Content Management System

Kenneth Baker (0732281)

Ciaran Smith (0742392)
Kathleen Berns (0847461)

What it is?

Content management system (CMS) is designed to be used by non IT based professionals

to manage and collaborate content such as documents, images, videos, sound files and
scientific data. It also allows future storing, controlling and revising of this data. There
are too main types of content management systems, Web Based and Enterprise Based.
Other types include document Management System, Mobile Content Management
System, Component Content Management System and Media Content Management
System. These can be broken down further into commercial and open source systems.
Open source is software, which can be downloaded for free where the source code is
included and in which you are able to alter the code to suit your needs. Commercial
systems on the other hand, are solutions which you pay for and which can be tailored for
your needs.

Web-based CMS

Within a Web based content management system there are two types of applications; a
content management application (CMA) and content delivery application (CDA). The
content management application is used by the author, who may not be familiar with
coding such as Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) to add or edit content on the
website. A content management system is usually designed to look similar to word
processing applications such as Microsoft Word, Users would generally be familiar with
such applications. The content delivery application (CDA) uses and complies that
information to update the website.

Examples

- Joomla

Joomla is an example of an open-source web based content management system. It is one

of the world’s most popular web-based content managements systems. It has over 200
thousand users one of which is UL’s computer science department website. Joomla got its
name in 2005 when there was a split in the Mambo community. Joomla is written in PHP
and uses SQL as its database system. Joomla uses articles, extensions and modules to lay
out the content. A community has started in which developers have created extensions
and modules. Examples of this include Community Builder, VirtuMart and JcalPro.

- Omni-update
Omni-update is a company that provides web content management systems for higher
educational institutes, some of their products include; OU Campus, OU Alumni, OU
Educate and OU Students. These products are used in over 500 college and university
websites. The architecture, which, these products use include PHP, ASP, .NET, CFM,
JSP, HTML, and XHTML these all comply with J2EE standards. Omni-updates products
are laid out using modules and third party web apps can also be used as add-ons.

Enterprise Content Management System

An Enterprise Content Management System (ECMS) is used by companies to control,

capture, manage and store content such as documents, images, e-mails, videos & instant
messages from across the company. The conversions of linked technologies such as
document management, web content management and collaboration have resulted in the
development of CMS.

Examples

- Alfresco

John Newton founded Alfresco in 2005 with investment firms such as Accel Partners,
SAP Ventures and Mayfield Fund. It is one of the most popular Open Source Enterprise
Content Management Systems on the market. “It couples the innovation of Open Source
with the Stability of a true Enterprise class platform” (alfresco.com) The team who built
Alfresco brought with them 15 years of enterprise developments skills. Alfresco use
technologies such as CIFS Interface, which is used to access its file system and its
compatible with Microsoft windows, and Unix based platforms such as Linux and Mac
OS10. It is written in Java and JSP java script.

- Microsoft Office SharePoint

Microsoft Office SharePoint is used to share information throughout the company. Its
main method of distributing information is using an intranet system. It uses a hierarchy
structure for the management of its content and it is built to work closely with the
Microsoft Office suite. Microsoft Office Sharepoint can trace its roots back to Microsoft
Content Management Server 2002. It is widely used by large scale organizations
including the University of Limerick.

Benefits
Content management systems make it easy for users to refresh the content on their
websites. Regular updates have a dramatic effect on your search engine rankings not to
mention consistent followers of websites value frequent content overhauls.
Another benefit that must be considered is the reduced cost, professional web designers
are by no means cheap, and in this economic climate it makes no sense to be paying for a
service up to three or four times a month that you could be doing yourself easily and on a
budget.

*To stay competitive in this day and age, websites need to be far more than a static
brochure. A website that has interesting articles which may be of interest to your
customers will generate return visits, as well as offer greater search engine indexing
opportunities. Search engines love content and by adding new content regularly you are
increasing the opportunity for your site to be found by visitors searching to buy, or find
information about your product, or area of expertise. (lineofsite.co.uk)

Reflection

The reason we picked this topic was because one member of the group uses content
management systems on a regular basis, specifically Joomla. The other members of the
group were eager to learn more about the topic. It’s an area which many of us may
encounter in our future careers.

When looking for information on this topic, we first looked in the college library but we
could find no relevant texts. We concluded that this was due to the ever changing
industry of computer technology and therefore any book we found would be outdated.
So, for the majority of our research, we used the Internet. The information, which was
online was up to date which is due in part to the use content management systems.

We began by brainstorming the topic and found out what we already knew. From there,
we researched the different aspects in depth to gain a greater understanding of the topic.
We visited various websites including the official websites of some of the content
management systems. We also used other websites including blogs and reference
sites.

Doing this project, we meet on a regular basis and discussed how our individual research
was going. Then, we came together as a group and combined our research and authored
our article.

References

[http://www.joomla.org/about-joomla.html Joomla.org]
[http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/Pages/Default.aspx Sharepoint.Microsoft.com]
[http://www.lineofsite.co.uk/cms/archives/2005/12/implementation.html
Lineofsite.co.uk]
[http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Main_Page Wiki.alfresco.com]
[[http://www-01.ibm.com/software/lotus/ Ibm.com]
[http://omniupdate.com/products/oucampus/ Omniupdate.com/products/oucampus]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source Wikipedia.org/wiki/open_source]
[http://www.alfresco.com/about/ Alfresco.com/resources]
[http://www.csis.ul.ie/administrator/ Csis.ul.ie/administrator]