Businesses cannot function without a content management system (CMS) in place. It lies at the very heart of all well-managed business processes and needs to be integrated into a business website to ensure data management and control.

What is CMS?

CMS is essentially a coming together of various procedures, whose primary goal is workflow management in an environment that facilitates collaboration. CMS is mostly computer based and performs the following functions:

• It enables data contribution and sharing of stored data amongst a large number of people
• Data access is based on user roles
• Facilitates convenient data storage and retrieval

The functions of a CMS can change from one organization to the other depending on their scope and scale of workflow. But, its core concept remains the same, which is making sure that all business data is managed and controlled in an effective and result oriented manner.

Why CMS?

Its functionality apart, why is a CMS important for businesses?  The answer lies in the kind of benefits it brings to organizations, irrespective of their size. When it comes to a CMS for a website, a well designed and structured CMS helps edit, modify and update website content easily and quickly. More importantly, it helps in faster decision taking.  With a CMS in place, you can not only upload data, but make sure that it is used in a way that helps promote business growth.

Why Open Source CMS?

Now, you can either get a CMS developed from scratch or you could think about going for an open source CMS. The latter is a very good idea for small business websites, because of their affordability. But, being cost effective doesn’t mean they lose out on the performance aspect. Open Source CMS is the kind of system, which makes available ready-to-use modules that only have to be integrated into the website. These modules can be customized to suit the needs and requirements of the business. Its good news for small business as these modules are readily available; can be customized quickly and deployed securely.

Types of Open Source CMS

There are numerous choices available when it comes to open source content management systems. Here are some of the more popularly used systems:

• WordPress - WordPress is web software that is popularly used for the creation of content management systems. The popularity of this platform stems from the fact that it is secure, stable and gives a numbers of customization choices. It’s been around since 2003, so there are thousands of widgets and plug-ins available that can be used to give CMS a boost.
   
• Drupal - Drupal is one of the most commonly used content management platforms that can be customized in accordance with any business need.  The reason why so many small business websites have a Drupal based Content Management System is because of its robustness, flexibility and the fact that constant improvements are occurring on a daily basis.
   
• Joomla - It’s easy-to-use; has proven extensibility and offers a platform for the creation of a powerful content management system. A large number of developers out there swear by the efficiency of Joomla, which is why it’s an integral part of numerous small business websites.
   
• TYPO3 CMS - TYPO3 is a CMS solution that assures maximum compatibility and improved longevity for a website. One of the many advantages of this open source system is that it has been specifically developed to cater to the requirements of small and medium businesses. With its detailed user permission system, it has emerged as one of the top choices for designing a website for small businesses.
   
• Expression Engine - Expression Engines supports each and every website design and is used by developers because of its flexibility, stability and security. It’s been in business for over ten years, which means there is a tremendous amount of support system available for its CMS.

Choosing the right Open Source CMS

The choice depends on your needs and objectives. Either one of the content management systems mentioned above, can do the job for you. But, it’s best that you get an expert developer’s opinion on the matter. There might be a particular feature or functionality that you want, but it might not be available on some of these systems.

Choosing the right open source CMS is in large part also dependant on the experience and expertise of the web development company that you choose to do business with. It’s only a company with a proven track record in the field of designing small business websites on open source platforms that tells you which CMS is your best bet. Not only that, but such companies will also help you optimize the use of the CMS chosen by you.

Content management systems (CMSes) are software programs and strategies used in businesses to manage different types of content such as information, employee resource, multimedia resource, web files, electronic documents, media content etc. There are six main categories of CMS depending upon the type of application they perform.

1. Enterprise content management system (ECMS): These content management systems are used to manage content related to organizational processes of enterprises or corporations.
    
2. Web content management system (WCMS): A web CMS is customized software for the creation and management of HTML web content. It implements automatic templates with a WYSISYG format for editing and creating web pages. Thus, it simplifies publication of web content for the companies whose employees have little or no web programming skills.
    
3. Electronic document (E-document) content management system: An E-document CMS manages electronic documents (especially on an operation system). It easily facilitates this process with e-mail notification and automated routing.
    
4. Mobile content management system (MCMS): A mobile CMS is a software program that is customized to create and manage mobile web pages. It allows businesses to upload, edit, and approve content for their mobile website without any need for programming skills.
    
5. Component content management system: A component CMS is a software system which involves managing of components (usually customer content) at the component level instead of whole documents or web pages. Though it can work as a standalone application, most of the time it is a sub-functionality of all the other CMS systems (ECMS, WCMS, MCMS etc.). It can assist with marketing, monitoring costs, customer support, and training purposes.
    
6. Media content management system: This CMS is for media (radio and television).

All these different content management systems are useful as management tools at the enterprise, web, mobile, media, electronic content, and component levels. By simplifying technical tasks (such as website designing), evaluating multiple marketing strategies, monitoring content and employees, as well as being useful for generating performance reports/activity logs etc., they help different organizations save time on a variety of functions, especially if they are large and deal with high volumes of data and employees and want a software system which can control and manage content without requiring its operators to have any programming knowledge.

