Supporting your content authors: when you need to consider integrating an additional CMS

Most website projects are pretty straightforward in terms of who is involved in managing content within the core Content Management System (CMS) or Digital Experience Platform (DXP). Usually, only a small web or digital marketing team have access. They control all the content, are familiar with the nuts and bolts of how everything works and are usually confident in what they are doing.

Over time, the CMS or DXP is likely to have been configured or optimised in such a way that it wraps around the way the team works, while at the same time their content management processes have evolved to fit around the use of the CMS. Basically, the team’s preferred way of working and the processes determined by the CMS functionality meet somewhere in the middle.

But what happens when the marketing team need to work with a wider group of contributors and authors who are mostly business users and not familiar with your core CMS? What happens if the CMS is harder to use? In this post we’re going to explore how integrating an additional CMS that is more suited to the needs of a wider group of less experienced users can be a viable option that ultimately saves time and effort.

The challenges of working with a wider group of content contributors

With some websites and with some specific projects, the digital marketing team need to work with a wider group of publishers who directly contribute and approve content, most of whom will be business users rather than digital professionals. This has challenges, which will be familiar to many of us:

• Contributors require lots of handholding, support and guidance, which can be time consuming for small, busy digital marketing teams.
• Maintaining publishing standards is difficult and elements such as structure, tone of voice and SEO go out of the window, so marketing team have to rework a lot of the copy.
• More technical content is either too technical or not quite technical enough and not everybody is quite satisfied with it.
• Approval workflows are complex and go back and forth, with approval bottlenecks often causing delays in publishing.
• Contributors get pulled in other directions by the demands of their role or lose interest and don’t pull their weight.
• Everything happens in Word and in the end the marketing team need to upload all the content, which can be a resourcing issue when it happens at scale.

All these leads to a lack of scalability, publishing delays, disengaged contributors and – above all – maxxed out digital marketing professionals who are spending too much time on low-level tasks.

When you can and can’t use a CMS

Sometimes these problems are exacerbated by a CMS that might be fit for purpose and optimised for the digital marketing team but is less suited to a wider pool of content contributors. In our experience, for a CMS to support a decentralised publishing model it has to fit certain criteria:

• Be intuitive enough so non-marketing professionals can actually use it without regular training and excessive handholding, therefore making the publishing model actually scalable.
• Does not have so much of a learning curve associated with it, so that contributors feel invested, engaged and motivated in creating and maintaining their content.
• Maximises efficiency in terms of content and approval workflows to avoid bottlenecks to meet project deadlines or the required publishing cadence.
• Uses features such as publishing templates and workflow to maintain the right balance between central control to meet publishing and brand standards, but with enough publisher autonomy so they can contribute effectively.
• Is flexible because invariably a one-size-fits=all approach rarely works when there are multiple contributors.

When the CMS that is used by the marketing team does not tick the majority of the above boxes then invariably the content management process involving a wider group is taken offline. This might involve a mixture of email and Word and is usually highly inefficient, time-consuming, prone to error and delays and more.

What are your options?

When you have an extended set of publishers to work with and your CMS is not quite fit for purpose there are different options, including:

• Soldier on with the “offline” process, which is what most teams do.
• Do the hard yards and train your content publishers accordingly to use your CMS, although this takes time and likely ongoing effort.
• Configure your CMS to make it easier to use. There are usually options to configure the experience by role, so there is usually at least some wiggle room to make the interfaces more intuitive for content contributors.
• Change your CMS altogether – which will involve considerable cost and compromise – and should not be something that you need to consider, unless the marketing team are also unhappy with it.
• Choose to integrate an additional CMS into your digital experience system, an option which is actually more straightforward than it sounds.

Four real world scenarios when there is an additional CMS integration

Here are four examples where integrating an additional CMS has value.

1. Using Passle as a technical blogging platform

We work with a number of professional service firms and law firms who need to get a stream of high value technical content out to validate expertise and attract return visitors. This technical content is usually presented in a blog or article format, is very time sensitive and is written by subject matter experts.

It is also subject to careful review, so it can be challenging in getting it out quickly and avoiding bottlenecks in the publishing workflow. Moreover, marketing teams often do not have the specialist knowledge or capacity to be part of the approval workflow and even get in the way.

With busy professional staff often reluctant to use a CMS like Sitecore, we have worked with clients to implement Passle, a lightweight blogging platform that is very specifically designed to lower the barriers for professional staff to successfully create content and get it live. It has the flexibility around approval workflow and an intuitive editing experience, while also integrating into the website so the overall experience is seamless.

2. Using GatherContent to manage content during a website relaunch

New website projects or relaunches can involve multiple stakeholders drafting, reviewing and approving content. The workflow around this can get complex and vary from item to item; most CMSs do not have the required flexibility or features such as commenting.

GatherContent is effectively a lightweight CMS that is highly flexible, easy to use and designed to work with distributed authors. You can create flexible templates and workflows, control highly granular access and also add commenting in order to manage the content, so it works very well for drafting new content. It can then be used for ongoing content management too.

A number of our clients use GatherContent to manage their content, including law firm RPC. On a recent project, we architected and implemented an automated content migration from GatherContent via an API, squirting content directly into the Sitecore CMS.

3. Using SharePoint to manage a controlled set of bios or documents

Sometimes a website has the ability for a customer to download documents from a website, but these are actually managed in a separate system by a wider range of contributors. Examples of this might include product documentation stored and managed in a Digital Asset Management system or separate repository.

One example we worked on was a set of CVs and biographies accessible from people profiles on a website. These documents were stored in a SharePoint site. SharePoint is used by many organisations to manage their documentation. We created a connector between the website CMS and SharePoint, enabling there to be just one source of truth for these CVs, while also avoiding disruption to the they are managed and updated.

4. Using Umbraco as an easy-to-use CMS in a headless scenario

One of the reasons so many people (including us) love working with Umbraco is that the interfaces for managing content are very easy to use, with a consistency and logic that makes it highly intuitive. This makes Umbraco an ideal CMS to use when you do have a wider community of publishers.

However, it is possible that you might use a more complex CMS such as Sitecore to deliver your front-end experience. In these cases, it is feasible to use Umbraco as the CMS for some or even of all your base content and then let this “talk” via connectors or APIs to your other CMS to deliver the actual front-end experience. This is an example of “headless” publishing which all of the main CMS and DXPs now support.

Key considerations for integrating an additional CMS

There can be quite a few moving parts when integrating an additional CMS, and it always worth ensuring:

• You have all your requirements and workflows mapped out in detail in order to assess if integrating an additional CMS is required or if there are other options, such as to configure your current CMS.
• When integrating an additional CMS always look for a solution that minimises effort for the long-term. For example, teams that use GatherContent then often use it on an ongoing basis to keep on managing content. Similarly, Passle, is an investment so you want to ensure it will deliver long-term value.
• Despite what a vendor may say about systems being “plug and play”, make sure you have the right technical help to drive integration and automation.
• Whatever you do, make sure that you are enhancing the experience for site visitors, or at a minimum not changing it. This is not an area for compromise.
• Working with a wide range of content contributors still requires work and support, however easy the CMS is to use. Still expect handholding, training and occasionally having to upload content on someone’s behalf.

Integrating an additional CMS?

Do you need a fresh way to support a community of contributors? Need help considering your options or actually integrating an additional solution? Get in touch!