and the Data Capture Templates. The table below
describes how each could be used.
To facilitate testing, business and technical test scenarios are
created and executed at Mainward. User-based scenarios are
used to structure a system test plan. This test scenario includes
a set of sequenced user actions, executed in order to test a
specific system function. The set of scenarios created provides
a complete test suite of the application. This would mean that
once the scenarios are executed and accepted by the test team,
the application is production-worthy. The test scenarios created
are based on the approach defined for the test phase.
At Mainward after every client engagement, and at the end of the
project we work to provide evidence that substantiates the value of
the user experience, strategy and technology implementation.
Some of the benefits identified include:
