If you find yourself nodding to any of the following questions, then the world of Component Content Management Systems (CCMS) should be squarely on your radar.
Do you create technical manuals, user guides, API documentation, eLearning materials, product specifications, or installation guides?
A CCMS enables content to be stored in discrete components, such as procedures, explanations, diagrams, and reused time and again.
Do you produce Legal and Compliance Documents?
A CCMS is ideal for managing documents requiring precise wording and consistent formatting, such as contracts, legal disclaimers, compliance documentation, and internal and external structured information, such as newsletters and press releases.
Do you produce Medical or Scientific Publications?
Items such as research papers, medical guidelines, and scientific reports often have standardized sections like abstracts, methodologies, and references that can be managed separately. With a CCMS, managing these documents becomes easier as you can leverage a comprehensive taxonomy to categorize and organize content systematically.
Do you produce Catalogs and Product Listings?
A CCMS is well leveraged to support ecommerce platforms for managing product descriptions, specifications, images, and pricing information.
Does your organization run against a comprehensive set of Standard Operating Procedures?
Industries like manufacturing, healthcare, and logistics often have well-defined procedures that can be modularized and managed using a CCMS, preventing repetition and ensuring consistency.
Do you have a complex Knowledge Base?
For customer support or help desk purposes, a CCMS can efficiently organize and deliver frequently asked questions, troubleshooting guides, and support articles.
Content substantially supports enterprise campaigns, delivers valuable information to clients and customers, and supports revenue generation. For larger organizations, that content often consists of a variety of content types, as mentioned above.
Organizing and managing these numerous content types through a digital first approach is best achieved with the help of a component content management system (CCMS). Understanding the business rationale for a CCMS and selecting the right one for your business is often challenging.
However, we can help with our extensive domain experience. In this blog, we’ll explore what features, functions, constraints, and purchase options you should consider when selecting a CCMS to ensure the one you choose delivers a seamless, efficient, and consistent digital experience and provides a return on investment.
What is a Component Content Management System?
A Component Content Management System (CCMS) is a specialized software solution meticulously crafted to optimize the creation, organization, and dissemination of intricate, structured content. It serves as an invaluable tool for organizations engaged in the production of a diverse array of documents and publications. This encompasses technical manuals, user guides, API documentation, eLearning materials, legal documents, scientific publications, catalogs, product listings, standard operating procedures, and comprehensive knowledge bases.
At its core, a CCMS revolves around a fundamental concept: the decomposition of content into discrete, reusable components. These components encompass various content elements such as text, images, diagrams, tables, and more. Rather than embarking on the laborious process of crafting content from scratch for each document, CCMS users seamlessly construct documents by leveraging these reusable components. This approach ensures content consistency while significantly economizing time and resources.
What to Do Before Shortlisting Component Content Management Systems
Before embarking on the journey to a new CCMS and diving straight into shortlisting platforms, you need to clearly understand your use cases. That means gathering a team of stakeholders and determining the strategic reasons you need a CCMS and what it would mean for your organization and various business units.
- Understand and document the business problem
Determine the problem your business is facing and how a CCMS can help you solve it. For example, as we mentioned earlier, you might be an institution that must produce and manage medical or science publications or a legal firm that needs to manage hundreds of compliance documents. Knowing the business problem allows you to select the right CCMS and the ideal features you need as well as quantify the expected savings in cost, time and reuse.
- Create a project team
Your CCMS project team will comprise key stakeholders from different areas of the business who will be using the platform regularly and have unique needs from different vantage points. This includes content editors, product owners, and project managers. Build a project team that consists of representatives from these areas, as they will help in determining what matters the most when picking your next CCMS and will be the ones to champion the new platform throughout the organization.
- Define business KPIs and organizational goals that CCMS should help improve
Having an overarching problem or problems that the CCMS should solve is critical, but you must also identify the benefits of adopting the new solution. Will the CCMS help redefine business processes that result in cost and time savings? Will improvements made to the customer experience help improve consistency and drive revenue growth? Set benchmarks for areas such as these and use them to aid the selection process.
- Understand the blockers
Even if you pick the right system, you need to identify the affected stakeholders, such as IT, change management teams, and HR. While these teams won’t necessarily be using the platform in their day-to-day work, they will have to sign off any new system.
IT must determine the feasibility of fitting any new platform into your existing tech ecosystem and ensure its compatibility with other tools. HR and change management teams will be critical in getting skeptical groups on board and providing training materials to others, such as employees who might need to use the CCMS but might be comfortable with the tools and processes that were previously in place.
- Determine information architecture and create a content strategy
Before selecting a CCMS, you should decide on your information architecture and content strategy. This indicates how content will be classified and labeled, as well as how your customers will be able to navigate and consume that content at the right time and in the right format.
With a well defined information architecture and content strategy, you can begin to answer questions such as, how will content be broken down? What workflows are required? What security framework must be implemented for sensitive information such as investor news? This step is crucial to maximizing the value of your CCMS.
