The Content Management Handbook

Citation

Bovey, J. (2005), "The Content Management Handbook", Program: electronic library and information systems, Vol. 39 No. 4, pp. 387-388. https://doi.org/10.1108/00330330510628024

By now, virtually every commercial establishment, government department, university, college or school has a web site containing information for the general public, and an intranet with web browsable information within the organisation. Most of these web sites and intranets have grown in an ad‐hoc way and are managed by a small team (often one person) who adds content provided by other members of the organisation. This approach may be adequate initially, but as the site grows the drawbacks are clear: it is difficult to maintain consistency as information is added in different formats, information becomes hard to find, content becomes duplicated making it hard to change, business rules about vetting and approving information are difficult to enforce, the web team become a bottleneck, and so on. One solution is to introduce Content Management System backed by Content Management Software. This allows people to add and modify content in a controlled way, provides searching, supports workflow rules about approval of published documents, and allows individual pieces of content (a site map, for example) to be used in many different web pages. Although it is possible for an organisation to construct their own content management system using scripting languages and a database package such as MySQL, most content management systems are provided as products by specialist companies. The target audience for this book is information professionals employed by an organisation that is considering the introduction of a content management system for their web site or intranet. It essentially takes a project approach – working through the decisions that need to be made and tasks that need to be completed for a content management system to be introduced successfully.

The book essentially divides into two parts, with the first five chapters describing background and the remaining chapters being devoted to procurement. Chapter 1 gives general background on content management and sets it in context amongst related disciplines like records management and document management. Chapters 2 and 3 describe the functionality and architecture of a typical content management system. Chapter 4 explains the importance of having a content management strategy if the system and software are to have any chance of being successful. Chapter 5 describes the different technology options, from building a system in‐house to outsourcing the service completely.

The remaining chapters assume that the chosen approach is to buy a content management product, and describes how to do this successfully. Chapter 6, which discusses how to make the business case is perhaps the pivotal chapter. Making a business case for a content management system is problematic, particularly in the case of an intranet, since the benefits are better exchange of information within the whole organisation and are hard to quantify. Along with a lot of good advice, this chapter includes a check‐list of the problems that a content management system could solve, and allows the reader to generate a score that indicates whether a system is likely to be of benefit. Chapters 7‐12 describe, often in very great detail, how to manage the procurement process from planning it, to writing the statement of requirements, to short‐listing the applicants and managing the presentations. Finally, Chapter 13 has links to other resources, both printed and on the web.

My overall view is that this is a well written, readable book full of practical advice for anyone who is charged with introducing a content management system, or with deciding whether a content management system would be of any benefit to their organisation. If I have one quibble, it is with the index. Clearly, the index is less important in a handbook, that is designed to be read from beginning to end, than in a reference work, but a better index would make it easier to relocate references to techniques or software discussed earlier.