Overview

Powered by Open Source PHP technology, OpenIMS Content Management Server enables companies to quickly and efficiently build, deploy, and maintain content-rich Web sites. By streamlining the Web publishing process, Content Management Server can reduce the need for costly site maintenance, empowering business users to manage their own content.
OpenIMS Content Management Server enables organizations to reduce the cost of online communication while increasing productivity by providing:

• A comprehensive solution for managing Web content. Empower your business users to create, publish, and manage content. The easy-to-use tools in Content Management Server enable your employees to schedule content refreshes, manage workflow, and index content by means of an Internet browser window ans Microsoft Word.
• Faster time to deploy and lower total cost of ownership. Build and deploy Web-based business solutions in less time by using this rapid application development (RAD) environment. By closely integrating with OpenIMS Document Management Server en osCommerce, OpenIMs Content Management Server enables your organization to quickly and cost-effectively develop a rich Web content management solution.
• Mission-critical abilities. Benefit from the proven scalability, reliability, and extensibility of a Content Management Server based solution. Content Management Server supports industry-standard load balancing and failover technologies, serves content in XML, and enables XML Web services customization and standards-based interoperability to ensure mission-critical capabilities that are simple and straightforward to manage.

Features and Functionality
Web content management is a critical component of any successful online business strategy. OpenIMS Content Management Server enables organizations to develop:

• An Internet presence. Extending your brand, market reach, and customer service capabilities are key to growing your business. By using Content Management Server, you can build content-rich, personalized Web sites and ensure that the content on your sites is up-to-date, relevant, accurate, easy-to-find, and tailored to meet your needs.
• E-commerce capabilities. Developing an e-commerce site can help your organization manage business-to-consumer (B2C) and B2B transactions through the Web site. By using Content Management Server ans osCommerce (www.osCommerce.com), your organization can provide rich content about your products and services, which enables your customers to make informed buying decisions quickly and complete their transactions on your Web site.
• Enterprise information portals. Increasing employee productivity is critical to achieving the most streamlined business processes. By using OpenIMS Content Management Server and OpenIMS Portal Server to build enterprise information portals, your organization can provide employees with a central location to access up-to-date, accurate information and applications.
• Enterprise content management. Integrating Web content management and digital asset management can help organizations centrally and cost-effectively manage brand and design elements on corporate Web sites. By using OpenIMS Content Management Server and OpenIMS Document Management Server, your organization can develop an integrated infrastructure for managing all types of enterprise content and publication processes.

Built with flexibility in mind, Content Management Server can be used to deploy Internet sites, intranet sites, and extranet sites. Content Management Server provides IT departments with the tools necessary to quickly build and deploy the core infrastructure of a Web site, including site structure, presentation templates, site design, application integration, and security.
Once a site has been deployed, business managers and content creators can use Content Management Server tools to create, publish, and manage their own content. By reducing the need for ongoing IT site maintenance, Content Management Server can lower the overall costs of maintaining an Internet presence.

Content Creation, Publishing, and Storage
Content Management Server provides employees by means of a tight integration with Microsoft Office an easy-to-use tool, that enable them to create and publish rich, personalized content directly to Web sites. Microsoft Word and OpenIMS Content Management Server ensure that business managers with no technical abilities can manage Web content.

The role-based distributed publishing model incorporates an approval workflow with multiple levels, automatic content scheduling and archiving, and content indexing. Administrators can create centrally-managed page templates and publishing processes that ensure consistency across the site, making it easy to ensure adherence to corporate publishing standards and branding without diminishing the flexibility of the publishing environment.
Content Management Server stores all content in XML, HTML, and binary content objects for maximum flexibility. Objects are stored in the OpenIMs XML Datastore repository and managed separately from the Web site templates or design elements. Web pages can be built and served dynamically. This enables content to be personalized based on user profile or behavior, browsing device, or language preference. By managing the objects separately, content can easily be re-purposed across a variety of applications within the organization and with external partners.

Web Site Development and Deployment
By tightly integrating with PHP, Content Management Server provides developers with the richest possible Web development experience. The Content Management Server development environment includes:

• Templates. Through the Template Explorer, administrators can create and manage their template galleries and template objects.
• Server Modules. The Content Management Server Modules menu in the admin Toolbox provides administratores and developers with access to modules that connect their Web Forms directly to the Content Management Server repository. Database modules can be configured to connect to a SQL database through properties dialog boxes. Content Management Server modules can be configured to connect to content schemas through their properties dialog boxes. This removes the need to write low-level data-access plumbing code so that administrators and developers can focus their efforts on higher-level business logic and design elements.
• Management of code and content. Most content management systems store source content in the content repository as if it were content. While this may simplify storage, it results in a poor experience for developers who have to manage source code on complex Web projects. Content Management Server provides users and developers the best possible integrated experience. Developers are free to use the source code management system of their choice to manage their code. Content Management Server integrates the code into the Web site dynamically through Template Objects (FLEX).
• Extensibility. Being able to extend your business system to evolve with your business needs and integrate with other systems is critical to any strategic infrastructure plan. Content Management Server offers extensible interfaces through workflow controls, Web Author Client, deployment, object properties, and more.

Web Site Deployment
OpenIMS Content Management Server provides a flexible and extensible mechanism for deploying Web sites and content from one server to another. The Site Deployment Manager provides an easy-to-use mechanism for packaging content objects using XML, exporting them from one computer running Content Management Server and importing them into another computer running Content Management Server.

Scalability and Reliability
OpenIMS Content Management Server has been tested to serve over 100 million dynamic pages per day on a Linux server. By adding processors Content Management Server scales up to continue to provide superior performance with high Web site traffic demands. By adding additional computers running Content Management Server into a load balanced environment, Content Management Server scales out to meet the highest traffic demands and provide failover support, ensuring maximum uptime.