Why do I Need a CMS?


Many businesses think that they have no need for a CMS, using the argument that their site isn't that big, and they only have a small amount of staff. However, the amount of data that the business handles is often grossly underestimated, and a content management system could actually help the business substantially.

Organizing information can be problematic; even when web sites or intranets start off fairly small, they can quickly expand and become hard to manage and maintain. This is especially true with company intranets, as they usually have a large amount of information added on a daily basis to keep employees up to date.

Companies typically have a special team that manages the intranet and uploads information to it using Web Design programs. If staff need some information added to the intranet, they supply a copy to the intranet team, then wait for it to be uploaded. This leads to wasted staff time, duplicate information, and means that the intranet will never be up-to-date due to the delay between the staff member giving it to the intranet team, and the time taken for them to add the information.

As the intranet expands the amount of information it handles will grow, increasing the time lag for information to be uploaded, especially since content can only be added by the intranet team. When large amounts of data are continually being added to the site, it will need to be categorized so that users can easily find their way around. However the intranet team won't have time to categorize the data in such depth. What happens, in effect, is that the few people who work with the intranet end up organizing the filing system for every department in the company, which is hardly an optimal situation.

We'll now look at these situations in greater detail, and explain how CMS can help in each situation.

Adding Content

To add content to the intranet you need to have an understanding of web design so that you can do things like adding new menu items for example, which typically most staff will not be able to do. Consequently, this task is usually assigned to a small team of web developers who liaise with staff to get information for the intranet. Of course, this limitation can be a problem, but this is the case with a lot of company intranets.

We mentioned earlier that this has the undesired effect of creating a delay in getting the information up onto the intranet, but there are other disadvantages that it is important to be aware of. The team responsible for adding content to the intranet is unlikely to have knowledge of what the data actually means, since it is not something they will have specialist knowledge about. This means that they will probably be unable to spot errors in the information as they enter it, they will simply copy what they have been given. Furthermore, the copying process itself may lead to mistakes that weren't present in the original information.

This can also have the effect of stifling useful knowledge that could benefit others because only a few people in each department are in charge of adding data, and there will be a limit to the amount of information the Intranet Team can add, depending on the number of staff for example.

How a CMS Can Help

CMS allows easy entry of data without requiring knowledge of web design, HTML, or specialized web design programs. This allows all staff to be able to enter data, although you then have to decide how much control they have, for instance if the staff are allowed to upload pictures through the web browser, you can limit both the physical size of the picture, and the file size that can be uploaded.

CMS separates the content from the presentational aspects of the page, allowing staff to focus on the actual information itself; the presentational aspects of the page, design, menus, links, etc., are handled by the CMS.

Note

Allowing staff to update their own sections of the intranet through CMS makes the staff feel more involved. A message throughout this book has been that an intranet can only be effective once all the staff actively adopt it and use it; CMS allows all employees to contribute directly to the intranet, increasing their awareness of it and their enthusiasm to use it.

The advantages of this are pretty clear. CMS allows staff to enter the data themselves through a simple form in either a web page or a custom application, alleviating the need for a specialist team to enter data for the intranet. This solves the problems we mentioned earlier: there will no longer be a delay in getting content on the intranet, and the content itself will be more accurate since it will be added by staff who are knowledgeable about it.

Inefficiencies of Handmade Intranets

Intranets that are maintained by hand usually end up being very inefficient, and it can be a long process to add a small amount of information. To add new content to the intranet, a new HTML page has to be created on which the new information is entered, then all relevant site menus have to be manually updated to link to the new page.

A lot of time is wasted on these repetitive tasks. Templates can help this situation, but if the site is large, it can still be difficult to maintain. Imagine, for example, that you have a menu stored in a template. If you add a new menu item to the template, the new link will be physically added as HTML to all pages that are using that particular template. This saves a lot of time, but say you have 500 web pages using that particular template. Each time you make a change to the menu, 500 pages have to be physically changed and then re-uploaded to the server. Even when this task is automated it can still take a while and uses unnecessary bandwidth as 500 pages are uploaded to the server each time a menu item is added.

On intranets without CMS, information can end up being duplicated, leading to versioning problems as old and new copies of the same information exist on the Internet concurrently, and leaving users confused as to which is correct.

How CMS Can Help

CMS improves this situation by allowing contributors to manage their own content, freeing up the staff who run the system to keep the servers and networks running, design the site, and keep the technology up to date.

The staff from each department who actually use the data will be entering the data themselves, as well as managing and categorizing it, so they and other staff members in the department can find the information they need. They are allowed to add and edit content, so they can make sure that the information on the intranet for their area is always correct and up to date. Because staff are in control of their own section of the intranet, and are responsible for adding content themselves, it helps to eliminate the chances of data being duplicated, as they know what content they previously added.

