Content reuse is the heart of a content management strategy. Content reuse can provide many of the benefits of using a CMS, including translation cost savings and savings in content creation time. Whether your content is in XML or still in unstructured Word documents, you can begin to identify where content is identical or very similar. Here are some tips to help you find your reuse potential:
How do you know if a CMS is right for your organization? Many people struggle to find the answer to this question. Often, these are the questions we hear: Is my content base too small to make it worthwhile? Is the cost of a CMS too expensive for my organization? Is my staff too small to benefit from a CMS? What is the breakeven point for adopting a CMS?
You may be looking in all the wrong places for justification for a CMS. The size of your team, the size of your content base, and the cost of the system may only play a small role in the decision to implement a CMS. The more important factor is: how much will you save in time and costs if you implement a CMS? Here are some criteria to consider:
Content management systems are all about content reuse, because content reuse can provide faster production cycles, major cost savings and greater content integrity. If you publish to more than one language…if you publish to more than one media channel…or if you create content for multiple products that have a lot of similarities, then you want to get the highest content reuse rate possible.
Many organizations that create lots of content to support the products they sell or to educate people with the latest information in their field are finding big savings by investing in a content management system (CMS). Developing a good content management strategy can save thousands – even millions – of dollars in editorial, production and translation costs. And, it will reduce cycle times to get the content in the hands of the consumers.
We talked previously about using intelligent content (content that is described by tags and metadata in a standard format, such as XML) and all the benefits intelligent content can provide. Intelligent content is very flexible, making it searchable and reusable for many different purposes across an enterprise.
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:
When your content is structured in a standard like XML, it becomes portable to many different technologies. It can be understood and shared by different databases and most editing, translation, and publishing tools. Using one source of intelligent content that is managed in a content management system, content can be easily transferred and processed by all types of tools. You will eliminate lots of duplicate content in many different file formats and consolidate your content base.
