Everyone writes endlessly about Content Management Systems and how they will revolutionize your web presence. They’re really not weaving a tall tale there! The websites of the years before 2.0 were primarily static, where, with a little love from web development applications such as Dreamweaver or Frontpage, you’d conjure up standard html pages, link them to one another, embed images and other media, and then queue your page outside the gates of an FTP to upload everything you had. On the other hand, today’s websites are much more dynamic. You simply need to create the structure once, and then keep updating your content.
Most of this is possible because while older websites were primarily technology driven – today’s websites are primarily content driven. Let’s look at some examples to illuminate this difference!
The time of Geocities (pre Yahoo) was considered a glorious time in design. Largely because people anywhere, with very little knowledge of design, development and internet connectivity (the really fast 56.6Kbps ones), could put a little part of themselves up online in exchange for a very queer website address that revealed nothing about their identity. Prior to that, the Web was fairly one-dimensional. CNN or BBC would spoon feed you information without the ability to hear back from you; without any real feedback mechanism in place.
The drawback was that you had to understand a little bit about file structures, linking pages, optimizing images so that they would actually download on an ultra-slow internet connection (which was actually the norm) and of course, you just had to know how to ftp into a server.  This was before the age of the colorful, icon-filled and feature-heavy website control-panel and the time where the only place you could ping for help was through your quick telnet to a mIRC channel. You had to depend on the web guy to do everything because making a simple update on a page wasn’t really that simple, as the complete page had to be downloaded off the server, updated and then uploaded again.
The general complaint from the users was that pages didn’t load fast enough, and the most that you could do to assuage the situation was to store images on the server and pull the links into your html page. But the reality was that bandwidth was slow everywhere and browsing was about as much interactive as was watching television. It was a truly unidirectional experience. Developers focused more on how they could jazz up a page as true optimization was difficult due to the lack of interoperability protocols between browsers.
Enter programming languages that were being used for web development such as PHP and ASP, and lo and behold, new, radical job descriptions were being written up. Companies that wanted large portals could do so thanks to the vision that Netscape and Mozilla were sharing with users. And though they had to hire more design and development guys and double up the workload on their existing content experts, companies saw the value in doing so.
Content as such, however, hadn’t really evolved yet!

Enter the CMS
You’ve already CMS’ed to some extent if you have ever put up a blog post, tried to upload a video on YouTube or commented on someone’s article entry on a news website. As soon as you remove the need for sending an email through a cumbersome ‘mailto’ tag that will try and open up your default desktop email application, you’ve entered the realm of managing content online.
You know when they say ‘hey, what do you bring to the table?’, they’re talking about the value you bring to the World Wide Web. Every comment, post, video, sound file or photograph that is put online, adds to the value that a website brings to the table. Since there are so many websites online, this is a massive business proposition where enabling one website to compete with the rest of the web. Search Engine Optimization, similarly, enables you to market your properties so that you can earn advertising dollars through online advertising campaigns.
It’s as simple as knowing the objectives for your company, aligning them with your long term business strategy, planning the structure and then letting it loose! This has largely been the case ever since New Media tools started to show up on the scene causing a massive shift in online behavior both from organizations as well as individuals.
If you go back to the days of yore that we talked about at the start, it would have been hard to imagine that a single blogger could be racking up traffic and competing with websites run by an entire organization many times his size! But that’s the reality, and even in Pakistan, it’s very visible.
But what has been the cause of this ‘revolution of content’? What has caused the power to be given to the individual? The answer lies in understanding Content Management Systems as a platform or a solution that is installed onto the web server. Very simply put, the CMS helps to plan and manage content more effectively than before. If one looks at actual files that are executed and decompiled on the server, one won’t find a single file for every article that is updated. That would actually prove to be detrimental.
CMS revolves around the concept of templates and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). One template will control as many pages in a specific category as you can possibly want. If you change an element on the template, the change impacts all the pages that use that template. If you’re still unsure how this works, try opening up software that uses the concept of Master or Parent and Child relationships such as Powerpoint. The key to a successful CMS is the fact that all the content is database-driven. All Content Management System solutions essentially have three things:
First, the database where the actual content is saved is independent of template or theme you are implementing;
Second, a programming language is used, hidden from most users, to dynamically extract the content from the database using a query language. The same programming language is used to dynamically generate the HTML page based on the content stored in the database as well as the template.
And finally, templates in the form of CSS and PHP files are static and remain on the server. You keep adding content into the database and the CSS and PHP files are the guides that help the content fit into your theme when you publish posts on an ad-hoc basis.
Let’s take a look at some specific software which can be of assistance in managing content:
Drupal – modular design, portals and web apps: If you are looking for a system that could be adapted to one’s needs, Drupal is probably the product you are looking for. However you will need basic programming knowledge to make Drupal work for you. There are lots of forums which can be tapped for knowledge sharing and information exchange.
Joomla – simple websites: Joomla is the best option for people, who do not necessarily have a strong programming background. The latest version strengthens its position by solving the problems of friendly links and languages version. There are a lot of forums that you can get assistance from. You will need to spend money on the developer pack and there are only a limited number of templates which are available for free download.
WordPress – blog tool (service) and weblog platform (the open source CMS): Lots of versions including the Multi User platform, make WordPress a highly flexible, community-inclusive tool that not only has lots of forums for support and knowledge sharing, but also thousands of free templates and design packages that can be downloaded.
A high availability of plug-ins and customization with minimal programming knowledge makes WordPress the Preferred CMS choice for CIO Pakistan.

Managing Documents
So far, CMS that we’ve been talking about are for websites. But while websites are content-driven, so is your business. The number of documents and files that users in an organization or in a network, need to be able to share at any one time, increases as the business becomes more competitive and more complex… and you don’t really want to be emailing files and attachments to one another all the time.
The concept of Document Management Systems are extremely similar to CMS – in fact, the whole premise of all ‘management systems’ work on the same principle: to be able to give multiple users robust and ready access to a database of archived documents. This is imperative to the workflow in any enterprise.
Xythos is an On Demand Document Management tool and is a provider of both on-premise and hosted (SaaS) document management solutions for large and small size organizations. Their hosted product has a somewhat unique history in that is was designed and developed from the very beginning as a web-based service, so it works very similar to a CMS. Products such as Xythos have been developed for the enterprise.
Another service that users might already be aware of is Google Docs which you get as part of every Google-based account (Gmail or Apps) that you use. Create a document, share it with your network, track changes and invite collaborators to edit or peruse that document. What’s most attractive about Google Docs is proposition that it is powerful and easy to use along with the fact that it is free. You can turn a simple document into a form and either email the form or embed the form anywhere you want. Because Google’s email solution is already very popular with the masses, it makes sense to deploy a Document Management System that makes collaboration so much easier.
Content Management Systems are extremely effective tools which might not be applicable to every website, but an effort should certainly be made to understand the concepts better. If you can manage the information in your organization more effectively, you can be more productive and have your strategy better aligned to meet the business objectives.

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