Enterprise WCM Basic Functionalities!

When you purchase a new content management system for your company you always have a long list of requirements for IT to work on – in order to get it set up. This list doesn’t include components or designs, it’s just the basic functions you will need in your web content management to make it through a first year.

These are the basic functions that your enterprise web content management platform should be set up to do, for your authors:

1. Staging – Ability to preview site content before publishing live.
2. Search – Ability to search the CMS
3. Analytics – Ability to integrate Google or Adobe Analytics to your site.
4. Meta Data – Have ability to add meta data to pages and assets – Include meta data fields in your page and asset content for title and description – to be used for search meta data.
5. Tagging – For setting up your site taxonomy – Include a tags area where you can create and edit tags for your site content.  Ensure those tags are allowed to your page properties.
6. Lock file functionality – In order to hold things from publishing.
7. Expire functionality  – Ability to unpublished your page and have it in a step that users’t only see if they want to – the expired pages.  If you don’t have this typically you end up with a folder showing all content and it’s hard to see what’s not published and what is – this opens a can of worms when you go to migrate or add functionality to your content by not knowing what you need to keep not published.
8. Versioning – Ability to keep edits of your content and view or revert to past versions of your pages in your system.
9. Broken link checker – Ability to see which pages are broken or orphaned through a report.
10. Redirect functionality – Ability to redirect old or non-existent pages to new located content.

These below are nice to have, not essential to do right away, but maybe you don’t have the funds to do right away? These can be released in later phases:

1. Roles – Ability to enter system users as roles such as Publisher, Content Review, Copy Editor, Writer, Stakeholder – and give those roles only specific actions they should be able to do in your system. For example Content Reviewer roles should not be able to edit the page, just view and post comments if your system can attach comments to pages.
2. Workflow – Ability to work in a customized workflow, where content comes in from the creators, then moves to writers, copyeditors, graphics, Review and Staging – then final review … then possibly a translation review and all the steps again for the international sites.
3. Translation – Ability to set up multiple region sites and use fallback rules to populate those sites.
4. Comments – Comments on files to be used in content creation and staging. Only folks internally see these comments, these are not made public.
5. Notifications – Ability to get notifications on content – as when something is published, deleted, moved etc… set them up to your business rules.