A vital aspect of content management is the capability to manage forms of content as it changes. Editors and authors frequently require restoring hoarier forms of edited products due to an undesirable series of edits or a process failure.

Another equally imperative aspect of content management includes the creation, maintenance, and application of review norms. Each individual of the content production and review process has a exceptional role and set of responsibilities in the development or publication of the content. Every review team member needs clear and concise review norms. These must be maintained on a continuous basis to ensure the long-lasting consistency and health of the knowledge base.

A content management system is a group of mechanized processes that may back the following characteristics:

1. Import and production of documents and multimedia material
2. Identification of all chief users and their roles
3. The competence to assign responsibilities and roles to differing instances of content classes or forms
4. Definition of workflow activities often coupled with messaging so that content managers are notified to changes in content
5. The competency to track and manage numerous forms of a single instance of content
6. The competency to publish the content to a repository to allow access

Progressively, the repository is an innate part of the system, and intergrates enterprise search and retrieval. Content management systems take the following versions:

1. Web content management system—software for web site management
2. Output of a newspaper editorial staff organization
3. Workflow for article publication
4. Document management system

Single source content management system — content stored in chunks within a relational database

Variant Management system — where personnel tag source content to represent variants stored as single source "master" content modules, resolved to the desired variant at publication—often used in concert with database chunk storage for large content objects

Content management expert Marc Feldman defines three primary content management governance structures: localized, centralized, and federated—each having its special strengths and weaknesses.

Localized Governance:

By putting management in the hands of those nearest the content, the context specialists, localized governance models empower and unleash creativity. These advantages come, however, at the cost of a partial-to-total loss of managerial regulation and oversight.

Centralized Governance:

When the devices of control are strongly centralized, content management systems are able of distributing a unique, clear and unified brand information. Moreover, centralized content management governance structures permit a large number of cost-savings opportunities in large enterprises, realized, for instance, the avoidance of duplicated efforts in creating, editing, formatting, archiving and repuposing content, through process management and the fine-tuning of all content related labor, and/or via an orderly updating of the content management system.

Federated Governance:

Federated governance models potentially realize the advantages of both localized and centralized management while evading the weaknesses of both. While content management software systems are inherently structured to allow federated governance models, realizing these advantages can be hard because it needs, for instance, negotiating the borders of control with local managers and content producers. In the case of larger enterprises, in paspecific, the failure to fully implement or realize a federated governance structure equates to a failure to realize the full return on investment and cost savings that content management systems enable.

Implementation

Content management implementations must be able to manage digital rights and content distributions in content life cycle. Content management systems are generally involved with digital rights management in order to control user access and digital rights. In this step, the read-only structures of digital rights management systems force some restrictions on content management, as they do not permit authors to alter protected content in their life cycle. Producing new content using protected content is also an issue that gets protected contents out of management controlling systems. A few content management implementations cover all these issues.

Content management exercises and goals differ by mission and by organizational governance structure. News organizations, educational institutions, and e-commerce websites all use content management, but in differing ways. This directs to dissimilarities in jargon and in the words and number of steps in the process.

For instance, some digital content is produced by one or more authors. After some time that content may be edited. One or more people may give some editorial oversight, granting the content for publication. Publishing may take several forms: it may be the act of "pushing" information out to others, or simply approving digital access rights to particular content to one or more people. After some time again that content may be succeeded by another version of the content and thus removed from use.

Content management is an innately joint process. It every so often comprises of the following basic roles and responsibilities:

• Creator – accountable for producing and editing content.
• Editor – responsible for fine-tuning the content information and the style of transmission, including localization and translation.
• Publisher – responsible for dissemination of the content for use.
• Administrator – responsible for controlling access permissions to files and folders, generally accomplished by assigning access rights to user groups or roles. Admins may also support and assist users in several ways.
• Consumer, guest or viewer – the person who uses or otherwise takes in content after it is shared or published.

Content management (CM), is a compendium of technologies and processes that supports the gathering, managing, and publishing of information in any medium. When stored and retrieved through computers, this info may be more specially denoted as digital content, or simply as content. Digital content may take the form of multimedia files, or any other file form that follows a content lifespan requiring managing. The process is complicated enough to manage that various small and large commercial software traders like Microsoft and Interwoven offer content management software to control and automate valuable aspects of the content lifecycle.