Alternative Web Content Management Solutions

Seeing as this blog still picks up some traffic, I'm putting a bit of effort in to get some of my pre-historic thoughts into the open. They sounded like a good idea enough to write down (in the thesis), so they're probably interesting to post here.

The last thing I posted about was about the evolution of web content management. Funny, when I wrote that the original title was actually The Levels of WCM, but when I looked over it later it was like I'd written a journey through the 90'ies online publishing; from httpd to lamp.

Now here's the next section I wrote. It's about the alternative forms of WCM, some of which have grown/shrunk into/away from eachother the last few years:

Alternatives to Web Content Management Systems

To further explain web content management, one can consider what other web content tools and management systems are used today, and what separates these from full WCM systems [Byrne, 2001], [Junco, 2004].

The definitions in use are not clear, and some vendors flag functionality which goes beyond their product. To avoid confusion, these are some of the product families which most often are mixed with the WCMS.

File system

There are various servers or directory services that can be set up to store digital documents and expose them to the Web with the use of a web-server. Even though many of them store content and perform similar tasks to the WCMS, these systems are not complete content management systems. However, file systems form an architectural basis for physical storage in several WCMS implementations.

Weblog

Perhaps the fastest growing channel for content creation is the weblog, more commonly referred to as 'blog'. Weblog systems make it possible for authors in lack of technical skills to publish online content. Recent years have seen an explosion of 'bloggers' appearing [Blood, 2000], and some believe that this form of publishing will continue to grow at such a rate that it eventually will replace communication lines like e-mail and online forums. In spite of its success, the weblog is still a far too simple protocol to be considered anything more than a possible part of a WCMS.

Wiki

Not nearly as widely known as the weblog, the wiki stems from similar communities of developers using the Web for asynchronous communication and collaboration [Cunningham, 2001]. The wiki is a decade old tool allowing developers to create documentation on web-page format, making the documentation easily accessible for viewing and editing. The most famous wiki today is by no doubt Wikipedia [Wikipedia, 2006]. Like the weblog, the wiki is too simple a tool to be considered a WCMS. Some have explored the so-called xanalogical potential of wikis [Di Iorio, 2005], so this may very well change in the future.

Web editing tools

Most web-sites are made manually with the use of HTML-editors. While HTML documents can be made with simple text-editors, many users turn to larger web design tools like Macromedia Dreamweaver, Microsoft Frontpage and Adobe GoLive. These products usually feature WYSIWYG-editing¹, web-page previews and even synchronization processes for updating web-pages. Strictly speaking, these tools are mere design-tools. They can be used for creating content, but their main purpose is to control the look and feel of the web-design. This does not constitute content management.

Enterprise Content Management

Systems performing enterprise content management (ECM) are typical large scale systems meant for corporations with content throughput of higher magnitude. Some systems like these incorporate their own WCM systems, while other vendors have separated their WCM product from their ECM system [Pelz-Sharp, 2006].

In the industry of content management, the use of this term is largely undetermined. ECM is used for products that do simple content management.

Some WCMS vendors claim their services feature ECM. On the other side of the scale, many lightweight web applications claim to deliver content management when they actually are providing what is by most perceived as web content management, or perhaps merely weblog or wiki functionality. Regardless, in the terms of this thesis, ECM remains something larger than the WCMS, a system able to process the entire digital content flow of an organization.

Digital Asset Management

These systems are developed to handle advanced kinds of media information, like video and images. The market for this kind of software is expected to grow during the next years due to a larger amount of Internet subscribers capable of streaming multimedia due to wider bandwidth. Many WCMS support media types, especially digital images to some extent, but proper digital asset management systems are stand-alone systems [Porter, 2003].

Records Management

Records management (RM) is also referred to as data warehousing. Large quantities of situational and transactional information require special software developed to store information snippets where the number of articles is counted by the million. Some ECM vendors include RM systems in their enterprise solutions, but a WCMS alone is not necessarily linked with an RM solution.

Document Management System

Systems that allow version-management, workflow control, collaboration on documents, digital library and information repositories lie at the core of several content management systems. Some will regard document management systems as software managing scanned digital copies of paper documents. Traditionally these systems were built in-house or proprietary systems, but recently some open source alternatives have started to appear [Gottlieb, 2006]. Like RM solutions, these are not essential for web content management.

Knowledge Management Systems

Foremost, the principles behind knowledge management (KM) take on a more human approach than traditional software engineering [Davenport, 1998]. Even though a knowledge management process will at some point include digital content management, the process as a whole has a nobler end. While the goal of a WCMS is to make content delivery smarter, the knowledge management goal is to make people smarter. Most would agree that a KMS is a suite of processes and tools that includes a variety of computer systems like groupware and generally every kind of management and communication system, including the WCMS.

Web Portal

This is perhaps the most difficult category to separate from the WCMS. The term portal is subject to many interpretations. Some considered it to be a personalized start-point on the Web, displaying bookmarks, news and other select content. The Java Community Process' Portlet definition describes portal (or the compilation of Portlets) as a tool for integrating different content sources into one single page [JCP, 2003].

Regardless of its content, a portal is most easily recognized from its panel-like display, including several windows of various content types. It is both possible to say that a portal is part of the WCMS since it can be used for handling online content. On the other hand one can say that the WCMS is one of the many windows in one portal, one WCMS being simply one of the many data sources integrated in the portal.

CMSWatch defines the difference between a WCMS and a portal as the latter being intended for content delivery, while the former is mainly used for content creation. Still it admits that the tasks of the systems overlap, and that open source WCM systems bear portal similarities [Boye, 2006].

The content landscape

The landscape of alternatives is summarized in Figure 6. Note that this is just one simple way to consider the range of content management software in the market today. The horizontal axis represents the goal ranging from delivery to the Web to storage. The vertical axis indicates the size or complexity of the system. This is not accurate overview, and many variations of these systems could have been placed differently.