Content management systems use to be more than a mechanism to update news and press releases on a corporate web site. At one point in time content management referred to large, complex, and sophisticated systems that completely controlled the distribution and flow of content. Today it seems that content management means little more than publishing copy to the web, and possibly a few other segments where it can easily be translated from its source html. During the dummying down of software, to make it more usable for the end user, a real important component of content management got left out. I am of course referring to the actual management of the content itself.

If you are familiar with some of the monsters in this space like Interwoven, Documentum or Vignette this concept is not foreign; then again the thought of these platforms may also make you cringe a little. At some point in time, possibly after an extremely expensive CMS implementation failed, it became advantageous to deploy micro CMS solutions that focused on singular purposes like web asset management.  Since then web developers have been perpetuating the notion that content management was nothing more than an interface to write and manage content and pages for web properties. This has created a rather large disparity between top-tier and mid-market systems to the point that the gorillas of the CMS world have renamed their offerings to include Content Repository Management, Digital Asset Management, and Document Imaging.

An unfortunate side effect resulting from the simplification of content management is that companies are not gaining control of their content, they are duplicating it.  The problem is not that these focused applications exist rather that they don't really manage content at all; they manage a web property and use content from their own proprietary closed system.  In contrast, the top-tier CMS platforms mostly use proprietary repositories that are largely very difficult to control or consume in disparate systems. Further exacerbating this issue is over ambitious implementations that require content retention of everything from meeting minutes to instant messages between co-workers.

It's understandable now why such a large part of actual content management was removed when it came time to cut features to make the software simpler for users to learn. While this may have been justified, I believe the knife cut a little too deep during surgery. With the relatively recent publication of JSR-170, we are opening the door to new opportunities for focused content management systems to interact with each other and not only perform their individual tasks but also share the content they manage.

I think there is a huge window of opportunity here for an emerging platform.  I have yet to see an application, web or otherwise that follows in suit with the currently available best of breed 2.0 tools. At some point in the not so distant future a tool will arise that not only becomes adept and handling organizations digital assets, but also provides the usability this generation of software has brought us. This tool will not only allow users to publish content to a web property, but have direct integration with other distribution points like VistaPrint or CafePress creating a true write once publish everywhere paradigm. Furthermore this tool will interact with other tools that follow the JSR-170 standard or something equivalent as to ensure its optimum interoperability.