About Lotus

The Story behind Lotus CMS

There is an adage that goes something like “one’s problems are not unique”. Namely, that the odds are very high of another organization struggling with the exact same issues. We have a unique opportunity to hear first hand what these requirements are and how the marketplace is not meeting those needs. Hence, necessity actually is the mother of invention and the opportunity for innovation.

We conducted extensive research and a top-down analysis of the most commonly used content management systems in the market and gathered pros and cons for each one. What they do well, what they do poorly and so on. When possible, even delving into the code of some of the open-source variants. The attempt was to take a fresh look at the underlying challenges behind developing sites and the way people need to maintain them to be competitive.

During this R&D exercise, a few questions kept coming up in our minds as we sought to find a solution to the challenges behind publishing content online:

• What does content management really mean?
• How easy would it be for a non-programmer to update a site over time?

We found that every CMS had a different way of inputting content, a different way of storing and cataloging content (data structure wise), different navigation models, varying abilities to add and extend features, and varying levels of technical expertise needed to customize and make the CMS usable for the business. All had a learning curve, the question was how steep they were.

First we tried to define what content is. Loosely, it’s any piece of information published for consumption, for a fee or not, and communicated in physical (paper) or digital (binary files, plain-text files, documents, audio, podcasts, streaming audio, radio feeds, mp3’s, video, animations, etc.) format or some combination thereof.

Next we tried to understand how organizations would want to contextually categorize content and then publish it for targeted consumption. In other words, how can organizations manage their sites without requiring an army of software engineers while maximizing the price of push or pull ad revenue? It is usually at this juncture that organizations seriously consider deploying a content management system, or CMS.

For a large corporation, a CMS might imply a centralized online document repository with all the associated bells and whistles such as document security, version control, audit trails, workflows and the whole nine – a complex distributed system that is a major line item in the technology budget. For a smaller company, a CMS may simply imply a system that allows a non-technical person to construct web pages and link them together without requiring a dedicated programmer to do it for them. Yet others may wish to publish content based upon demographics and/or various factors relating to the consumption of content.

Organizations distributing content need to:

• publish content online easily
• maximize revenue from ad placements by linking content to ad buys
• re-purpose content when, where, and how it is needed
• maintain and organically grow web sites without overloading technical staff with enhancement requests

Organizations creating content need to:

• minimize costs of paying for content placements
• centrally catalog content in a structured and searchable way
• develop searchable knowledge-bases
• create web pages and web sites
• effortlessly syndicate content to a variety of distribution media

So what if your company needs both? Enter Lotus CMS.