If your work in any way involves a website or web based system, you have almost certainly encountered a CMS, or content management system. Whether you have experienced a CMS for managing your own personal blog, like the back office area of WordPress, or you’ve used an enterprise level SAP content management systems like Weaveability SAP CMS, the concept of a back end area where new content can be added, content can be categorised and managed, and other functions can be carried out without the use of any coding, is probably not new to you.
CMS use has become completely mainstream, to the point where it is quite easy to forget that not so long ago these platforms were not so commonly used, and managing content was vastly more difficult (and usually required in house web developers). As we head into a cloud CMS utopia where content can be managed effortlessly and your CMS can even stream directly to other sites (something Facebook is beginning to do this year with its new Instant Articles service), it is nice to look back at some of the now simple tasks that used to present a real headache to site owners:
Localised Site Versions
These days, if you want to have versions of your site that are displayed for different local audiences, perhaps with different languages and currencies, it is quite easy to organise this in your CMS. You can make sure content is consistent between your different versions, queue content for translation, and all kinds of other things that make having localisation that actually works cohesively simple.
Before CMS platforms were in wider use, you would have had to develop your own ways of doing this, or simply have had separate sites, which you’d manage separately, leading to inconsistencies over time. You may not even have bothered with having different versions of your site for countries who spoke the same language, assuming that people in the UK could just put up with US English and dollar currency references. Now, you can easily manage localisation so non language-based localisations like these become far more ‘worth it’.
Web Developer Handover
When a site is fully developed, if it sits on a CMS, it can then be easily handed over to a content team who don’t need to have even the basic CSS and HTML skills the developers would have had to have used to change content in ‘the old days’. Not only can content be added but new static pages and whole new sections of the site can be added easily by non technical users.
Ease of Collaboration
If you have a large team, collaborating to produce and publish content using a CMS is very easy, thanks to inherent QA processes and tools. This means people all over the world can be working on your content, as well as people you may have outsourced content creation to – in the cloud. And, as long as you’ve set up their access right properly and have sound approval and moderation processes, this will work effortlessly.
Cloud CMS use has definitely changed how businesses run their websites, intranets and online services, and while this is no secret, it can be interesting to remember just how difficult things like these used to be to manage or do!
