Content Management

Business Process OutsourcingConsultingSystem IntegrationUniversal Banking Solution

Overview

Problem

Solution

As relationships with customers grow increasingly

sophisticated, the demands made upon a bank’s

website become more complex and the

management of its content more complicated.

In the old world, content management was

essentially a technical activity; content owners

would generate the information, but depend on

the webmaster and his team to publish it.

However, today, when banks need to capitalize

on new business opportunities by reacting

quickly to market changes, their website content

(news, blog content, services, products, offers)

becomes more valuable and needs to be updated

regularly. Thus, when there is a need to publish

several new documents a week authored or

edited by different people, it makes sense to use

a Content Management System (CMS).

This paper gives a comprehensive description

of a content management system in the context

of online banking, as well as its benefits that

enable banks to centrally and securely manage

their content.

In a world without a content management

system, the management of an organization’s

website content was a tedious multi-stage

process that included converting the source

material into HTML format, editing the structure

of the site, and placing the new content on

staging servers to allow manually-driven approval

processes (if approval was sought at all) before

final publication. The organization depended

on the IT folks even to make small changes. This

was both costly and slow.

A Content Management System (CMS) is a tool

that enables its users to create, organize and

publish a variety of content (such as text,

graphics, video, documents etc.), whilst being

constrained by a centralized set of rules,

processes and workflows that ensure coherent,

validated electronic content. CMSs are frequently

used for storing, controlling, revising, semantically

enriching, and publishing documentation. Version

control is one of the primary advantages of a CMS.

What is a Content Management System?

Typically, a bank’s website can source various

types of content from a content management

system, ranging from details of banking

products, schemes and advertisements in pdf

format, to images, audio, video, and static

content such as logos and menu options. A CMS

can also support a website’s multi-lingual and

search features.

At an enterprise level, content management

solutions have to deal with more than one form of

content, for instance:

• Digital assets - digital photographs,

animations, videos and audios

• Documents - electronic documents, images of

paper documents

• Web content - website content

• Records - file records such emails, application

data, certificates etc.

A content management system is primarily

aimed at managing the lifecycle of information

from initial publication or creation all the way

through archival and eventual disposal. A CMS

should have managed workflow (an action-

approval cycle in the content management

scenario where one process is passed through

several approval steps for completion) in a

collaborative environment.

The figure below depicts the lifecycle of content

as follows: creation - uploading by the bank’s

administrator - viewing by a customer on the

website - expiry.

What Should a Content Management

System Include?

Content Management

Content creation,Editing, Integrationof external content

Versioning andArchiving

Content viewed by a customer

Content upload/Publishingby a Bank Admin

Quality assurance and approval

Expiry and Destroy

Lifecycle of Content

What benefits does a Content Management

System provide?

Cost Benefit

Every time you need to make a change, update

your event calendar, feature a product or

service offering, or add new information, in the

absence of a CMS you need to pay IT

resources by the hour. These recurring expenses

can be avoided by using content management

software to maintain and manage the content of

your organization.

Centralization and Sharing of Content

Content is consolidated into one powerful

repository, facilitating content sharing among

co-workers.

Version Control

Most content management systems have a

version control mechanism, allowing roll back

to a previous version of a web page. This is

useful if a web page is published with mistakes,

or if it needs to be modified for a limited time

period, after which the changes have to be

reversed. Version history is also useful for

auditing; displaying what content was changed

when and by whom.

Facilitating Fresh Content

If your company does not have anyone with

the ability to update your website, such as a

webmaster or IT department, it is likely that

some or all of the content on your website is

out-of-date. You may have to periodically pay

an external company to make changes for you,

which can be costly and comes with an inherent

time delay. In most cases, when a website is not

updated on a regular basis, it is difficult to retain

repeat visitors. The website may lose relevance

in search engines and appear further down the

list of results than it used to, because other

websites in direct competition with yours are

updated more frequently.

Separation of Content from Design

When a developer implements a website on top

of a content management system, she creates

a set of templates, or page layouts, which is

subsequently used to create pages. A template

contains one or more editing areas, which can

contain text, images, audio, video or a mixture of

these. The developer can usually control the

type of formatting that the content editor can

do, for example, by limiting the color palette.

Such control can prevent editors from altering

the look and feel of the website. When a content

editor adds or updates content, the content

management system abstracts away from the

fact that you’re editing an HTML page. Content

is displayed in a text area and a Word-like

toolbar is provided to format the text with

headings, bullet points, colours etc.

Approval Workflow

In several scenarios, such as when there are

tens or hundreds of content editors, it makes

sense to have a controlled approval route

whereby website content that is added or

modified is subject to review before it is published

on the website. Approval work flows accomplish

this task by providing a process by which content

editors can submit web pages for approval. An

approver is notified to review the web page

and has the authority to reject or approve it. If

approved at this point, the content will be

published on the website.

Scheduling

Some content management systems allow web

pages to be published to a schedule, so that

they only appear on the website for a predefined

duration. Such functionality is useful for time-

sensitive information, such as special offers or

news articles, and contributes to keeping website

content fresh and relevant.

