a thousand furnished rooms

Indeed, the very term “content management” has been edged out by “enterprise content management” as analysts, journalists, and IT professionals draw more and more direct connections between the content of the organization and the many, varied applications and interfaces that enterprises are deploying around an Internet-based infrastructure.

The bottom line is content management solutions must deal with a broad spectrum of challenges—beginning with the effective management of many types of content, and ending with the integration of this content into a wide and growing number of applications.

Content is becoming part of the complex synthesis of once-independent business processes, even while these business processes shift outside the enterprise’s four walls, and move towards integration with those of its customers, partners, and suppliers. Furthermore, enterprises are making not just content but also operational data available to consumers, customers, and business partners via the Web, in what many call the “extended enterprise.”

The Internet has made the Web into a huge business community, and with the development of Java programming language and the standardization with XML for data interchange, the movement of content and data from back office applications on to the Web and from the Web into back office applications has increased tremendously. When it comes to the integration of content management in the new extended enterprise, two fundamental questions arise:

· How can the enterprise leverage its existing infrastructure, applications, and data?
· How can the enterprise pursue content management integration with least effort and most success?

While much is being claimed for the “extended enterprise,” the fact is that for very many businesses today, content management needs remain simple. These companies’ needs can be met but literally hundreds of products available today, ranging from application service providers that, in effect, create, manage, and serve a company’s content for them, to basic HTML tools such as Microsoft FrontPage and Macromedia Dreamweaver that helps Web designers and Webmasters create Web pages for serving through the company’s own Web server, to standalone Web content management platforms that provide much higher functionality, a wider range of contributor interfaces, and workflow and versioning administration.

But because of the growing role of the Internet in commerce, enterprises can not stay with simple content management without peril. It behooves the strategically-minded enterprise to look at contant management tools that not only meet relatively simple content environments today, but which can also anticipate and address the more complex challenges of fusing content and other business processes.

Bill Trippe
btrippe@nmpub.com