Having discussed some of the key Documentum features in the preceding chapters, let us commence our journey into the world of Documentum by helping an actual enterprise deal with the age-old problem of managing large volumes of content in the website.
It is a safe assumption that whoever is reading this book is either genuinely interested in knowing more about Documentum or perhaps needs to evaluate if it could be a good content management option to meet his or her specific business requirements.
Either way, we should first find out if there really is a need for web content management (WCM in short) in the project at hand. All WCM systems have their own share of merits and demerits. We should meticulously analyze the business requirements to verify that the business needs can be fulfilled by a good content management system.
Documentum is an enterprise content management system and offers a multitude of rich tools to cater to the needs of ever-growing businesses. However, let's not forget that there is a caveat. Good CMS systems are costly and entail training overheads for the end users who eventually use them. Additionally, we need to have a development/system team to set up and configure the CMS system and a system administrator to monitor the CMS system as well to ensure smooth operation.
Documentum as a WCM system is fruitful when the business requires frequent updates to the content on the website/portal. What this means is, a business that needs to keep on updating its business information displayed on its websites to ensure that the website users can view the most up-to-date information available at a given point of time is a good candidate for a WCM.
This can be better explained through a few examples:
- An online shopping website: An online shopping website uploads its product information such as product descriptions, product images, price, and stock availability details etc. At any given point of time, this information needs to be up to date, lest the customer purchases something at a stale cost rate. The stock information, if not updated on the site, would result in purchase orders for a product that is not available in the shop!
Instead of updating the website's HTML/JSP pages manually on a daily/weekly basis, the online shopping website firm can manage it effectively through a WCM system. Latest content information can be updated through the WCM content authoring tool and new product information can be easily entered without requiring any knowledge of web scripting tools.
- An online newspaper website: A newspaper website's structure/layout remains more or less constant but its actual content changes everyday. In fact the old news expires everyday from the site and is archived in some cases as well. Moreover, the news articles surfacing on the site have to pass through a group of reviewers via a workflow mechanism before they get finally approved. With a WCM system installed, content creators and editors need not learn web technologies/scripting languages in order to upload/edit content on the site. Once trained, they can author content via the authoring tool(s) provided by the content management system itself. So, a newspaper site can be considered a good candidate for a WCM system.