The Content Management Handbook

Citation

Wood, S. (2005), "The Content Management Handbook", New Library World, Vol. 106 No. 9/10, pp. 474-475. https://doi.org/10.1108/03074800510623173

Content management (CM) is slowly becoming a becoming a crucial subject area for many information professionals – many are heavily involved in web and intranet projects in increasing numbers. Content management forms a core part of many organisational information strategies, enabling the processes through which content assets are managed from creation to publication to destruction. Content management often generally means web content management, whilst Enterprise Content Management means full integrated document and content managements systems with enterprise search facilities combined with web content management. This text is valuable for either context.

This text is as the title suggests a handbook and offers practical and timely advice on grappling with the issue of content management. There are few people more qualified than Martin White to write this text, as a recognised leading intranet consultant (he is Managing Director of Intranet Focus www.intranetfocus.com) he has experienced many content management projects from initiation to full implementation, this experience has been shared via many conference presentations and courses. This text consolidates the excellent work Martin White has done into a readable and coherent handbook.

The text, as Martin White acknowledges, is not intended to be the definitive text covering every single aspect of content management, Bob Boiko's text “Content management bible” is already available and offers an extremely detailed (if somewhat daunting at nearly 1000 pages) text about content management. Martin White's handbook guides the reader through the practical issues that organisations need to focus upon when developing a content management strategy. From his experience of so many CM projects that have had different outcomes Martin White is able to offer great insight into the issues of selecting content management software unfettered by much of the jargon associated with the subject, often published in white papers by content management system vendors.

The text is well structured and guides the reader from CM concepts through business focused stages of strategy, business case, project management, requirements, selection, implementation and migration. The conceptual sections contain an overview of CM process, well referenced with pointers for further reading on areas such as meta data and information architecture. It is in sections 6‐12 that the text delivers insight of high practical value: the sections draw on experience and serves as an excellent reality check for anyone trying to implement content management systems: Martin illustrates how a project will be broken down and suggests relevant timings for each of his stages. The text gets the reader to take a business driven and user centric approach in developing an approach to content management.

By not placing too greater emphasis on current software features, Martin enables the text to have value beyond the often‐rapid software development cycles in the industry. Whilst the text will require updating in light of some developments in the longer term, the text will always have relevance due to the emphasis on business planning.

The price (£39.95) when viewed in the context of the many content management reports that are on the market for hundreds of dollars, is very good value. I would recommend this book to anyone thinking about developing a content management strategy and considering software implementation. The book is practical and relevant to information professionals whilst containing much advice and key information that can also be fed to managers with non‐information professional backgrounds involved with a CM project. The only area that could be improved is the area of case studies – the text develops generic case studies rather specific examples and thus lacks insight for the reader in terms seeing of seeing evidence of real world implementations.