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WL040C-197-Quin WL040/Bidgoli-Vol III-Ch-56 June 23, 2003 16:38 Char Count= 0
ISSUES INCONTENTMANAGEMENT 695ISSUES IN CONTENT MANAGEMENT
As Web sites play an increasingly important role in orga-
nizational activities and business processes, major issues
in Web content management need to be dealt with early
in the planning process. Such issues include content and
technical requirements, access control, economic and le-
gal aspects, and security.Content Requirements
It is essential that a Web site maintain quality and timely
content. This means that a content management system
needs to(1) provide fresh, up-to-date, accurate, and personalized
content;
(2) allow efficient authoring for nontechnical content
providers;
(3) support worldwide content authoring in different lan-
guages and at different locations;
(4) provide automated scheduling for both content pub-
lishing and archiving;
(5) integrate workflow processes to automate content ap-
proval;
(6) build a component architecture separating content
from presentation forms and dynamic serving of con-
tent; and
(7) support version archiving and an audit trail to provide
a record of site changes (McCluskey, 2000).Decisions must be made in dealing with time-sensitive
content, e.g., how often content should be updated—
whether to update on a daily or hourly basis and for what
type of content. Different types of content also vary in
terms of their stability. For relatively stable content, e.g.,
reports and procedures, the content structure may adopt
some stable and consistent document structure and style.
The workflow from creating the content to delivering it
to the Web site may need to go through several approval
steps: when an update or new content is to be posted, how
many approvals should it go through? Can content be up-
dated in real time? Will certain content be updated on a
scheduled basis? All these issues need to be solved before
a content management system is built or customized.Technical Requirements
Technical support for a content management system in-
cludes the Web management team’s collective technical
strength and capabilities, platforms for system and net-
working environment, and software applications. To op-
erate a complex Web site and keep the content up-to-date,
the availability of technical resources (Web designers and
developers) is extremely important. Issues such as author-
ing environment (Windows, Macintosh, Solaris), content
repositories (SQL database server, Oracle, Sybase, etc.),
and authoring tools (Netscape Composer, Dreamweaver,
etc.) should also be considered.Access Control
An organization’s Web site generally contains content
with three modes of access: open-access information,license-restricted information, and privileged informa-
tion (Sullivan, 2001). Open-access information is freely
available to all users. News and press releases, prod-
uct catalogs, technical support, and other publicly avail-
able information fall into this category. Access to license-
restricted information restricts the retrieval and use of
such sources to the members of an organization(s), such
as commercial databases that an organization subscribed
to, or the entire digital library of a professional associa-
tion. In these cases, access control can be done through
basic user authentication or server address verification.
The most challenging in access control is to the privi-
leged content, which can range from data about individual
customers collected through Web forms to business intel-
ligence about a company. The access to this type of content
is controlled by the need to know. Examples include grant-
ing access to a project’s information to its team members
and the project leader may require access to other projects
related to this one.Economic and Legal Aspects
When an enterprise produces information, a high cost
is associated with the information production process.
The economic goal of Web content management is to
pay for the least cost to gain the most efficiency in cre-
ating, organizing, and delivering the content. The return-
on-investment for Web content management may not be
easily translated into monetary terms; other nonmonetary
measures such as time saved, decision quality improve-
ment, and reduced effort can be useful measures.
Legal aspects related to Web content management
mainly focus on public versus nonpublic content as well
as digital rights management. For the U.S. Government,
all data collected, created, received, maintained, or dis-
seminated by any of its agencies must be made accessible
to the public unless the data are classified as inaccessi-
ble by state or federal statute. Written policies and pro-
cedures are also required to assure properly controlled
access to private and confidential data. Enterprises need
to be compliant with the access and security laws when
it comes to private and confidential content. While the
philosophy for enterprise Web content management may
be different from that of the government, the privacy and
confidentiality rules apply to all organizations.
The term “digital rights management” (DRM) emerged
in the past couple of years to cover “the description, iden-
tification, trading, protection, monitoring and tracking of
all forms of rights usages over both tangible and intangible
assets including management of rights holders relation-
ships” (Iannella, 2001). For digital content, DRM controls
not only who has access to certain content, but also de-
termines the amount of access, e.g., for a limited time, a
limited number of times, or a certain number of accessing
machines or users. It also manages payment for uses of
digital content. This area is gaining more attention in the
information industry.Security
It is common for enterprise Web sites to use firewalls,
intrusion detection software, or content filters to protect