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Tulane, Volvo, and Coca-Cola are just a few of the organizations that have started to use commercial content management (CM) solutions. Products in the CM category tie together Web pages, database files, e-mail, and other content into a single, searchable place. Major systems vendors like IBM, Microsoft, and Sun are also making big plays in this space. Beyond merely implementing CM, enterprise administrators are specifying systems requirements and even making buying decisions. With so many possibilities out there, how do you choose?

By 2004, more than 95 percent of Global 2000 will have purchased a CM system, compared to only 60 percent in early 2002, according to a study by the Meta Group. More CM deployments will be "large and strategic" by 2004 as well, instead of just limited to a single site, for instance.

Last year, though, 60 percent of all mid-sized to large organizations were still using homegrown tools and applications for managing Web content, according to research results from the Yankee Group. Yankee characterizes these homegrown tools as typically offering only "rudimentary" security, access control, and workflow. Meanwhile, analysts agree that the content management needs of most organizations keep growing more and more complex.

"Multiple Possible Points of Failure"

"Content management is a very difficult challenge," contends Stephen O'Grady, an analyst at RedMonk. "There are multiple possible points of failure, including the content delivery system, the database backend, the application, and the user interface, for example."

Beyond Web content, relational database files, and e-mail, companies may need to manage some or all of the following: accounting spreadsheets, PDF files, Microsoft Word documents, video files, application development code, X-ray results, and scanned-in, paper-based medical records.

Tulane University, for example, is now running five instances of Xerox's DocuShare content management system, two of them on Sun Solaris servers and the remainder on Windows 2000 and NT. Two of these five implementations — an accounts payable system and a medical research archive — have been customized to meet the needs of specific applications, says Tulane's Mike Britt.

Tulane started to move to DocuShare about 18 months ago from a series of FTP servers that were turning into "both a security issue and an administrative issue," according to Britt.

Network Managers Play a Growing Role

Network managers and other administrator pros are playing a growing role in content management. In the architectural planning phase, for example, network managers are often called in to determine bandwidth requirements, figure out ways to consolidate storage, and explore storage virtualization, reports Sal Sarkar, segment manager, Content & Knowledge Management, at Sun.

"You can put the content almost anywhere on the network," he elaborates. In addition to traditional servers and storage area networks (SANs), hardware choices include server clusters and hierarchical management systems (HMS).

At Tulane, participation by network managers has evolved over time, according to Britt. In the latest implementation of DocuShare, Tulane network managers determined user expectations, sized and evaluated network bandwidth, purchased servers, and installed the CM software.

Some Tools for Administrators, Others for Users

At the same time, CM software vendors are trying to ease administrative burdens by gearing some of their management tools to business users. "The latest version of DocuShare allows for multiple levels of administration," notes Tulane's Britt.

At Tulane, "content administrators" — who are typically professional server administrators — perform port filtering. They also write Visual Basic scripts for cleaning and rebuilding DocuShare's meta data indexes.

Other tasks, though, can be handed off to business users fulfilling the roles of "site administrators." Within the university, site administrators are responsible for adding new users, managing passwords for the CM system, and assigning meta data tags to content.

"Some of our tools are for systems administrators, and others are for end users," states James Rothstein, senior VP of marketing for FatWire, an ISV that produces administrative tools for multiple platforms. For Sun's emerging SunONE platform, FatWire's tools include workflow with approve/reject, check-in/check-out, metadata tagging, rollback, pre-built portlets, and "to do" lists.

Early leaders in CM have included specialists like Documentum, Xerox DocuShare, Vignette, FileNET, InterWoven, and Stellent. Overlapping the functionality of this sort of product are digital asset management (DAM) systems from companies like MediaBin and North Plain Systems, as well as video asset management (VAM) systems from vendors such as Virage.

Among major systems vendors, IBM pioneered with its introduction of DB2 Content Manager a number of years back. IBM's current CM customers range from large enterprises like Coca-Cola and the National Geographic Society down to mid-sized businesses like Genesys Health Systems.

Genesys, for instance, is using a health care application built by IBM partner Bluewave, which is integrated with DB2 Content Manager. Known as "The Wellness Connection," the application houses medical records, lab results, and other data from over 20 different clinical systems, says Genesys CIO and VP Dave Holland.