In the search for solutions, content management has emerged as a fast-growing sector of the IT industry.

Whether organizations have built or bought a solution, most have not yet gained the full value of a content management system (CMS). Many technical experts and IT business strategy decision-makers blindly believe that high cost, radical complexity, and long-winded implementations are prerequisites for content management projects. This is not true. Practical options exist for quick, flexible, scalable integration, and they do not necessarily cost an arm and a leg - even for projects with sophisticated needs.

Today, organizations are finding new ways to leverage XML within CMSs. The ability to reuse content is becoming a must-have service, particularly as handheld devices and print versions of Web content are needed anytime, anywhere. All organizations, even those not currently using XML, should ensure that their CMS strategy includes forward-thinking plans for realizing the power and value of XML.

How Can XML Be Optimized in a CMS?
Business end-user XML authoring
Consider the evolution in word processing. First, word processing software allowed business users to apply their own formatting to paper documents. Previously, professional typesetters applied formatting "tags" to the document. Next, WYSIWYG HTML editors allowed business users to add HTML formatting for Web content in an environment that feels just like word processing. With this functionality, IT departments overcome the challenges of Webmaster bottleneck. What's next? Business-user focused, WYSIWYG XML authoring in the browser is the next logical step.

A CMS should hide the complexity of XML from business users. The system should offer a familiar, easy-to-understand environment that automatically applies XML tags to content "behind the scenes." Cutting and pasting from Microsoft Word, for example, should be seamless. A Web developer or system administrator should be able to create radically intuitive "smart Web forms" that "transparently" structure and power the XML tagging process. The creation of such a form should be as simple as developing a template in Microsoft Word.

Strictly enforced content and page layout
A CMS becomes even more powerful if it takes full advantage of cascading style sheets (CSS). The deploying Web developer or system administrator can set parameters for styles and classes, thus forcing end users to comply with specific standards.

Use of CSS within an XML-enabled smart Web form extends this functionality even further. Within a CMS, XML can be used to validate content and to transform content for various consumers. By combining CSS, XSLTs, schemas, and DTDs, the content's style can be enforced for presentation on one device (such as the Web), then simply and automatically modified for alternative presentation on a different device (such as print, PDA, mobile phone, other servers, etc.). The CMS should allow for validation against a schema or DTD both locally and on the Internet. The system should also allow for handling and management of XSLTs within the application.

New possibilities with Web services and RSS
As Web services become more prevalent and standards evolve for content sharing, communication barriers between dissimilar platforms will disappear. Soon, Windows-based CM solutions will share content with non-Windows CM solutions and vice versa. With Web services, content management will take on a new face by truly managing information in a global environment.

A CMS that takes advantage of Web services can become an engine in a multitiered application. Organizations can more easily get information (text, images, data, etc.) into and out of the CMS regardless of the platform on which it was built. As standards become more available, intelligence can be created within content management servers so they can locate and communicate with one another. The future will see a "content management box" sitting in an organization's IT infrastructure serving content to a variety of places including handhelds, Windows applications, other servers, etc.

Consider RSS, a known schema for transmitting and presenting content. A system is "fed" with an XML block and knows how to present it. Over time, RSS will be exposed as a Web service.

Now, consider content. Today's problem with content is that it has no well-defined schema. RSS is perhaps a start at moving in this direction. Today, organizations are hanging RSS feeds out on their Web sites as a URL. Take this one step further and the implications could be significant. If the RSS standard (let's say version 2.0) is exposed as a Web service and people register their service with a UDDI server, then programs can query the UDDI registry and incorporate the feed programmatically. The potential is limitless.

We see certain industries beginning to use content schemas, for example mortgage companies. Many groups have been formed and many standardization initiatives are under way (Web Services Interactive Applications Group, Web Service for Remote Portals, etc.).

To me, content management is an engine and XML is one fuel for that engine. Until recently, the technology our companies created has focused primarily on getting content to the Web in the easiest, most efficient way possible. The lessons we've learned yield great value for creating an environment that utilizes content throughout the IT infrastructure in the easiest, most efficient way possible.

Many emerging technologies have interesting implications for content management - the tablet PC, speech recognition, wireless devices, and handwriting recognition, just to name a few. These will radically change creation of and access to content. Regardless of the way content is created or accessed, XML and Web services hold great promise for enhancing opportunities to retrieve, store, edit, publish, manage, and reuse content. XML will continue to simplify life for IT and non-IT professionals alike, especially in the area of content management.