Two user processes govern the flow of unstructured content within any enterprise:

• Document control and
• Knowledge management

Understanding how these processes work, and their impact on users, is key to understanding how to correctly implement a web content management solution because both are inherent in the web content management process and need to be automated to make a web content management solution scalable.

Document Control

In document control, a small number of content authors tightly control versions, approved content, and make it available to a large number of content consumers. In addition to version management, document control often contains functions such as revision storage, audit trails, review and approval cycles, archiving, and off-line storage of source materials created with standard authoring tools. Examples of document control applications include: ISO procedures, manufacturing procedures, safety manuals, web site content, and product manuals. In each of these applications, the common thread is the need for formally approved content that is considered “the latest version” or “the approved version for the day.” The fundamental user process is push. Approved content is pushed to content consumers when it is ready for release. Content under document control is relatively static, and expertise contained within such content is modified by the needs of the business process.

Knowledge Management

In knowledge management, everyone in the organization is considered a content author and a content consumer. As users author documents throughout the course of business, useful expertise is captured in documents. This expertise is very useful to other personnel, because it allows them to author similar documents quickly by example, makes expertise captured by someone else readily available for acquisition by every other user, and from a general perspective allows the organization to search a repository of expertise. Knowledge management’s primary method of implementation requires personnel to save documents to a centralized, searchable storage location that is accessible by other users, and is a compelling alternative to document storage on each user’s local machine because documents stored locally are “unknown” to others. Another way to think of knowledge management is “data mining.”

Examples of processes improved by the knowledge management paradigm include:

• Proposal creation
• Project plan generation
• Business intelligence tracking
• Status reporting
• Many forms of intranet content

Content involved with the knowledge management process often has no review or approval cycle, no version management, no audit trail management, and no archiving; although for some types of content is it useful to include these features. The fundamental user process is pull. Contributed content is searched and then pulled by content consumers, and is then used to create new content, which in turn can be re-contributed after additional expertise has been added to it. Content under knowledge management is relatively dynamic, and expertise contained within such content is iteratively modified and increased by the needs of the users.

Document management is not a user process. It is a data process. Document management includes the things typically associated with document control, such as: version management, audit trails, review and approval, archiving, etc. Thus a document manager is an application that provides document management processes, which in turn manipulate data. Document Management Systems are the core applications required to implement all document control and knowledge management processes. Although these processes could be implemented manually on file storage, the result of this approach is an unscalable solution.

With regard to sharing content in an organization, it is necessary to look at the users who are working with content on a regular basis. There are two primary groups of users: content authors and content consumers. When considering how a representative member of each of these groups works, it becomes clear that each has different needs. Content authors work with traditional authoring tools and author documents, which may be documents, spreadsheets, presentations, images, etc., in traditional authoring formats. These formats are typically paper-oriented layouts, which are the easiest to manage and organize and maintain. Alternatively, content consumers typically retrieve content with a web browser, which requires content to fit the computer screen properly, and to provide hyper linked navigation between related units of content. In addition, content consumers may also wish to print documents using the paper-based layout.

Scalable Solutions

It is clear from these differing requirements that the only way to create a scalable solution that optimizes user content processes is to consider the needs of each group separately when engineering the solution, and to eliminate user exposure to technology. With this in mind, a document management application clearly meets the needs of content authors, but is insufficient to meet the needs of content consumers because it offers the consumer only authoring formats, which are not workable on-line. For the consumer, each type of information, each area of business, and each business function being performed can drive a requirement for a web site with various types of content-specific functions.

The correct solution is to bridge the content between the document manager and the web site solution in such a way that the content authors and consumers are not required to learn application, techniques, and technologies other than those they already know. The process of bridging content from author to consumer, allowing content authors to go about business as usual, transforming the content so that it suits the needs of the content consumer, and synchronizing updates to managed content, is called automated content management. This is very different from most content management technologies on the market that provide manual content management because they require both authors and consumers alike to work with the technology in ways they shouldn't have to, creating unscalable user processes consisting of cutting-and-pasting, converting documents, applying vendor or web-specific markup in document making them useless in a multi-purpose environment, etc.

To create an automated content management solution, it becomes crucial to follow a specific methodology that ensures all the benefits that can be obtained from a specific technology are not cancelled out by poor engineering that result in user productivity degradation and scalability problems.