Lately, I’ve been wondering what’s a good strategy for getting a large decentralized organization into the behavior of using a content management system. So far, these are the techniques that I’ve come up. What do you think?
Content Creators
Give the content creators a quick and easy “converter” that takes the content created by a user and returns a well-formatted HTML document.
Advanced Content Creators
Going a step further, resolve layout issues by deploying a very simple desktop version that can handle design challenges for form creation and data that is displayed in table format.
Developers
Give the developers an API to work with that hosts the web content in a repository and provides them with a few good formats for output (xml, html, etc) while keeping the role of the repository simple.
Overall
Give the site owners and content creators a place to manage their entire content while in the background providing site managers and developers a place to pull content from and produce/manage in their own way.
That last point might be redundant, but it’s a start. It seems like web services play a great role in mirroring the organizational challenges brought by loosely coupled units.