Enterprise Content Management in London

Just come back from the ECM in London (Olympia). Great stuff - but what a surprise when I found out that all the CMS solutions are either java or asp! Some of them offer API to enable interaction, but it frankly looks to me like the market is now wide open for the Jazar Application. There is potential for good partnership between Jazar and other Content Management providers, but we will first focus on delivering a solid application which will meet all the basic requirements.

Note: contentmanagement365 which was there as a "Sponsor?" is built obviously on a content management system. But have a look at their forum ... I amy offer them to rebuild their site with our technology!

here are the key elements which make Jazar the best content management system:

1) a good text editor.
A good content management system is here to eliminates webmaster bottlenecks, and speed the time to web. Internet is nowaday the first marketing channel - you want your site to be updatable by anybody in your marketing team, without first having to write the specs to your webmaster!

A good comparison I heard was as follow: you can compare your site to your telephone network - it will never come to your mind to ask your IT department to build a telephone for you....

Operation on a website is a process, not an event

2) control system to ensure content is approved before it is published.
You need to allow contributors from across the company to supply information directly to the sites, speeding up information flow, cutting costs and placing the ownership of the site content into the hands of the relevant people. On the other hand if editors have too much opportunity to change the design and layout, it leads to branding and design inconsistency.

By managing publishing rights, you ensure that all the new content submitted by the different contributors is reviewed and corrected before going live.

3) Multilanguage support.
This is self explanatory - all good content management system should leave you the option to create your pages in different languages.

4) Live updates.
Compliancy and Accessibility are very hot topics today - in the UK, the department of Trade & Industry (www.dti.gov.uk) and the office of the e-Government unit (www.e-governmentcabinetoffice.gov.uk) are coordinating the development of industry standards for web accessibility.

A good content management system will get live update from our updates server to make sure that:

• all your potential clients can have access to your site
  
• some websites have already been the victims of successful legal claims from disadvantaged users of websites
  
• we know now that search engines will always prefer compliantpages, improving your visibility in their search results pages.
  

5) Modularity.
You may want to add your own booking system, or own job posting solutions - a good content management system should be built in a way you can add easily new modules to your existing website, without having to build a new website.

Website development is costly - your system should be flexible enough to easily integrate new modules. Best practices tend to make an API available to programmers so that they can have access to high level functionalities to interact with the existing system. Jazar provides you with a content management system for your site - we are open to provide you with custom add-ons - but your IT may be keen on simply developing a module for the site: we provide them the set of functions to let them just do that.

6) Multi Channel support.
You may need to build different sites, related to different themes. But you want to manage them from a common interface. A content management system allows you to do that. Built around templates, you can easily manage the content across the different sites.

7) Searchable.
You want your whole website to be searchable, not only the database of your products.
All the content you create is stored in a database, which makes categorizable, and easy to index for specific searches.

Search feature is very important today - it allows you:

• instant access to relevant area of the site for people who know what they are looking for.
  
• opportunity to submit high density keyword pages which is very important for the promotability of your site in search engines.
  
• a powerful marketing tool to find out what your visitors are the most interested in.
  

A good CMS should provide with a webanalysis tool, delivering information about what people are looking for on your site, the popularity of your pages, etc ... This then give you the opportunity to fully use the functionalities of your content management system to analyse the data, and change the layout of your website to address potential issues highlighted during this analysis.