CMSs are frequently used for storing, controlling, versioning, and publishing industry-specific documentation such as news articles, operators’ manuals, technical manuals, sales guides, and marketing brochures. The content managed may include computer files, image media, audio files, video files, electronic documents, and Web content. These concepts represent integrated and interdependent layers. There are various nomenclatures known in this area: Web Content Management, Digital Asset Management, Digital Records Management, Electronic Content Management and so on. The bottom line for these systems is managing content and publishing, with a workflow if required.

Offline processing

• These systems pre-process all content, applying templates before publication to generate Web pages. Vignette CMS and Bricolage are examples of this type of system. Since pre-processing systems do not require a server to apply the templates at request time, they may also exist purely as design-time tools; Adobe Contribute is an example of this approach.

Online processing

• These systems apply templates on-demand. HTML may be generated when a user visits the page, or pulled from a cache. Hosted CMSs are provided by such SaaS developers as AspireCMS, Bravenet, UcoZ, Freewebs and Crownpeak.
• Some of the better known open source systems that produce pages on demand include Concrete5, Mambo, Joomla!, Drupal, TYPO3, Zikula and Plone, etc…
• DotNetNuke is a partially open source CMS that runs on asp.net and is free to download and install. DNN produces pages on demand but levels and types of caching can be set. There are also many additional “modules” that can be purchased or installed for free to extend the functionality of DNN as needed, many of which create data and content dynamically.
• Most Web application frameworks perform template processing in this way, but they do not necessarily incorporate content management features. Wikis, e.g. MediaWiki and TWiki generally follow an online model (with varying degrees of caching), but generally do not provide document workflow.

Hybrid Systems

• Some systems combine the offline and online approaches. Some systems write out executable code (e.g. JSP, ASP, PHP,ColdFusion,Perl pages) rather than just static HTML, so that the CMS itself does not need to be deployed on every Web server. Other hybrids, such as Blosxom, are capable of operating in either an online or offline mode.

The specification, called Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS), establishes how content management systems (CMSs) can use a set of Web services interfaces, as well as the REST and Atom protocols to link with other repositories. The vendors announced that it plans to submit the specs to the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), the standards body that oversees many Web services standards today.

“Historically content management systems were purchased for specific application uses and this led to islands of incompatible systems,” the specification states in the introduction. “The objective of the CMIS standard is to define a common content management Web services interface that can be implemented by content repositories and enable interoperability across repositories.”

It is expected that existing vendors of content management systems will implement the specification, so that when their customers need to move a set of data from one repository to another, they will have an easy set of commands to carry out the work. Not every feature in every content management system will be replicated, and some systems will have to be retrofitted to talk with the new features, the document warns.

SMIS is built on an object model. In the parlance of CMIS Version 1, a content repository has four basic entities, called objects: Documents, folders, relationships and policies. All the objects are extensible, meaning they can be extended with new attributes. CMIS offer specifications for creating, reading updating and deleting objects. Services are also defined for filing documents, navigating the repository and querying documents within the repository

Issuing commands and transferring information across repositories will be conducted by using the Simple Object Access Protocol. A subscription service, where users can be notified when a document changes, will be carried out using the Representational State Transfer protocol.