Chapter 9. Content Management

Without content, a portal would be a lonely place. The volume and richness of web content are what brings users back to a portal again and again, whether it is an internal portal for knowledge management or an external portal to create a virtual community and a market for goods and services. While portal content could be created as most web sites are created, one page at a time through authoring tools such as Microsoft FrontPage or Macromedia Dreamweaver or through HTML coding in a simple editor, major portals rely on content management systems to automate the creation, editing, and maintenance of thousands or hundreds of thousands of web pages. You should consider content management for your organization, as it can have the biggest payoff of all your portal initiatives.

In many ways, content management is at the heart of a portal, whether it is an enterprise portal or an external portal, because so much content resides in web pages. The content management system is also an embodiment of the site taxonomy, and it governs the site navigation. It creates the consistent "look-and-feel" that is essential to giving users a positive experience in the portal. If all you did to implement a portal was to implement content management, migrate all pages to the system, and enable users to create their own fresh content, you would be providing quite an enhancement over what most web sites offer.

The first content management systems were created as custom solutions, and some served as the basis for what later became commercial content management systems. Content management systems consist of a repository where content is stored, one or more frontends for authoring and other management tasks such as review and approval, and additional components to enforce content management business rules and provide services such as notification to authors and reviewers of changes in the status of a page. The repository is typically a relational database, and the frontend systems are most often browser-based.