A Study on Content Management

by Steve Gaetjens

Information.  We need it, have it, lose it, duplicate it, bias it.  We are information processors with massive parallel processing computers, signal processors with mammoth data storage all in a neat package we carry above our shoulders.  All that information in our heads is stored in a single format, a mysterious chemical one.  We take that information and process it to produce output: we speak, we write, we move.

Generally in business, however, our information is not organized like that.  We use computer applications to hold our information: word processors, spreadsheets, web page editors, image editors.  All our information gets chopped up into little proprietary pieces.  Organizations have to settle on an application suite like Microsoft Office to piece everything back together.  Information sharing within the organization is difficult because things are scattered and not necessarily in a format that we can use.  If we do agree on a format, we usually copy and paste out the parts of your information that we need, and create new documents using it.  Our documents live separate lives from then on.

CUESoft's Content Management model makes your organization function like a single person.  All your corporate information is essentially stored in a central repository using common formats.  You don't copy information to reuse it, you transform it.  The transformations required to produce the output become the application.

For instance, your company makes widgets.  Your marketing, engineering and manufacturing groups have produced some documents on widgets.  Now, various groups within your organization need that information for different purposes and audiences:

• The marketing group wants to produce a trade show brochure.
• The technical publications group needs to produce a user's manual.
• The web team needs to produce a web page.

Typically, each group would grab the original source document (if they can find it), copy out the sections they wanted, put that information into some proprietary software, do some creative rewriting, and produce their output.  The original documents are left untouched, and there is no record that they were used to produce other documents.  That relationship is broken.

Sometime later, the marketing group rewrites the product overview and publishes a new brochure.  That product overview was included in the user's manual and on the web site.  Those documents are now out-of-sync with the original document.  When you multiply this problem across a large organization with many products, you can see how much management you have to provide to keep information accurate and consistent.

With CUESoft's content management model, the various groups don't make independent copies of the source information.  The web team uses sections of the original engineering and marketing documents directly to produce the web page.  Later, when marketing changes those source documents, the affected web pages get automatically rebuilt as a batch process.  All your data flows consistently from internal source to internal consumer to public consumer.

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