Apply Good Governance
Engaging with your audience means getting everyone involved in publishing content, not just IT or marketing. To encourage this author adoption you need to consider two things - are the tools easy to use for the larger community and how to apply good corporate governance?
Clearly we have tools that are easy to use - but does enabling more users in your organization endanger your editorial quality, your brand and your commitment to accessible websites and website standards?
Alterian Content Manager (ACM) enables you to create an editorial environment that is both democratic and inclusive, but also runs along good corporate governance lines, by offering:
- WCAG 2.0 Web Standards Checker – You need to maintain your sites integrity, your observation of web and accessibility standards and you need your business users to be able to do that, rather than have everything go through the techies.
ACM includes a standards checker that, for example; won’t let a user save badly constructed HTML that they have just cut and pasted from Word or another source, it won’t let you save an item until you fill out the mandatory accessibility fields, it won’t let you insert an image with ALT text. All of these things are configurable, giving you the control over the quality of your website.
- Workflow Approval – ACM has an easy to set up content editorial process, with approvals, rejects and the ability to add notes to each step. Our workflow engine also enables you to trigger system events, like machine translations. Our customers also want items to be published at a certain date and time or to have items only remain published for a fixed period of time – the ACM workflow engine enables that, with the business user able to set the date time or lapsed period for when an item moves to the next state.
- Version Control – ACM enables users to maintain a version history of content, to preview, then revert to previous versions and to maintain a published version on the site, while you work on the next version. ACM also enables you to compare these versions, so that you can quickly see the changes that have happened.
- Audit History - ACM maintains a full audit history of everyone that has edited a content item and when used in conjunction with version compare, gives you a clear view of what has happened to a content item during its publishing lifecycle.
- Separate Content from Presentation – This is a standard for most Content Management Systems, but it’s a critical part of protecting your brand – of enabling folks to contribute content, without needing to worry about HTML and without you needing to worry about someone inserting bright pink flashing text.