Content Management, Information Management and Document Management Systems - iStart.co.nz

Use this Pavilion to research vendors, case studies and white papers to research solutions that help create, load, publish and share electronic documents to portals, intranets and web sites. Check also the iStart Diary for local seminars on this subject. All vendors showcased below will be glad to assist with your enquiries.

Solution Providers

Contegro represents a new generation in website content management, delivering a feature rich solution in one easy to use package. Contegro is the intelligent content management solution providing organisations with an unparalleled level of flexibility, functionality and control.
Tell me more

IBM Enterprise Content Management Solution (ECM) - Improve your workforce effectiveness by managing all types of content - images, documents, email, web content and e-Records multimedia. IBM ECM enables you to deliver the right content to the right person at the right time so you can make smarter business decisions
Tell me more

 

Think Global. Act Local. It’s easy to say, but Montage Interactive helps customers manage and optimize their global web presence – reducing risk and cost while increasing responsiveness and customer engagement.
Tell me more

Whatever your content management solution needs, whether website or intranet, big or small, Intergen can design, develop and implement what you need.
Tell me more

 

Choose Datum Connect and use the Web Central online content management system "updating your own content for dummies and einsteins". Use our flexible web tool, enabling speed in adding and maintaining online content. Management is performed by persons who do not necessarily possess specialised technical skills.
Tell me more

 

 

Overview

Content Management
There is no single agreed definition of Content Management - but the wider definition here embraces Content Management, Information Management and Document Management. Content management is a relatively new discipline, and if you ask the many suppliers of content management software they all have different definitions. It is fair to say that most people regard content management as applying solely or mainly to the management and delivery of web content. This is a very limited view, content management software covers a much wider area and can be categorized as follows:

  • Web Content Management Systems - this was the first and is the most common use of the term "content management". They are primary used to help manage websites and web content. In this context the word "content" refers to any resource used to build a website. Most of these systems are only concerned with managing the delivery of the website. The authoring and maintenance are done by other products.
  • Document/File Management Systems - Document and file management systems are designed to manage whole documents and other files rather than the words and pictures inside them. They know little about what the files contain and treat them as a "blob" of data. They rely heavily on users defining and applying metadata to give them more information. In practice metadata is not applied making these systems little more use than the file system.
  • Digital Asset Management Systems - very similar in nature to document and file management in that they manage files, but focused on multimedia so provide little or no functionality for text intensive files. They are used mainly to create a central repository for graphics, video, flash, and other multimedia files, and provide archive, search, and retrieval functions.
  • Enterprise Content Management Systems - this is one of the latest categories in the content management and does not have a clear definition. Most providers in this space are actually combining many of the other categories and calling it "Enterprise" as it provides a wider scope.
  • Component Content Management Systems - rather than storing documents, they store and manage the content that is used to assemble these documents in small re-useable components. These components can be anything from a single word to many paragraphs or other components like graphics or links. Component Content Management can be regarded as an overall process for originating, managing, and publishing content right across the enterprise and to any output. 

Web Design/Development
Before embarking on any web development project you should ask yourself what do you want a web site for? Is it to showcase your products and services as an online brochure, or are you planning something more substantial that allows you to conduct business online?

The more thoroughly you can answer these questions then the better the position you’ll be in to brief your web developer. The developer will then provide you with a proposal, which should show a clear understanding of what you want to achieve and a preliminary assessment of the cost.

Once you have signed off the proposal, your developer will prepare a site map that illustrates how the site will work. This should be detailed enough to give you an idea of how the content will flow, down to at least the third or fourth level of pages.

The best web developers will also give you a series of storyboards that clearly show how different parts of the site will look and how your web visitor will interact with you online. At this stage, your web developer should also give you an assessment of your technical (back-end) options and a firm budget.

You should spend time considering whether this assessment meets your needs. Changing it later will be costly and frustrating.

The design of your site will begin with a design brief prepared by you and your developer. Good web design is all about combining brand and image with online navigation. But remember the rule, form is less important than function; a sexy site is useless if people can't get what they want within three mouse clicks.

Building the technical stuff is your developer's job - the content is up to you. However a good developer will help you through this process. They may even write the copy for you (at a price).

On the web, content is king. As with design, there is no advantage in having a sexy site if the content is boring, trivial or irrelevant to your visitors. Bear in mind the attention span required to read your content online and respect the intelligence of your audience.

A good idea to consider is a "beta" launch of your site - give key customers access to a test version of your site, and modify it based on their suggestions.

Last but not least - make sure your launch date is realistic before you tell your customers - and then tell everyone. Don't forget to gear your site for search engines - your developer should take you through this process. Never launch a site half built.

B2C e-Commerce
Doing business online no longer requires a huge investment by retailers, thanks to developments in template-based online stores which are based on packaged applications that are delivered over the internet.

As nearly all online stores will require the same functions: catalogues, order baskets, payment processing, content management and member management, it makes sense for those components to be created once and shared by all stores, with each store effectively ‘renting’ its own copy of the applications.

