Interests: Document & Content Management

Document Management is the organisation of documentation in its various formats. Making sure that the right information gets to the right people in the right format.

Content Management is the process and functionality that lets non-webdevelopers to add and update the content of a website independantly of web developers. It gives business the flexibility to change their website without affecting its look and feel. It requires a clean separation between the content and the resulting markup. Most content management tools use XML as its data-format, thus keeping the content independant of the layout.

Both disciplines focus on getting information through to the user in a format they can use, quickly and effectively. Document management is for those documents already in its final format, while content management is for documents that can be converted into the required output formats.

The majority of Content Management are huge applications, such as Vignette and Interwoven - not really suited for small businesses because of the infrastructure required to run them, and the prohibitive costs.

On the other hand there are a multitude of small open source content management systems that can suite most small businesses well, although in this field there is a vast array of tools classified as content management, everything from document conversion tools, to news headlines (or blogs) and discussion topics of Slashdot. In my opinion these are not content management tools, but web authoring and interactive collaboration tools. Content Management is typically done in an offline or non-production environment and when the content has been approved and finalised is it uploaded to the live website.