Content Management is a system or the capability to manage and track the location of, and relationships among, a firm's content at an element level in a repository. High-end content management systems apply workflows, and enable the use and reuse of content and content collections. Content management systems can manage entire binary files (documents), components of files, or XML/SGML data.

The need for functional content management systems is expressed through the growing awareness of importance of content in day-to-day operations. Employees are demanding up-to-date, accurate and personalised content and organizations are seeking technology applications and vendors in large numbers. Consequently, online services have a growing strategic importance as experts and employees are empowered to create, manage and publish content.

Internal information can be troublesome to an organization without a content management system. Content can be broadly defined to include any product from an organization - databases, documents, transactions, presentations, sales materials and more.

A content management system allows the users to find useful and trustworthy information even from outside the organization using an integrated set of tools. Content management system is a comprehensive system to enable employees to more productively select the right information.

Content management is the nerve center for the enterprise information infrastructure that coordinates the creation, acquisition, classification, delivery and expiration of content. CMS technology gathers content from disparate systems and applications for unique requests in whatever format is required. Employees make better decisions based on relevant content, rather on all available content.

An ideal content management system:

has standardized technologies to manage content in a variety of formats.
has a metadata layer that provides information about the content in addition to the taxonomy.
provides security and access privileges for the application users.
enables front-end applications to pull meaningful information.
track how information is used.

This enables an organization to:

streamline processes to capture, classify and disseminate content.
increase the productivity of knowledge work.
ensure that most recent and accurate information is available.
provide easier and faster access to information.
improve decision making.

This is the ideal world. The reality is that most organizations have a wealth of information in a variety of repositories ranging from databases to file servers to individual laptops which are owned and managed by a variety of functions for a variety of purposes.

CMS focus on four major things:

Content owners.
Content users.
Content management and use.
How the information is handled by the system.