How To Channel Your Content

When considering an enterprise-content-management application for multichannel publishing, it's critical to look first at how your company communicates internally and with its customers, partners, and suppliers. Find areas in which content is created and updated repeatedly and is widely distributed. Then ask several key questions: Do your employees have trouble finding the information they need? Are there concerns about whether the information they're accessing is current? Is having the most current version of content a business-critical need? Think about not just traditional channels but systems as well. You may discover that your company's call-center knowledge-base application is likely to be a more rewarding channel than PDA or cell-phone delivery.

Finally, preparation for multichannel publishing always takes a bit of work. In order to publish content to different systems, companies must configure the systems to accommodate their content-presentation needs. When properly planned for, though, multichannel publishing can have a dramatic impact on the freshness of information across all of a company's channels.

Jeff Phillips is a senior analyst and Christine Klima is a technical editor at Doculabs, a technology consulting firm. Contact them at [email protected].

Illustration by Frank Frisari