The Content Management System is the backbone of most enterprises web development activities. It offers so many key activities for the organisation such as:-
- managing content for the typical business user, offering an easy to use system allowing fast easy updates to websites.
- a tool that manages content, content placement and digital assets for the organisation
- governance and workflows so that organisations can be sure of appropriate approval processes and draft to publish workflows.
Interestingly, while Adobe, Websphere, and Sharepoint dominate the enterprise sphere with their robust functionalities, the cost associated can be substantial. For the average home user, blogger, or budget-conscious website, WordPress becomes a go-to solution. WordPress, often free, offers scalability and can entail minimal charges for themes and plugins. This setup allows for affordable and rapid website enhancements, altering user expectations when interfacing with large-scale corporate websites. In the realm of SEO blogging, WordPress’s user-friendly interface and numerous SEO plugins cater to optimizing content for search engines, making it a prime choice for those prioritizing search engine visibility
Most organisations will then work tirelessly to integrate a range of other tools in to their Content Management System such as Google Analytics, Adobe Omniture, Google Adsense, IBM Forms and a range of survey tools and API’s (particularly from Google again). Each time the Content Management System is upgraded with great new features, along with the task comes reintegration of these back into the new version of the Content Management System. The fun tasks of checking code snippets is always the staple activity of a Content Management System manager in late afternoons to ensure that they all work well together.
So it begs the question, Why does Google not launch its own Content Management System? It already creates most of the great API’S that are being used today and the arguments certainly stack up for any organisation to put it on to their shopping list for a look. Advertising and commerce activities are already a part of the Google range of services nearly every website makes use of already. It would make perfect sense for Google to build a Content Management System that integrates these tools, and do this better than anyone else.
Can you imagine upgrading the Content Management System to the next version, and bringing all the tools along with it? All at once. Integrated panels to manage multiple functions, mobile applications to bring it all together, reporting tools with true integration and easily understood links to one another. Including the opportunity to bring a better understanding of SEO into the content that gets published.
Will Google build a Content Management System?
Apparently Google seems to think so as well with some discussion between Google and major publishers already in talks since 2013 about how they might go about it. Typically, it would come from their ad development side, given the obvious impacts on integrating advertising products like DoubleClick for publishers and other ad-management tools.
On the negative side however, Google has already delved in to the publishing side of things with thier foray in to Google Blogger for example. That eventually died off with the emergence of other free and easy to use tools such as Wordpress which offers a lot of functionality for the average user without requiring the knowledge of a developer.
Overall there is an interesting challenge, but certainly one that they can take on to get right. It would need to be exceptionally well done as convincing any publishers and web development teams to change CMS platforms has to offer major attractions and benefits as it is often a costly excercise taking months.