Mike Riley is a Naperville, Illinois-based advanced computing professional specializing in emerging technologies and new development trends. Contact him at [email protected].
The explosion of digital document storage has introduced new requirements for creating order out of increasingly chaotic data, radically changing how we think about Web content management. What used to be the simple identification and access of unstructured documents through well-formed tags have ruptured at the seams to also include the content modification and back-end data management systems to handle diverse information such as application-generated office documents, media files, conversation threads and even Web presentations. This exponential growth has spurred a multitude of sophisticated content management systems (CMSs), including, as part of their solution, support for stringent regulatory requirements such as audits, track-and-trace, replications and scheduled content releases. Add the need to meet increasing performance requirements to manage the data, and you've got a whole new look to CMSs.
Table 1: Selected commercial content management systems.
Table 2: Selected open-source content management systems.
Bringing Structure to Chaos
At one end of the spectrum, we have enterprise-class CMSs, such as EMC's Documentum and Stellent's Content Server, which have been architected with a single function in mind: to provide maximum performance. According to Andy MacMillan, product manager for Stellent, the platform runs "within a single JVM that runs against a single repository working with a single relational database." MacMillan says the solution is also service-oriented, in that "every action performed in the system is actionable through the APIs." Seeing this granular level of functional interaction from any SOAP-compliant language is impressive and powerful, providing Stellent users remarkable flexibility with this approach.
Vendors focusing on the middle ground hone their efforts toward browser-based Web asset management with several of the higher priced choices featuring live editing of the Web page being viewed. This provides the capability to author and edit template-driven pages without knowing anything about the underlying technology driving the delivery and display of the intended content. Many of these Web-centric systems are straightforward, supplying rich WYSIWYG editors that allow content suppliers the same experience as working with a word processor. Several of these vendors (including Stellent) have progressive plans to adopt Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) editing and organizational tools that will turn the Web editing experience into a richer desktop-like application, complete with drag-and-drop reordering, in-place roundtrip editing and replication of text and image attributes.
Although many of the of the mid-tier CMS players, such as Ektron and Kentico, are based on the .NET Framework, several Java-based CMSs, such as Interwoven's Worksite MP, are frequently found at either the low or high extremes. Systems based on the language are minimally represented in open-source CMS alternatives.
