Content management is becoming an increasingly popular part of technological advancement for the internet and for the people who will create, manage, and consume that content. Developers have long been exceeding in this area, but the future demands new collaboration features that have only recently been increasing with popularity.
Who Uses This Stuff?
Bloggers, designers, content producers, web surfers, and pretty much anyone who uses the internet will be constantly interacting with content management software. As developing countries catch up (China, for example), the need for these technologies to handle an increasing number of users is drastic.
Just as the website owners and administrators need better ways to handle this data, the consumers of this data also demand new ways to view, interact, share, and remix this content.
It is easy to imagine that a majority of the people between 18 – 30 will have blogs in the coming years.
Why Collaborate?
However, one interesting feature of the future is the ability to collaborate. The demand for collaboration services and software is outrageous with enterprises nowadays, and with time, small to medium sized businesses will demand this same functionality.
The ability to collaborate on documents is crucial to the development of online businesses. For bloggers, this means that bloggers will be able to create, edit, and share information with their fellow bloggers. This is possible today with the likes of Microsoft SharePoint Server and Alfresco, but it would be nice to see this same functionality integrated into solutions like WordPress, Movable Type, and Drupal.
Perhaps we will have this functionality in the future, but it will likely be awhile before developers realize the usefulness of this functionality. Granted, it would not be nearly half as useful as a blog with several hundred bloggers working together, but it could still find its uses. This could also promote more bloggers to join existing blogs.
It would be nice to simply assign articles to people, or add edits to article live while other users are editing, and even a check in/check out system would be quite useful. Create an open API that can interact with many existing text editors, then the world of collaboration will have just expanded greatly.
In the end, the world could benefit with these collaboration tools. Many tools already exist, and many bloggers could perhaps take advantage of these tools and integrate them into their workflow:
- Microsoft Sharepoint Server
- ConcourseSuite
- Alfresco
- TikiWiki
- Google Docs
If you utilize any of these content management tools or have ideas for tools you would like to see, let us know in the comments section.
2 thoughts on “The Future of Content Management Is Collaboration”
I really doubt many people will start blogs. If you see the trend now, most blogs do not survive more than their first few months. It is more work than most can bear.
Most people start full of enthusiasm and then suddenly loose it for the lack of readership.
They will indeed keep going to sites with much more direct (chat like) interaction. That is why myspace is so popular I guess.
Interesting article that does a nice job of looking forward while also looking at what we have now.
You mentioned the 18-30 set and I think they will be looking for some of the things they are familiar with on MySpace and Facebook — these “digital natives” have been living in that environment so I think we need to figure out how to incorporate some of those features into these collaborative apps.
Thanks for the insightful piece.
— Brian
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