Choosing a Component Content Management System: Features to Look For
Whether a specific feature is a must-have or a nice-to-have will come down to your organization’s goals and current circumstances, and the vendor you select for your next CCMS should be able to meet those unique requirements.
Structured Content Management
Arguably the most important feature your CCMS should be able to provide is structured content management. That means facilitating content reuse, metadata tag management, and improving the findability of content assets ensuring content is always u to date wherever it is used.
User-Friendly Content and Web Editor
Another crucial feature is a user-friendly content and web editor. When content teams are working in the CCMS, they need access to an intuative interface that enables them to use familiar drag & drop tools and others to manage content for the web and other digital channels.
Version Management
The ability to track and review previous versions of content is invaluable, particularly for organizations with extensive technical documentation and an assortment of content assets. Your CCMS should provide version management features that enable you to monitor changes and roll back content to previous versions as necessary.
Translations and Localization
Global enterprises need features such as translation and localization as part of their CCMS. This enables them to manage content experiences across multiple regions with audiences that speak different languages and adapt content assets to meet unique requirements.
Workflow Management and Collaboration Support
Collaboration and well defined workflows are fundamental to an operationally efficient CCMS. These workflows facilitate creation, review, and approval of content before and after publication. Having the right personnel involved in the content workflow definition ensures better content coordination and accuracy and enables teams to work more proficiently.
Granular Security and Information Governance
Granular security features allow administrators to control who can access, edit, and publish content. This includes logging and auditing capabilities and single sign-on (SSO) to provide an extra layer of security. Meanwhile, information governance ensures compliance with regulations and standards to manage, store, and distribute content securely and according to specified requirements.
Multi-Channel Delivery and Multiformat Publication
Audiences enjoy the flexibility and freedom to consume content in the format most suited to their needs and on their preferred devices. A CCMS should support multichannel delivery to the web via a website, portal, or other channel, mobile devices, or wherever content will be consumed. It should also support multiformat publication, whether as a PDF, HTML, or other format.
Integrations and Extensibility
Since the CCMS is unlikely to be the only frequently used tool in the tech stack, it should be able to integrate easily with other systems and have functionality extended to meet additional requirements that appear. Integrations with other content authoring tools, such as a headless CMS, translation management systems, CRM software, and others, may be required, and the CCMS should make integrating these solutions straightforward.
Onboarding and Training
Vendors under consideration should be able to provide access to onboarding and training materials that help get new users up to speed. Proper training and onboarding procedures make it easier to attain the process efficiency and revenue generation benefits a CCMS can provide.
Technical Support
Along with sufficient training, technical support should be readily available to help team members perform troubleshooting, resolve any issues and provide responsive assistance when required.
Scalability (and CCMS Licensing)
A CCMS should be able to handle increased content volume and user load without compromising performance. CCMS licensing models should align with an organization’s growth trajectory, allowing them to choose a plan that fits their current needs while providing options to scale as required.
Proof of Concept
The vendors you are considering should offer a proof of concept or sandbox that allows you to “play with the system” and determine whether or not the system works for you. With a sandbox trial, you can test the different features available and begin to understand what a full-scale rollout might look like across the organization. Additionally, you can start to identify other potential stumbling blocks that might restrict you from going with that particular CCMS.
A Component Content Management System Shortlist
The CCMS landscape is quite large, with several options available to you. To help you narrow that down, here are two possibilities that Content Bloom recommends as leading options in the component content management system category.
AEM Guides
AEM Guides is a cloud-native and enterprise-grade CCMS that enables organizations to manage and optimize product documentation, knowledge bases, technical documentation, and other content assets.
AEM Guides supports structured content management and allows DITA-based content creation and delivery. It offers features including web-based review and collaboration, omnichannel delivery, and native integration with Adobe’s assortment of products.
Tridion Docs
Tridion Docs is a DITA-based CCMS that handles structured content creation, translation, and delivery. It provides enterprise-quality content authoring and collaboration and helps to improve information governance, content findability, and more.
Getting Started with a Component Content Management Systems
Given the value that content can provide to your business in delivering a high-quality customer experience, enabling the organization to save money and generate more revenue, it’s crucial to have the right tools at your disposal.
With Content Bloom’s structured content and CCMS expertise, businesses can select the right CCMS to help them eliminate content silos and scale content operations. Our experience is also helpful for building the right content strategy for your needs and implementing leading enterprise solutions such as Tridion Docs and AEM Guides.
As part of an enterprise content management and web redesign project with SNC Lavalin, Content Bloom implemented Tridion, built a new corporate website from the ground up, integrated various technologies, and launched numerous microsites.
Learn more about the value of structured content and selecting the right CCMS by reading our eBook: Building a Unified Content Strategy: Integrating Web and Structured Content Management Systems.
