InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
February 14, 2000
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Huntington Bancshares Inc., for instance, discovered the need for Web content management on its growing Web site during the past year. "Stuff gets tucked away on the site and forgotten until someone hits it," says Tom Hetterscheidt, a VP at the Columbus, Ohio, bank. The fallout from an erroneous hit might trigger a scramble to soothe a ruffled customer and remove the incorrect content from the site.
With a content-management system, the bank hopes to return content responsibility to each business unit while automatically enforcing a consistent look and feel for the content and imposing content-management policies, such as designated expiration dates. "Content-management technology will give us the way to allow people to create content but do it within an established framework," Hetterscheidt says.
The small content-management systems market is ramping up to meet the needs of companies such as Huntington Bank. Leading players include BroadVision, Continuous, Interwoven, IntraNet, Macromedia, Mortice Kern Systems, Rational, and Vignette.
To begin sorting out the players, managers should understand the roots of the vendors. Rational and Continuous, for example, come from the software configuration-management and version-control world familiar to application developers. Others come from document management or the Standard Generalized Markup Language publishing worlds. Some of the newest entrants are pure Web-content-management players.
The first players to provide tools for Web content management came from the document-management arena. Document management consists of tools and disciplines used to manage massive amounts of documents. Large manufacturers of complex products, for instance, employ document-management tools to index, store, organize, retrieve, and assemble all the documents that accompany those products, such as a nuclear submarine or some other complex piece of machinery.
To a document-management system, documents exist as files. Documents might consist of word-processing, spreadsheet, and database files. The systems are very good at organizing and tracking files and various versions of files.
So it's natural that companies managing Web content would gravitate toward document-management tools, especially if their Web sites are filled with file-based documents. However, problems arise when the document file is too large a component for effective content management. "You need to crack open the file to manage smaller pieces of content," Boiko says.
A Web page, for instance, may contain a text document and a number of other graphical components. These components may be reusable, and they may have relationships to other components. It can be difficult to manage these small pieces through a file-oriented document-management system. Despite that, companies that use document management effectively will likely continue to use it as they move their documents to the Web.
Another group of tools comes from the electronic-publishing market, which includes players such as Arbortext, Inso, and Interleaf. These products appeal primarily to companies that produce large, complex documents, such as catalogs and compound documents consisting of diverse elements. These tools use SGML, the big brother of the Extensible Markup Language and HTML, to structure and manage documents at a very granular level, as small as an SGML element.
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