From the course: Foundations of Enterprise Content Management

Storage and adding content in a CMS

From the course: Foundations of Enterprise Content Management

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Storage and adding content in a CMS

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- [Instructor] In this section of the course, we're going to examine some of the features that an effective content management system will need to have. Where applicable, I'll show you examples of how these features look in real life. I'm not going to recommend any particular product and I'll show a variety of different tools. The important point is that if you're considering a change in your content management processes, you'll know some of the things you should be watching out for. Let's talk about the different components of what goes into a content management system. And by the way, the abbreviation for that is CMS. You'll be hearing that a lot during this course. The first thing we'll address is storage. This is kind of obvious, right? I mean, how can you manage something if there's nowhere to put it. In a traditional content management system, that where is part of your existing storage or with a dedicated provider server. These days, however, there are content management service providers who are entirely cloud-based, meaning your content is stored online. We'll talk more about these options later in the course. Making it easy to add or create content is also a crucial factor. Let's take a look at an example of this in Microsoft SharePoint. SharePoint may not typically be considered as a CMS, but in addition to its other features, it actually performs very well as one in a lot of circumstances. It's also something that a lot of organizations already have on hand and I would always advocate looking at tools you already have before going out and buying new ones. SharePoint is available as an on-premise or cloud-based solution. I personally prefer the online version and that's what we're looking at right now. Adding existing content to SharePoint is super easy. In a file library, you click the upload document icon and browse to the file that you want. You can also drag and drop files directly into the library, which is a great time saver. Now to create new content, click the new icon in the toolbar. SharePoint gives you the ability to create a variety of standard file types. And this can be modified either to restrict types or expanded to include custom file types defined by your own templates. WordPress got its start as a blogging and site creation tool. But did you know that it's also one of the more widely used CMS tools? It's used by a large percentage of the market although mostly for specifically web content management. Now I'll be honest and say that it is not the best solution in a lot of cases, but it does have some advantages, which we'll talk about as we move through the course. I'm not going to spend time on WordPress's site building features in this course, but I'm going to use it to show you examples of content management concepts and functionality. Now most content in WordPress is a post, and most posts need to be created from scratch, although you can import XML data and paste texts or upload media files into a post as you create it. There are some things on this page, which we're not going to talk about right at the moment, but let's just create this new post and we will go ahead and publish it. And that's really all you need to do with that. And there's the post. WordPress also has pages, which you should think of as website pages. And it has a media library, which is where you house documents, pictures, videos, and the like, which you plan to use in posts or pages. Now, oddly, this isn't as useful as you think out of the box, but we'll talk more about that later.

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