Content Management Systems

The basic premise behind content management is that intellectual capital of a firm can be stored and managed in some unified manner. Simple. The reality is that firms have huge loads of non-standardized content on all sorts of media ranging from the more manageable text and visual media (digital media being especially manageable) to the least manageable audio and tacit knowledge content. The resulting challenges cause content management efforts to fail regularly - partially because individuals fail to recognize the rich variety of styles and forms of what constitutes intellectual content in an organization. Given these troubles, CIO's must still find ways to better organize and make available the intellectual resources of organizations. They turn to enterprise document management (ECM) systems to do this. .

Content management systems are getting better as search technologies include improved algorithms for indexing and keyword isolation.  I have been experimenting with various indexing services, most notably Google Desktop (for two years), Spotlight, and now Yep for Mac.  Yep is really quite good with PDFs.

Sharepoint has quickly become an industry favorite for managing documents and content on the Web. Document management in Sharepoint is their take on content management (still tied to individual document files- perhaps taking the metaphor too far for the good of improving on the old model).