Live from Confab: CMS Selection

CMS Selection: the “C” is for “Content” by Anne Casson

Goal: head for lunch with a better understanding of content requirements that go into choosing a CMS.

A basic approach:

1. Define the requirements
2. Vendor shortlist
3. Vendor evaluation (with a scorecard and checklist)

We’ll focus on: defining the CMS requirements

1. Define and document the content needs into a process flow
   • What do I do with content today?
   • Who is involved?
   • What roles do they play?
   • What do I want to change/what do I need to do with content?
2. Organize those needs into categories
3. Formulate questions designed to determine the impact of a CMS on those needs

What are all the things you do/want to do with content today?  
Examples include:

• Create an article
• Select photography
• Create an infographic
• Enter into CMS
• Edit, review, revise, preview, approve
• Translate
• Tag (SEO keywords, performance measurement, and related product content)
• Create a FB post and tweet
• Create a related video
• Create captions and transcript
• Publish
• Tweet
• Repurpose as a series of blog posts
• Archive or decommision

**Bonus! Think about the content owners and roles for each step in this process.

Categorize requirements so that they’re easier to ask about.
Typical categories of requirements:

• Category: Content management
  • Examples: content authoring, rich media, preview, site design, testing, tagging
  • Question: Does CMS allow for centrally managed assets?
  • Question: Can I upload files in bulk?
  • Question: Can I tag or export in bulk?
  • Question: Does CMS support user-generated content?
• Category: Page templates
  • Example: landing pages
  • Question: How flexible are layout and landing page templates?
• Category: Publishing
  • Examples: content versioning, preview, caching, multi-channel delivery, scheduling
  • Question: Is there support for content versioning and content caching?
  • Question: Is there support for preview?
  • Is there support for multi-channel delivery?
  • Can I do scheduled/time-based publishing?
• Category: Localization
  • Examples: multi-lingual content, sharing
  • Question: Does the CMS enable translation?
  • Question: Does CMS support content reuse on multiple pages/sites/screens/channels?
  • Question: Can I designate nodes of content as “shared/you can edit” and “corporate/no edits”?
  • Question: Can content items and page templates be shared between sites?
• Category: Personalization
  • Examples: geo-location, pages visited, referrer, tags, time of day, customer profile
  • Question: Does CMS support content meta information (page types, media types, product types)
  • Question: Do I have the ability to identify content dependencies and relationships?
• Category: Workflow
  • Examples: user management, authorization, manage review process, approvals, queues
  • Question To what level do I have role-based access control?
  • Question: Can workflow trigger external tasks?
  • Question: What level of workflow capability comes out of the box?
  • Question: Can I customize the workflow?
• Category:SEO
  • Examples: metadata fields
  • Question: How does the CMS help me create search-engine friendly content? (i.e. metadata fields)
  • Question: Does the CMS analyze my content and provide recommendations and best practices to improve my search engine placement?
• Category: Search (inside the CMS)
  • Examples: author, user group, time stamp, text search
  • Question: Does it allow for text-based content search?
  • Question: Does it allow for advanced search based on content meta information?
  • Question: Foes it allow for search based on author or user group?
• Category: Integration
  • Examples: content creation platforms, eCommerce, multi-channel distribution, social media interaction
• Category: Product support
  • Examples: Training, services, resources
• Category: Reporting
  • Example: analytics