Today’s businesses are struck with information overload, and static websites are definitely not a solution with their fast-growing and highly competitive nature. There are hefty contents for the organizations to store and work upon. Using an enterprise content management system (CMS), a company or an organization can have a smooth maintenance of their content for both on-site and off-site purposes. With an increasingly high need to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver data on the websites, it has become mandatory to use content management systems.

Search engine visibility is not the only challenge for today’s online businesses. To stay ahead in the competition, it is necessary for them to present an updated version of the online content to the internet users. An enterprise CMS helps them build structured websites facilitating adding, deleting, and editing of the online content in a fairly easy manner, thus overcome all the challenges with content management whatsoever. Be it press releases, upcoming events, product launches or updates, newsletters, or special offers - business users themselves can publish the new or frequently updated information even if they have no technical knowledge regarding computer or web systems.

Below are the ways enterprise content management systems can be useful and advantageous to businesses:

• Cost saving: No need of employing IT specialists to handle upload and management of the content. Standard automated processes of CMS can be maintained by the business personnel themselves.

• Access rights and control: Business users or content owners are entitled to have a direct access to the information and make any changes from anywhere, at any time. Having a better control over the use of information, they can organize and manage their business in a desired way and make informed decisions based on secure, accurate real-time information available to them.

• Freshness of the content: By keeping their website fresh and updated, businesses can encourage customers to keep connected with the regular happenings around the business, which in turn makes them more responsive.

• Consistent presentation: Content management systems offer well-defined templates for content presentation on the site to maintain a consistent look and feel.
  

• Enhanced online visibility: Frequent updating makes websites automatically indexed by search engine crawlers to get improved search engine positions.

All in all, using an enterprise CMS, businesses can notice significant improvements in their marketing results in short time and exceed their own performance standards to gain newer heights.

Web content management requires designing software to manage publication and editing of web content. It is possible to keep a track of all the possible content on the website with a CMS software, anything from a simple text to photos to music to video. The best thing about it is that it can be managed with virtually no skill or knowledge at all to manage a website.

The open source CMS means the content management software whose source code is open for all on the web, quite an easy way to have a web presence. There are dozens of them available guaranteeing an easy maintenance of your website. Some of the popular ones are Joomla, WordPress, Drupal, dotCMS, Textpattern, Mambo, and so on. They usually come with a lot of handy plug-ins and widgets that can be further customized. Though not designed to offer the advanced functionalities by default, it is possible to enhance their performance and features to a great extent using few additional plug-ins.

Don’t think that these CMSes available free of cost are a choice only of those who can't afford to spend too much on web development. You will find some of the gigantic industry leaders also relying on the open source stuff for their web content management, like audi.com, twitter.com. The CMS platform is equipped with a powerful blend of features and configurability to empower robust corporate websites. You will find several different open course CMS software packages to support different types of websites such as community web portals, corporate websites, Ecommerce websites, resource directories, social networking websites, personal websites or blogs.

Those wishing their own personal, simple website have easy-to-use open source CMS options in the form of CMS Made Simple, Mambo, Pluck, Frog CMS, and many more. Thus, a non technical newbie on the web also finds a solution with open source and enjoys creating unlimited number of pages, inserting images, creating blogs or photo albums etc. along with the ability of changing information on the site.

Thus, open source CMS is indeed a way to go unless you need too customized a system that sets you way out of the lot and requires something that can’t be managed by these off-the-rack content management systems.

An enterprise portal is a door opening to a dozens of resources and services which a company or an organization wants configured on a website. Portal architecture design would challenge the developers to form a complex structure integrating information, people and processes across the organizational sphere. Having to choose what resources to deploy and in what manner, a business can have tremendous benefits by custom portals. However, in the complex framework of the portal, what is the role of the business itself is of great significance.

Application development in enterprise portal in its vastness includes services ranging from content management system to customer relationship management. A streamlined approach towards web development usage by an enterprise portal would be to have a multitier architecture (also referred to as N-tier architecture), most commonly a three-tier model, as seen in many Ecommerce websites. This is how the application can be broken into separate functional modules to allow separate access to the customer and the vendor leading to flexibility and reusability of the application.

Enterprise portal development service providers would require to understand the nature and domain of your business and accordingly feed components to your portal. The portal formation would include different perspectives, usability by the employees and by the customers or clients. Shopping carts, for instance, would be deployed for customers and intranet for the employees. N number of initiatives could be taken whether it is customer services or business intelligence projects.

Enterprise portal solutions are a way to see businesses in their supreme richness. Need is to find out an enterprise portal solutions provider that can comprehend your business territory in its full complexity.

Contact PLAVEB to experience the wonders of enterprise portal development services.