Why a Business Should Never Be Without a Content Management Service
As your business grows, it is going to need to maintain and distribute ever-increasing amounts of documentation, both internally and externally. While it is tempting to believe that your own IT department can create the best possible system for managing your company's content, this is rarely the case. Content management is a problem that has been solved many times over, and using an external tool allows you to take advantage of that.
Common Interface
People need to know how to add more content, edit existing documentation, and access what they need quickly. If you spread this amongst multiple platforms, it will be difficult to track what information is in what place. Departmental silos disrupt the free flow of information between employees, lowering productivity. New employees will also need additional training on how to manage this conglomeration of systems, a process that has to be repeated any time they move to a group that uses a different system.
Creating a unified document store eliminates these issues by creating a single way to create and maintain information. A sufficiently flexible system allows the needs of your different departments to be met without splitting off into multiple systems.
Performance
In addition to being able to find and manage content, your employees should not be spending time waiting for content to load. Your customers certainly won't have much patience for a system that leaves them wondering if their information is still loading or if the system has run into an error. To solve this problem internally, you will need to dedicate part of your development team to maintaining and upgrading the code, and your IT department will need to purchase and maintain servers that are able to handle peak loads.
As cloud-based services become the norm, the costs of on-premise content management are becoming harder to justify. Not only does it free up your developers to work on other things, you can work with a system that expands and contracts along with your usage, so you are only paying for the server time you actually use.
Security
Security is often something that is only tackled as an afterthought, but it is a critically important consideration. You need to ensure that each user is only able to access the content that is assigned to them. This can get incredibly complicated as your organization grows. A good content management service will give you the tools to manage this aspect of your business with a minimum of effort, while still providing the necessary security so that you can rest assured that no one is able to access information that they are not entitled to.
As you can see, using an enterprise content management service can make the difference between having an organization that runs smoothly and one that is constantly in a state of chaos. When your employees and your customers know exactly where to go to get the information they need, your support costs go down. Using a system that has all the features you need already built in drives costs down even further as you will spend less on development.
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