Some of the features CMS can provide are:
Multilingual. The CMS can easily manage many different languages concurrently within the system. This allows for ease of new language installation without major coding changes. Also, the system can track and match the translations of pages and documents to the original language text and location. Without CMS multiple languages requires significant manual maintenance.
Search. Users can attach meta data to the content in the database to provide meaningful searches to users.
Content control. Version control, roll back content and content history management.
Convenient interface. A central interface to manage all content from one place. Usually the CMS has a built in visual hierarchy of the entire site for easy management.
Content lifecycle. Content can automatically expire or come on-line. You can set and control when content goes up or down to the site for time sensitive info.
Access levels and accountability. Easy to give different people in the organization control over the content they are responsible for.
Collaboration. Information and content and its management can be shared easily between departments, teams or other locations.
Content workflow. Content can go through an approval process and even can be placed in a testing (or sometimes called staging) version of the site. So if this is set up then every piece of content must got through the approval process and signed off or it can not go live.
Templates. This can allow the end user to be able to launch new or change the look / format of pages in the site by selecting from templates within the system.
Metrics and statistics. Very specific and customizable metrics and stats are usually available.
Multichannel publishing. Ability to enter content once into the central depository and publish content in multiple places simultaneously (i.e. Internet, Intranet, email, fax, print). This also maintains consistency and up to date content across all channels.
Compliance. Many organizations need to follow industry compliance regulations for information and content. These can be build into the system along with the ability to set policies for retaining, storing, and retrieving specific content.
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An Introduction to Content Management Systems  |