Repetitive tasks such as building menus and maintaining links (within a preset framework) can be handled by the CMS, taking this job away from staff and freeing up staff time. Data for menus is usually generated dynamically in real time, so if a link is changed, it's instantly reflected on all pages. There is no need to change the HTML for the link on every page that contains the link, and then re-upload all those pages to the server, saving time and bandwidth.

With a business intranet, it's not just the data itself that's important, the links between pieces of information are also important. A page of figures may be absolutely meaningless on its own, but linked to some other content it may be much more meaningful. This is analogous to an office filing cabinet: all relevant documents are kept together in a file, rather than being stored separately, to make them easy to find.

A good CMS will allow you to link related pieces of information to each other and make them available together, so they are viewed in the correct context. Once the link has been established, the CMS takes over and even if documents are moved, it maintains the correct links, which quickly becomes extremely difficult with a hand-maintained intranet. If you are using documents from other applications, such as Microsoft Word documents, or Adobe PDF files, the CMS should be able to track versions of the documents, and maintain links as with other types of content.

It can also categorize the data faster and more accurately than a human could, and so allows for more accurate search results, ensuring information never gets "lost" in the system.

Inconsistency

Another problem that often occurs with handmade intranets is that over time, parts of the site start to alter as different people take over. Each person has their own style and way of working, and so eventually parts of the site start to look and work differently from each other and use different ways of categorizing data.

Over time the whole purpose of the intranet (that is, sharing information between staff) starts to break down, and each department becomes separate from the others, and the whole point of building the intranet is lost.

How CMS Can Help

CMS can help enforce a consistent style, and can help to ensure that the information is categorized correctly by presenting a solid framework for the information. It maintains consistency between departments, and ensures that an employee feels as at home in another department's section of the intranet, as he or she does in their own department's section.

Over time the site can still evolve, and change to meet future needs, but the CMS package ensures that all departments change in the same direction, and keeps the changes consistent.

This again is another major benefit over maintaining a site by hand. When you have a large number of pages, maintained by different people who come and go, you can quickly end up with a mix of different styles and navigation systems. Although CSS can help with visual consistency, it still allows scope for abuse unless strictly managed.

The CMS handles the presentational aspects of the page and manages the links, ensuring consistency; a user who normally uses one part of the intranet, can easily use another part if necessary, instantly finding their way around to get the information they require.

It also helps to ensure that "accidents" don't happen and incorrect or private data appears. The CMS provides a rigid structure, and data can be checked by other staff members, for example, before it actually appears live. A CMS also provides an audit trail, allowing managers to easily see who added content and when it was added. This means that staff are ultimately responsible for the content they maintain and they are accountable for any mistakes. If you compare this to a hand-maintained system, you can see it's much more secure; with a hand-maintained system it can be difficult to show who added pieces of information, and who is responsible for that data.

Need for Rapid Growth

As more and more data is now being shared between businesses such as customer bases, transactions etc., it becomes increasingly difficult to keep track of all the information and allow it to be shared between staff. Staff in charge of the intranet can become overwhelmed with data, held back by the process of having to create a new intranet page for each piece of data, categorizing it, and adding links to it.

With hand-maintained systems, as greater volumes of content need to be added to the system, the intranet team soon becomes unable to cope, and skilled IT personnel become tied up doing repetitive tasks such as creating new pages and maintaining links.

CMS Can Help

CMS allows each staff member to enter data, subject to preset restrictions, so the intranet team doesn't get overloaded and the system will always contain the latest information.

" A CMS actually gets more productive when it handles greater volumes of content"

The system will also be able to scale according to the number of staff, and can work just as well with 100 staff, as it can with 10 staff.

A good CMS package should scale well in terms of the amount of information it can manage, and be easy to update and expand in the future as the needs of the intranet change and evolve. If you have a hand-maintained system, the intranet will always be slightly behind the times. As the intranet content grows, the lag will be greater and greater. The hand-management system becomes a larger and larger problem the more you use it.

On the other hand, a CMS actually gets more productive when it handles greater volumes of content, and since content is entered in realtime, the lag is eliminated. The CMS becomes more helpful the more it is used.

Cutting Costs and Increasing Productivity

Although a CMS package may initially involve a large outlay to set the system up, this is easily justified by the money the system saves over time. CMS will perform many jobs that previously staff had to do, freeing them up to perform other tasks.

It also allows staff to deal with the information more efficiently, and ensures that documents don't get "lost in the system". Staff are able to apply complex searches to find the data they need quickly, they can access the information from anywhere, and related documents can be linked to each other.

A CMS also ensures that everyone has access to up-to-date information, it makes staff accountable for the information they enter, and also checks can be enforced before a document goes live. Clearly, mistakes in information could cause major problems for a company, not only can mistakes make a company look unprofessional, if prices are wrong for example, mistakes could end up costing the company money.




Practical Intranet Development
Practical Intranet Development
ISBN: 190415123X
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 124

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