Do people want to use a CMS?

As content management systems mature they start to reach more and more of the "rank and file" users in an organization. These are not the dozens of webmasters, editorial staff, or internet marketing teams in charge of Web sites. These are the hundreds of subject matter experts, field reporters, and managers of local departments and branch offices. Increasingly, I'm finding that the more these people use content management systems, the more they are saying they'd rather just work on the content and not the management.

Where editors, site owners, and page designers love digging into Web pages, carefully aranging or editing content and then seeing them all nicely approved and published, the mass of other users really don't. They make new copies when it should have been a revision or new version of the old one. They don't put in metadata correctly if at all. In fact, they'd just as soon not even bother with checking things out -- and they definitely don't bother checking things back in again when they're done.

As maddening as these "masses" can be for the power users of the CMS, they do have a point. It's their content after all that we all depend on. Why should they have to be trained, and then do a bunch of extra steps to enter what they know, just so everyone else can make better use of it? Ok, maybe that isn't much of "a point" but it is power. If we power users fight it, we'll be back to getting nothing but emailed Word documents from them and doing everything ourselves. A better approach is adapting the content management system to how they work.

This is not simply letting them edit in Word or some other tool, but rather requires that we "hide" content management functions like check-in-and-out and versions behind business functions like "Update Product Spec Sheet" or "Add to Community Events Calendar." Business tasks like these can roll up the various CMS functions required. For example, product spec sheet update might involve versioning, whereas events are always new items in the system. The point is, the end users did not have to understand the significance of those decisions to the content management system. All the end user had to know is what kind of business task they were about to perform.

At Percussion, we're aggressively pursuing this concept of "business task oriented interfaces" in the latest release of Rhythmyx, our Web Content Management System. Do you have examples of common business tasks where such interfaces are required? Send them to contentions@percussion.com and I'll share them.

For now, I'm off on my summer vacation. Right after I check this in of course.