Content Management Selection and Implementation

The first step in choosing a Content Management System (CMS) is to answer the questions:

How can a CMS improve your processes?

Will the benefits of a CMS outweigh the costs?

This is a crucial first step before the CMS requirements and use-case analysis.

Choosing and implementing a content management system should be done in conjunction with experts who can help you identify specific requirements for your organization, and who understand the strengths and weaknesses of the various CMS systems that are available. Do not rely on vendors dueling it out by answering large, often esoteric RFP documents.

Having an independent expert on your side whose focus is to protect your best interests is invaluable. CMS implementation is seldom a short process, and an expert will raise the chances for a smooth and successful transition.

Whether you go with XML or structured FrameMaker, once the decision has been made to componentize a documentation set into topics, and maybe even smaller chunks that are reused across topics (conrefs in DITA language) a CMS can be employed to fully leverage that knowledge base and the investment expended to get there. A CMS should allow you to:

1. Quickly and easily find topics based on metadata, not just free text.
2. Manage topics in logical hierarchies, apart from the maps that use them. Simply speaking, a map is a collection of information topics compiled to form a deliverable.
3. Easily compile new deliverables, or maps.
4. Manage which topics are used in which maps.
5. See how changes to topics will affect their use in different maps.
6. Manage revisions of maps, including which versions of the various topics are used for different revisions of the maps. Different revisions of your maps are delivered with different releases of your product.
7. Manage the links between different topics, and make sure there are no dead links when conditionally publishing maps.
8. Expand the metadata fields and conditional parameters to meet your organization’s requirements.
9. Filter and publish to multiple formats without having to manually edit style sheets, templates or ditaval files.
10. Easily export packages of topics for translation, including only those topics or graphics that actually changed since the last document release. Integration with a localization management tool such as SDL is also an advantage.
11. Provide text-based marked-up files for translation to eliminate DTP costs on translated material, without having to resort to authoring in XML.
12. Allow engineers and others outside the technical communication department to comment on topics without requiring an authoring license. The review process should include safeguards against the possibility of non-authorized reviewers changing the actual topics.

Optimally, a CMS should allow you to choose which authoring and publishing tools to use.

The CMS should also allow integration with enterprise product lifecycle management (PLM/PDM) tools, DMS and CRM systems.