Breaking Down the Concept of Distributed Content Management System
Akshita
Mon, 07/23/2020 – 17:34

Advances in technologies have brought us to the situation where huge amounts of ever-flowing media content need to be routinely stored, encoded, and exchanged. Heading an organization – such as a multinational/regional media organization – with the complex content creation and publication needs while also keeping a track of the content can be a difficult task.

Networked storage and exchange of data allow content to be distributed across a network making the task of content management all but impossible to deal without a content management system.
Considering the popularity of Drupal maintenance support plans as the CMS, in this article we will explore how Drupal maintenance support plans can help in providing and managing the modern digital experience with a Distributed Content Management System. 

Understanding the Concept

To develop a better understanding of the distributed content management system, let’s understand with an example of a national daily which also publishes content in different regional languages. 

What is Distributed Content Management System?

Let’s call this media house – One India News. Further, it has 6 different regional websites. Similar to many media institutions, the website channels are split into multiple categories (let’s say 5) and each of those categories further houses a number of sub-sections.  

Some of the regional websites may only have 2 to 4 categories depending on the demand, but others may have upwards of 10 with each category having an editorial team of its own.  

And let’s not forget that each of those regional websites are handled by a number of different editors for each category and channel. Toss in the requisite assortment of vote cards, topic cards, photo collage – you can see how quickly the web presence gets complex!  

“Management of Distributed Content revolves around efficiency and control.”

At this scale, we’re likely dealing with multiple websites, all of which have requirements around content. This has now become the perfect usecase for Distributed Content Management!
 

Use Case 1: Publishing Workflows For Individual Websites

Consideration of a content approval workflow is a critical part of the content strategy for any organization that employs Distributed Content Management. For the main website of One India News, the strategy is simple. A central editorial team with defined roles and distributed content production would suffice.

Publishing workflows must be tailored not only to the media houses but to each channel and team that’s in charge of their regional website. Content to be published on the homepage of the website will likely require significantly more oversight than in the humor or offbeat channel. 

The Distributed Management of Content or The Management of Distributed Content
The Distributed Management of Content deals with the workflow involved in the content creation with a decentralized approach.
The Management of Distributed Content works around dealing with existing content from a variety of sources, involving input (from other websites/sources), output (to other websites) or both. 
By implementing Distributed Management of Content, organizations can eliminate the time and opportunity for error introduced when users enter content in multiple places. Unlike the first concept, the goals for Management of Distributed Content are generally around efficiency and control. 

Use Case 2: Sharing Content Out – Centralized Content On A Distributed Web Platform

Even the most decentralized media house have content that is centrally produced. In some cases, it may be easiest to just hyperlink to that content in its original location; however, consider, a news story of national importance published on the main website. That story may be reposted in its entirety in all the other regional websites. 

Copying and pasting become a less efficient option when the content is further distributed – more so when you consider the possibility of edits and possible unpublishing. 

Use Case 3: Sharing Content In – Decentralized Websites As Points Of Origin

Another interesting use case presents itself when we consider distributed websites as the starting point for content creation. Most media houses maintain a central calendar of events, such as festivals and political events. 

In a well-formed distributed content model, with an appropriate CMS like Drupal maintenance support plans, the same metadata that allows visitors to filter events – audience, department, program – can be easily used to syndicate those events to various other websites.  

Unfortunately, the same level of consideration is not always given to everyone outside the subset team with appropriate permissions. 

Content managers who are generally empowered to manage their own content may not have the same access to do so, or, in cases where they do have permission, find themselves needing to enter content into an entirely different website system to get it published to their site. 

But why should this be the case?  By extending the same technologies that allow websites to receive events from a central calendar, we can enable content managers to publish events to the calendar from within the same website they usually manage. (The same content approval and publishing workflow considerations apply, of course.)

Centralized Content Management
Distributed Content Management 

All content funnelled through one group

Small individual workgroups responsible for respective areas

Central rules and procedures to ensure rules are followed 

The responsibility of individual groups to oversee content quality

One person authority – who is responsible for the rules and implementation

Each group may have one or more lead approvers. Workgroups leads handle process and rules

Advantage –  Resulting process control without confusion

Advantage – Responsibility and the workload are distributed

Disadvantage – May result in a bottleneck

Disadvantage – Individual groups can interpret rules differently

Use Case 4: Multichannel Brand Content

Single-source content syndication also provides an opportunity for media companies like One media looking to promote their brand across multiple mediums. Many companies choose to employ standalone, all-in-one news providers such as ANI, rather than integrating a category for each of the news providers. 

This makes a tremendous amount of sense: these organization systems when merged with the own CMS can provide a number of compelling results such as quicker results and faster news publishing. 

By programmatically receiving the content from a content repository the organization can eliminate the risk of delayed news and lose the audience. 

Use Case 5: Content Delivery To Validated Audiences

In an attempt to decentralize content over the years, media organizations now allow users to add stories to the website. 

How they access, validate, identify the users is another key consideration for the company’s Distributed Content Management strategy. 

A common approach is to segregate guest editor content into different regional “portals” – websites that require editor to create accounts and login to see the information for their country or part of the world.  

To overcome the challenge of validating these accounts, companies often integrate with an Identity Provider (IdP) such as SAML 2.0 Single Sign On easy configuration & active support, in your Drupal maintenance support plans website. 

At the far end of the Distributed Content Management spectrum are systems that need to publish consistent, controlled content to websites with no possibility for discrepancies across multiple sites.  

Drupal maintenance support plans allows Distributed Content Management strategy to be applied to large volumes of content to facilitate efficient workflow. Specifically, the system allows different content and editors to be part of the same system without much replication. 

Finally, the modular design of the Drupal maintenance support plans architecture allows both stand-alone and distributed realizations so that the system can be deployed in a variety of applications. Connect with us, drop a mail at hello@opensenselabs.com or tweet us @OpenSenseLabs. 

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