Web Content Management - High-Performance Web Databases: Design, Development, and Deployment - page 91

CONTENT VERSUS DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT
The tools and approaches for managing content are somewhat different
from those used for documents. Document management is one of those
tool sets for managing unstructured data that have been around for some
time. Document management is generally considered arcane and is associ-
ated with library functions and records management. For this reason and
for some of the reasons discussed later, document management has been
difficult to get into the main stream of business IT. The base functional com-
ponents generally associated with document management systems are:
• a conceptually centralized repository
• secured access
• search capability
• versioning capability
• check-in/check-out capability for editing
Some of the more sophisticated document management tool sets may
offer additional functionality such as workflow for review, approve, and
publish type document lifecycles, and integration to some of the desktop
authoring tools. Some very high-end products may even offer integration
with structured data management systems such as ERP applications.
Content management requires more sophisticated tools than document
management. A content management system manages components of doc-
uments, so it requires all of the functionality of a document management
system with some additions. The additions fall into three broad categories
of functionality. The first is the ability to aggregate the components into
documents and managing them in this aggregated form without keeping
multiple copies. Some in the industry refer to this capability as virtual or
compound document management. A compound document must be man-
aged as any other document from the perspective of versioning and work-
flow. In addition, a compound document must be actively linked bi-direc-
tionally to each of its constituent content component parts. Compound
document management can become very complex.
The second category of functionality is integration with the authoring
tools used to create content. With the possible exception of some Web
authoring tools, most tools in current use today were designed to create
entire documents and not just content components. These authoring tools
generally apply considerable presentation formatting to the unstructured
data within the content. Most of this formatting must be stripped from the
data before it is stored. The ability to create entire documents sometimes
creates the requirement for disaggregation services; that is, the ability to
componentize a document and store it as a collection of its constituent
component content. This entire category of functionality should diminish