Tips for Managing Digital Assets in a Content Management System

How do I find the asset I need?
Does my co-worker have a more appropriate asset sitting on his local drive on his computer?
Is the asset I found the most current version?
How do I make sure no one uses the outdated versions?
Where’s the translated version?

These are some of the issues of managing digital assets for a content set. It can be an overwhelming job, especially if your content set contains lots of graphics, videos, animations and sound clips to illustrate instructions and procedures. While file systems may get you more organized, they don’t help much to actually manage the assets for easy searchability and retrievability.

If you buy a car with a GPS but no MP3 player, you may want the documentation to include instructions for operating the GPS but not include the instructions for operating the MP3 player. Or if you have a Macintosh computer, you may want your antivirus software documentation to include only the Macintosh instructions—not the Windows instructions.

Organizations that sell a product that has variables for each client or for different situations may have a need to produce customized documentation. A content management system has several ways to help writers accomplish this in an automated way while maintaining a high level of content reuse:

So, you’ve implemented a component content management system and you’re on your way with topic-based writing and content reuse. But there are still a few writers who just can’t seem to follow the same writing style as everyone else. They always seem to do something differently, causing problems when other writers must reuse their content. Here are ways to get better cohesiveness between the writers:

We often hear people say that they are going to implement a component content management system (CCMS) with the expectation that it is going to solve all of their problems! While a content management system can solve many problems, the system is only as good as what goes into it. For example, if you put poorly structured XML content into the system, it cannot magically make well-formed XML; you will have problems. It’s the old “trash in, trash out“ syndrome. But there are things you can do to prepare for a smooth content management implementation: