Content and Document Management Systems

The IT department of a software company must manage a large number of documents in a variety of formats (HTML, DOC, PDF, PPT, XLS, XML, etc.).

For each product there are:

Marketing studies

Marketing promotions

User documentation

Technical specifications

Design specifications

Release schedules

Source code

Tutorials

etc.

For each employee there are:

Home pages

Resumes

Confidential evaluations

etc.

For the company itself there are:

Home pages for each department

Employee Directories

Product Inventories

Annual Reports

etc.

In addition, quite a bit of information about the company is stored in different databases, including:

Employee Database

Customer Database

Product Database

Source Code Control System

Configuration Management System

Knowledge Base Systems

etc.

The IT department would like to eliminate replication of information. Issues that typically arise for source code control systems such as version control are also of interest. In the ideal situation, documents would be created on demand in any desired format by plugging information units into document templates. Toward this end the company is investigating document management systems and content management systems.

Project

Research document and content management systems and produce a RAD specification for the software this company needs. Your specification should go beyond the usual scope of a specification by attempting to educate the reader about the state-of-the-art of CMS and DMS.

References

Here are a few references to get you started:

Evaluating CMS

ODMA Specification

Velocity

CMS Overview