The one area where it's important for online stores to differentiate is their look and feel, and naturally retailers feel very strongly about their business branding. So the ability to create a unique ‘skin’ for each site is an important part of a template-based e-store offering.

Using the latest internet application technology, individual sites can be created within minutes of the retailer selecting a template and supplying graphics such as logos. Typically, retailers will pay only a modest monthly rental charge – and retailers require no specialist hardware or software, other than internet access.

Anyone who wants to sell products and services over the internet, or who wants customers to be able to research their purchases on the internet, should consider an online store.

These days, a web site should be a standard part of the promotional and advertising mix for every business, along with other tools such as Yellow Pages, newspaper advertising and signage.

Articles/Industry Reports

The good oil on Document Management

Implementing an effective document management system can result in impressive productivity and efficiency gains for an organisation of virtually any size. Thinking about the impact such a system will have on a business’s people and procedures is a good place to start.
READ MORE

Sharing documents between staff & offices

Spent any time trying to find a lost email, Word doc, spreadsheet or research report lately? Annoying wasn’t it? Annoying… and expensive. Badly managed document flow, storage and retrieval is costing New Zealand businesses millions of dollars a year. But as David McNickel discovers, it doesn’t have to be that way.
READ MORE

Enterprise Portal - The Door to More

Today's businesses have high hopes for their enterprise portal projects. Once little more than static gateways to internal and external resources, these systems are now expected to play an active role in managing content from disparate applications so that employees can put it to work effectively.
READ MORE

Portals that work

Many of today's portal initiatives fail to provide access to useful tools and resources on a daily basis; fail to facilitate interaction among customers, partners and employees; and fail to manage the content associated with these interactions. So how do you create a portal 'that works'?
READ MORE

Portal progress & potential

Corporate portals have surged onto the scene so fast that few IT corporates have had a chance to get familiar with them. If you're just getting your ears wet in the portal scene, Michael Desmond's article is a good place to start.
READ MORE

Portals-know what you're getting into

Over the past year, the buzz around portals has reached a level where most corporates couldn't help but take notice. But, as happens with many emerging technologies, awareness and fad have become intertwined. As Gartner Group recently wrote, "'Portal' is the most-abused term in IT." By defining what a portal is -and can be - and looking at the capabilities of the technology, the applications and benefits of portal technologies become much clearer.
READ MORE

Portals next big thing

Illuminata, a New Hampshire-based research group focused on e-business technologies, has released a report in which the role of portals is projected to become increasingly important over the next few years.
READ MORE

What is a Portal And Why You May Need One

Because time is money. Today, people expect and need to be able to find information and make decisions within minutes instead of weeks or months. Here's a quick overview of how enterprise portals bring information and applications together to make you and your staff more productive and efficient.
READ MORE

Industry Report: Growing Your Own Internet

Making sense of intranets, extranets, VPNs and corporate portals. New Zealand businesses must work to ensure information flows freely around their own organisatonal pond before they can expect to benefit from the full impact of any external knowledge wave.
READ MORE

Taking focus off the website user

Often websites overlook promising opportunities from the usability perspective.  Vineet Thapar discusses the importance of 'User Focus' while continuing to retain website technology intricacies.
READ MORE

The agony of a website revamp

Success IS director Debbie Mayo-Smith shares the processes and strategies she used to completely redo her company's website recently. If you're up for a re-work shortly then this article should give you a new perspective on your site, especially if you rely on search engine traffic.
READ MORE

Web 2.0: can your business handle the truth?

Web 2.0 is all about growing online communities through honest opinions and feedback. Is your company’s website up to the challenge?
READ MORE

Managing enterprise-wide information and web content

Business Problem; How to manage electronic documents such as emails, faxes, reports, proposals, manuals etc, as well as ‘content’ to be shared with others internally or over the web, through one comprehensive enterprise-wide solution? Solution; Content Management Systems (CMS). Here, Chris Bell reviews some of New Zealand’s market leading solutions and gets inspired by their wide range of business applications.
READ MORE

Cut to the chase with content management As communication channels proliferate, an organisation's ability to manage the content it presents to both internal and external clients has become crucial. Keith Newman investigates the solution to getting all your data managed online for when, where and how you need it...
READ MORE

Content key to visit - sale transition

Provision of fresh, up-to-date, relevant content for visitors to your site to read is what turns a visit into a re-visit, and a re-visit into a buy. It's content therefore that drives website transactions - the purest form of e-commerce. Why it's important and what content to provide is all covered in the following content!
READ MORE

Content management key to site success

Your website allows visitors to "walk through" your organisation - similar to the way they might walk through a department store. And just as the displays in a department store need to change frequently to keep customers coming back, your website content must be frequently updated, presenting a refreshed and constantly stimulating view of your business to browsers.
READ MORE

Other Resources

If researching in Australia, go to the iStart Australia Content / Info / Document Management Research Pavilion

site by doubleclique