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We're often asked by our clients to help them get their arms around selecting a content management system (CMS) to fit their needs. After you decide to integrate a CMS for your Web enterprise, understanding your specific needs through the development of Web content management requirements greatly improves the selection process. We commonly hear our clients needing a CMS to resolve the following points of pain:

• Make it easy to create and manage multiple versions of the same content for different areas, different audiences, or even different sites
• Shorten approval timelines for publishing newly developed content or adding new pages
• Provide a way to schedule content for future publication and expiration

We believe in the benefits of right-sizing content management for our clients’ projects. We do this in many ways, but the most successful approach is to let the user experience, namely the information architecture, content strategy, and user interface design, inform your content management requirements. In other words, let the user experience drive the technology instead of the other way around. This approach allows you to quickly get at the heart of what is needed to support your business objectives.

It's not as hard as you think. There are usually two important dimensions of a Web project that drive a large percentage of the content management requirements—the content creation, editing, and approval process (workflow model requirements), and the types of content and business rules found on the different types of pages in the site (content model requirements).

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Workflow Model Requirements

The workflow requirements are exposed during the early phases of discovery in a project by gathering some information from our clients in regard to their desired editorial processes:

• How many content authors and editors are there in the organization?
• How are approvals for new and updated content managed in the organization?
• What are the lifecycles for the range of content available on the Web enterprise?
• How may this change as the project moves forward?
• Is there a business need for maintaining archives?

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Content Model Requirements

The information architecture phase of a project, more specifically the development of a wireframe model (which documents the unique pages of a website), exposes all you really need to know about what your content management system needs to do.

A good wireframe model details all the different types of content that will exist on a website. In addition, we use the wireframe model to help our clients develop the real business rules that govern how content should be presented and behave across the site. This behavior translates into the exact features the CMS must have. Examples include:

• News articles are ordered by most recent date on the press room page, but may be in a different order on the home page
• The discount subscription offer is only available in the right rail to registered visitors
• Gold members can view the performance schedule 1 month before the general public
• Only the date and the byline of an article appear on the home page and only if there is not an emergency alert

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Keys to a Successful Solution Choice

When we have the workflow model and the content model defined, the job of selecting a content management solution becomes exponentially easier. There are additional factors such as current technology infrastructure, budget, and buy versus build, and performance requirements that will influence a solution choice. But until we clearly define what a CMS must do for a specific project, it just doesn’t make sense to go out and select a content management solution based on these other factors at the exclusion of the content model requirements and the workflow model requirements.

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