Content Management Systems - The History and the Future

Content Management Systems (CMS) are any process of organising electronic knowledge. With the rise of the net, the phrase was adopted as a catch-all to report a variety of systems that allowed users to generate, edit, manage and publish web-site content.

Although in the early 1990's people could update some type of online content with products from both Microsoft and Lotus, the earliest example of a pure Content Management Tool came from Vignette with StoryServer around 1996. The next few years saw lots of CMS packages being released from the likes of Documentum, Interwoven and Broadvision.

Between 2000 and 2005, the sector went through a huge wave of merger and acquisitions leaving lots of users unsupported after packages were abandoned and difficulties as packages were merged.

By 2007 there were three types of Content Management Process:

These systems deal with the editing on a local machine or network and then depend on publishing to upload the new content to the net site. Usually these offline systems need installation of application before editing can be undertaken.

one) Application Editing

two) Online Editing

These systems usually need no application installation, giving flexibility to edit on any machine as long as a user has password access. Online content management systems can be simple such as Wiki's through to sophisticated CMS editor functions such as Vx.

three) Hybrid Systems

Hybrid systems permit users to edit content online through an online editing process, but permit for "checking out" of content to work away from the process before the content is put back in to the net editor.

Content management systems have become sophisticated allowing users to manage and manipulate text, images, documents, audio, video and animations.

2008 and the future...

Leading edge systems have begun to bring the offline in to the content management platform. Print materials, PDFs and other offline communications are now being managed through CMS systems in a similar way to sites and emails. Content Management System New developments have brought the ideas behind Content Management Systems (non technical or design staff managing their sites) in to other fields of the promotion mix. Lots of systems have integrated e mail promotion functionality in to their CMS, allowing tracking between the e mail and web-site functions.