Earlier this year, Adobe commissioned Forrester Consulting to evaluate the role structured content management via a CCMS (component content management system) can play in addressing strategic and operational gaps. As a result, the report titled: ‘Component Content Management Systems: Supercharge Long-Form Content For Personalized And Consistent Experiences’ was published this August.
XML-based authoring
Since Fonto partners with most CCMS providers on the market, we were very interested to learn what the 450 respondents had to say. The good news – for us – is that one of the key findings is that “organizations are expanding adoption of structured/extensible markup language (XML-)based authoring to gain a competitive advantage.” This fully confirms our day-to-day experience.
What is a CCMS?
Interestingly enough, as a structured content authoring solution provider, we’re often asked for advice on the right CCMS to choose. In practice, some organizations start from the angle of authoring and then select the best solution to manage content i.e. content components.
In this context, we were triggered by the clear CCMS definition by Forrester, and the list of key problems versus the benefits that a CCMS brings:
“A component content management system (CCMS) manages content by breaking it into granular chunks or components called topics rather than managing it at a file or document level. This structured content management approach makes content highly suitable for single-sourcing, content reuse, release management and omnichannel publishing.”
An inefficient content creation, management, and delivery process poses significant compliance and regulatory risks.
Forrester / Adobe
| Problem | Benefit |
| Single-sourcing | – Greater content accuracy – Faster go-to-market for content |
| Content reuse | – Greater content consistency |
| Structured content management | – Reduced maintenance costs – Reduced delivery costs – Reduced translation costs – Improved modularity – Ease of links and content maintenance |
| Release management | – Managing documentation releases – Traceability – Improved collaboration and automation with workflows |
| Omnichannel publishing | – Reaching audience on their preferred medium |
Moving from unstructured to structured content authoring
The above table shows the main advantages to move away from unstructured content authoring to structured content authoring. Moving away from copy and pasting, to reuse of content components. Effective structured content authoring is directly related to managing components in a CCMS and gaining complete control over content again, organization-wide.
The full Forrester report can be downloaded on the Adobe website:
Component Content Management Systems: Supercharge Long-Form Content For Personalized And Consistent Experiences