How to Become a Content Management Systems Expert

A content management system isn't just for your website. It's about managing digital information in all its formats: documents, graphics, audiovisual files, databases and computer programs. You can allow many people in your organization access to files they're authorized to see and even allow them to modify the content, when appropriate. These are the steps to becoming an expert in this software.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderate

1. Familiarize yourself with the tasks content management systems can perform. They help you create, manage, store, share and retrieve files in a multiuser environment.
2. Know the terms used when working with this software. In web content management systems, for instance, you need to know what MySQL, ColdFusion and PHP refer to if you intend to enrich your website with multimedia and interactive tools.
3. Define your organization's needs. Content management systems come in all flavors and some aren't cheap, but they save you money in the end if they do what you need them to do.
4. Research systems based on the tasks you need performed, the size of your organization and the types of files you work with. Involve key users of the system in your decision.
5. Decide if it makes sense to use an enterprise content management system in your organization. These can take care of offline and online content. Your file-sharing capabilities and procedures may be good enough if you're a small company and don't work with many multimedia files or databases.
6. Learn about programs that restricts access to files if you're looking for an internal system. The more features you need and the bigger your organization, the more it'll cost you but it'll make your workflow more efficient.
7. Look into web content management systems. With all of the Web 2.0 tools at your disposal such as blogs, forums, polls and podcasts, you need to choose software that's easy to set up and use for anyone who's going to be generating content for your site.
8. Study open source and free software options such as CMSimple, Joomla! and Mambo. Some of these content management systems do specific tasks like create blogs, forums, wikis or website templates.

Tips & Warnings

• The term "content management system" is often used to refer exclusively to software that lets you manage content on your website.
• There are a lot of open source web content management systems sufficient for personal and small business use. See Resources for a link to a website discussing these.

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