Developing a Content Manager System

Every good business web site that is the center of your business should be founded on a good content management system (CMS). I recently entered CMS into myUltraSearch site, looked through the major search engines and found something in excess of 2500 possible links promoting various kinds of content management. And then of course there is always Sharepoint portal that Microsoft gives you for free in your Windows 2003 servers. We even offer our own flavor of CMS which originated in classic ASP in 1997 and offers more features than Sharepoint or many of the others called The Frameworks.

The overall mission statement of a content management system is to provide a web based home from which the departments and personnel of your company may operate to share documents, post reports, and enter data. This system should offer security so when a user logs into the system, they only see what they are allowed to have access to; both in documents and database tables or reports. The layout of the business or private pages of the web site should intuitive so there is not much training required; especially for the average computer user. And it should offer total administration so new departments can be created, users may be enabled or disabled, and access groups may easily be created and assigned to departmental folders and subfolders. It is always nice to have a system that allows departments to manage themselves; even in menu enhancements and folder or document access rights. And certainly the system should cater to the ability to house other web based applications or links to important vendor sites offering services in use by the company or department.

In my opinion, any CMS requiring programmers so the system may operate normally for the business, is not a well designed CMS for the user or community in mind. Examples of these would be Sharepoint Portal, DotNetNuke, Joomla, among MANY others. And then there are many addon packages out there just for the developer (i.e. Iron Speed Designer) to enhance or speed up development.

A good CMS on the other hand, can be the center for speedy communications, reports, company status overviews, accounting, accountability, time tracking, project status, and global company assets management. Easy to access. Quickly get to what you need when you need it. For instance, a manager who is prone to micro-manage his staff can easily make assignments to his staff, tell them to drop their finished product in their assigned folder within the CMS, and the micro-manage the folders rather than hang around looking over the staff member's shoulder and asking if it is done yet.

Salesforce.com is not a CMS. It is a web based framework that houses thousands of other plug-in applications that you can subscribe to and try to make work for your company purposes. Let me point out to you that most business processes are composed of a database table for saving data, templates to present the data and for data entry, and backend pages that do the work. It is much the same thing, over and over again, pertaining to many different processes. As an IT group, we just need to start thinking in terms of database driven web pages, editor, and presentors, using variable templates, and reporting for every purpose required by users. We need to get past the Get-R-Done web development mentality and start designing and programming for support and growth, mirroring the company business centered around the CMS.