Thursday, August 28, 2008

Contend Management a misnomer

The more I've worked with content management systems, the more disillusioned I've become. None of them, for example, seem to provide a detailed content inventory: something you'd think would be pretty basic in something called a content management system.

It seems that to do a thorough inventory you still have to do the grunt work with an Excel spreadsheet (or something similar) in order to find out the basics:
  • page identifier
  • page subject/keywords
  • author
  • date created/date last modified
  • who last modified it and how
  • type of document (html, pdf, image, video, etc)

In my opinion, a good CMS should not only provide such a tool, it should:

  • be able to send out reports to the people responsible for specific pages to remind them when it is time to check that the content is still relevant, and
  • automatically check regularly to see that the links are still valid (and send the owner a notice if any of the links have died).

If you've found such a tool, let me know! Because even when I attended an international conference of web content managers (with lots of vendors present), none had a CMS that could do these things.

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