Solutions Showcase: Do You Know Where Your Content Is?

More and more, publishers are seeking content management systems (CMSs) that help them to create in one system content intended for any channel. These tools serve as central repositories of content stored in extensible markup language (XML) and interact with other publishing and delivery systems (e.g., print and Web), thus enabling publishers to repurpose content across a host of channels on the fly.

“With XML, you can centralize all of your content and then do multichannel delivery. If I put all my content in XML in one centralized platform, I have the ability to quickly go in the direction I need to go when the time comes,” says John Kreisa, director of product marketing for San Carlos, Calif.-based MarkLogic, whose flagship product is an XML server that stores, manages, searches and dynamically delivers content.

Beyond storing content in a centralized location and enabling multichannel deployment, some CMSs offer text search, content aggregation, analytics, alerting and text-mining functionality.

“The Web is a game of relevancy,” says David Crouy, marketing director for Nstein Technologies, a Montreal-based company that offers products for Web content management, digital asset management and text mining, among others. “Google has shown it, and Google’s success was really based on its ability to provide relevant experiences to its users, which made it quite quickly No. 1.”

Nstein offers text mining integrated to its Web CMS. Text mining structures and organizes content, and extracts meta data (e.g., names of people, organizations and places, sentiments, opinions, etc.), allowing publishers to link related content together and repurpose it. Text mining allows publishers to contextualize whole Web pages, which offers more relevant experiences to users, says Crouy. Readers are, in turn, inclined to consume more content, thus increasing page views.

In this way, contextualizing can benefit a publisher’s bottom line, allowing them to charge advertisers more by contextually associating advertising banners with content, thus offering a more targeted, relevant audience, he adds.

Open vs. Proprietary
One key, differentiating factor between CMS tools on the market is their degree of “openness,” so to speak. Some CMS tools pitch themselves as “open source,” others are “open architecture,” and still others are considered “proprietary.” According to Ed Stevenson, product manager and senior analyst at Really Strategies, an industry consulting firm and creator of the XML-based CMS RSuite, open-source tools generally are “free” in terms of licensing and the ability to access and change the source code. For open-architecture tools, publishers purchase a license to use software that has open standards and allows for customization and integration with other systems. Proprietary (or closed-architecture) systems are more of what Stevenson calls “a black box,” often characterized by greater restrictions on exporting content to other systems.