How complicated is it to manage website content?
Usually, it depends on the size of an organization – intuitively, that may sound a bit unnatural – aren’t we considering placing of simple text & images? Well, to some extent that is correct, but let me venture to say, that managing content in a large organization is an authentic challenge.
The context
Let us consider an example of the Company, that operates globally and holds dedicated websites for each country. Some countries’ have the content available in a few languages and some of it must be controlled globally and rolled out on demand. Additionally, some of the content has to be reusable and available on different channels. Last but not least, do not forget about the approval process – every bit of content must be validated against legal and language…
The example proves, that even a simple content (even texts and images) change with the context presented above becomes a real challenge.
What’s the reality?
Global organisations frequently struggle with the content management process. It is not uncommon that every need for a content change is escalated from local to the regional or even global offices and even a simple change takes relatively a long time. Management teams are reluctant on doing changes themself because of the CMS’s complicacy and fear of lack of the control of the published content pieces. Often because of a misuse of the tool and lack of standardized processes.
What is the solution?
Introducing the controlled process of managing the content that reduces the risk of publishing inadequate content and opens the possibility of making changes to a local team is the desired state in many organisations.
Due to AEM architecture, it is possible to host multiple sites on a single AEM instance – each site may be available under a different domain, and may be very different from the others, additionally, AEM allows managing many different sites in one place with the ability to limit access by setting up Permission Groups.
Above, combined with AEM’s Live Copy mechanism helps to control multi-sites content, where there is a blueprint on which authors may implement changes, which are then rolled out to the underlying markets.
Finally, the content can be automatically translated by integrating with translation services and validated with the usage of Content Approval Workflows that will automate the current flow and reduce the time required to publish a page.
Those features combined and used in the right way may significantly simplify and automate the processes in an organization and effectively lead to real savings. In one of our projects, by using AEM’s features to address the content challenges, we were able to reduce the time needed for content management by half.
