Content management (CM) is the administration of digital content throughout its lifecycle, from creation to permanent storage or deletion. The content involved may be images, video, audio and multimedia as well as text. The usual stages in digital content management are: Creation. Editing.
Content management is a set of processes and technologies that supports the collection, managing, and publishing of information in any form or medium. When stored and accessed via computers, this information may be more specifically referred to as digital content, or simply as content. Digital content may take the form of text (such as electronic documents), multimedia files (such as audio or video files), or any other file type that follows a content lifecycle requiring management. The process is complex enough to manage that several large and small commercial software vendors such as Interwoven and Microsoft offer content management software to control and automate significant aspects of the content lifecycle.
Content management systems (CMS) vary according to the specific industry. A Web content management system, for example, will include components for that purpose, such as a content management application (CMA) that automates the production of HTML. An enterprise content management (ECM) system, on the other hand, has components that will help deal with enterprise data effectively. ECM components are geared to goals like streamlining access, eliminating bottlenecks and minimizing overhead.
