Success factor content management
While earlier it was sufficient for a company to have an Internet presence in the form of a Web business card, today you are faced with new challenges. A modern information platform should offer customers, partners and staff members not only high-quality, up-to-date content, but also interactive services. The success of an Internet strategy depends largely on the quality and novelty of the information offered, as well as on the actual value added by the service: This is how content turns into a success factor.
But high-quality and current content can only be offered efficiently if information can be captured and managed directly at the source. Only a powerful content management system, such as FIRSTspirit, is able to guarantee the targeted processing and uniform presentation of content, while at the same time utilising the most optimal communication medium. While Web pages make visually attractive presentations possible, a different format, such as PDF, is more suited to the production of high-quality prints of documents or forms. Customers can already have mobile access via a cell phone or a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA), and can use the content offered any time, wherever they are.
Expandability
In order to construct a system platform that will remain stable and expandable for a long time, the first step in developing FIRSTspirit was the conception of modern software architecture. On the basis of established principles of software technology, this architecture was implemented consistently, using the latest technologies: FIRSTspirit is a component-based framework that was implemented entirely in JAVA (tm) and uses XML as a central and universal mechanism for persistence, export/import and configuration of graphical user interfaces.
The FIRSTspirit servers that have been running reliably for more than a year in actual operation at our customers' sites demonstrate the capabilities and reliability of the software and prove the sustainability of these development principles.
Efficiency
One of the outstanding features of FIRSTspirit is its success in minimising the duration of projects. This achievement is possible because of the functional components that are standard features of FIRSTspirit. These enable, among other things, the implementation of complex elements of navigation in a Web site without the need for programming. The effort involved in the initial planning of the project and the implementation of the design is significantly reduced. In addition the intuitive editing system requires only minimal training, so that even less skilled employees are able to use the system quickly. The powerful administration tools drastically reduce the time necessary to install FIRSTspirit and put it into operation.
Group-wide information pool
Even in large companies, content management is frequently interpreted as nothing more than using a tool to manage a Web site. In contrast, once FIRSTspirit is introduced, content management becomes the foundation for a uniform, group-wide information pool.
All projects implemented within the company using FIRSTspirit - whether they involve the Internet, an extranet or an intranet - can use this information pool and the information contained in it for their specific purposes. By using these so-called content modules (CMs), it is possible to centrally manage and reuse the content, media objects, or entire segments of a FIRSTspirit project. As a result, the extent of maintenance is considerably reduced when it comes to very large presentations divided among several Web sites.
FIRSTspirit even provides powerful mechanisms that enable users to apply different designs to the content modules contained in the information pool. In this way, information maintained centrally can be converted into several, visually completely different presentations through the application of different design templates.
Moreover, the consistent separation of content from design and structure on the basis of XML makes it possible to prepare contents for different distribution channels. A Web page, a printable PDF document, or a WML presentation for mobile phones can be created by using a single content module. Since FIRSTspirit consistently uses XML to store all contents, it is simple to import and export content - flexible content syndication is available.
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