How Online Banking Uses Content

Management Systems

Content Management

different perspective. JCR is an infrastructure

specification for interacting with general purpose

content repositories using a Java API. On

the other hand, CMIS is an interoperability

specification for interacting with document-

centric content repositories via HTTP-based

protocols. It is also interesting to note that while

JCR is Java-based, CMIS is platform and

language- independent.

Customization

A CMS software’s ability to cluster and allow

extension/development and customization is

another factor taken into consideration when

comparing it with the others.

Storage Type

A CMS can use any kind of repository, ranging

from file-based storage to relational databases.

The kind of storage used is also a factor of

comparison between different systems.

Multi-Channel Content Delivery

A content management system must be

capable of presenting information over multiple

channels, with different displays and themes

for various users, and different levels of security

and access control.

Security and Scalability

To ensure optimum availability and resilience

of online banking services, a high-performance

content management system should also

separate staging and production environments.

In a typical scenario, content is drafted and

refined on the staging server, and pushed to

the production server when it's ready to be

published. The production server can run different

domains and privacy settings simultaneously,

in order to deploy a website, a private website,

or an intranet site. Both the content repository

and the production server should be able to

cluster and scale to enterprise-class workloads.

There are different CMS products available in

the market under licensed and open source

categories. The following CMS software solutions

are chosen for evaluation. Some of them are

licensed, whereas some are open source.

While they use separate content management

frameworks, all are Java-based systems.

Various Content Management Systems in

the Market

Key Selection Criteriafor a Content

Management system

Simplicity & Ease of Use

Creating web content and scanning documents

and other types of files can collectively be

called authoring. A key selection criterion for a

content management system is the ease of

authoring, i.e. the availability (or absence) of a

‘what you see is what you get’ editor, easy

upload of documents, ease of content creation

and related tasks such as tagging, editing etc.

Authorization and Access Control

CMS solutions provide multiple authorization

levels and different access control for users of

web content, pages and repository nodes.

However, the granularity of access control and

applicability to other tasks such as editing,

modification, and publishing etc. is what

distinguishes them.

Standards Compliance

Various CMS solutions use different platforms

and conform to different standard APIs

available, say CMIS (Content Management

Interoperability Services) or JCR (Java Content

Repository). Each of these standards has a

Content Management

• Mexican user is browsing through a

bank’s website to view product catalogs.

He clicks on ‘Spanish’ in the multilingual

label section. The content on the screen

is displayed in Spanish.

• A retail customer wants to know the risks

involved in investing in mutual fund

products. He logs in to the e-banking

application and starts a new thread on a

discussion forum. He invites all the users

in his address book to comment.

• A bank has uploaded the e-statement of

a retail customer’s savings account on

an online vault. The customer can access

the vault after logging in to Internet

banking, and check the e-statement.

• A prospective customer logs on to a

direct banking site and seeks help on

opening an overdraft account. The

application provides the user with a video

demonstration of all the steps involved.

Typical Business Scenarios for a CMS

Alfresco Content Management- Alfresco

Alfresco Web Content Management is an open

source content management system. It provides

a complete Enterprise Content Management

solution by providing Web Content Management,

Document Management and Image Management.

It can be deployed to any application server by

binding the latter to a CIFS directory.

Sandboxes are a special feature provided by

Alfresco. Content is managed in sandboxes that

isolate each user's changes. There are facilities

for submitting content to a shared (staging)

sandbox and then deploying that content either

to a flat file system or another instance of Alfresco.

Lotus Web Content Management - IBM

Lotus WCM is a proprietary software suite

offered by IBM. It offers web content management

along with workflows. It provides features

ranging from content authoring to publishing

along with social software capabilities like blogs

and wikis.

Its special syndication feature replicates data

from one web content library on one server to

another web content library on another server.

eXo - eXo Platform

eXo is a portal-based platform that offers

content management, document management,

and workflow along with social collaboration

and networking features. The software provides

Java middleware for cloud-based services and

is based on service oriented architecture.

Apache CMS Stack - Apache

Apache CMS stack includes 3 different products

viz. Lenya, Jackrabbit and Chemistry. Lenya is

an open source content management system

from the Apache software suite, which is based

on a Java/XML platform. The latest 2.0 version

offers LDAP integration and access control by

IP. The entire site or a part of it can be SSL

protected as well. This is a simple system that

can be studied as a reference implementation.

Apache also offers Jackrabbit which is a

repository framework fully conforming to JCR

that is implemented on JCR 2.0. This is used

as the underlying content repository by many

CMS software solutions like Hippo and Weceem.

Apart from this, Apache also has one CMIS

implementation called Apache Chemistry which

Author

Shilka Sharma

Associate Consultant, Finacle

Infosys Technologies Limited

is still under incubation. Apache also offers

one web development framework, namely,

Apache Sling, which uses JCR and has got

some CM qualities.

Liferay CMS - Liferay, Inc.

Liferay is a free open source enterprise portal

written in Java. It is one of the leading portal-

based platforms for social networking, portal

development, business intranets, corporate

extranets, forums, archives, and general

web publishing.

Liferay comes with two different products viz.

Liferay Portal and Liferay Social Office.

The former provides a portal platform with workflow

features whereas the latter offers 3 features,

namely Content, Context and Collaboration.

• To deliver fresh and dynamic web content

easily and faster. It will enable the bank to

distribute and act on content from virtually

any source.

• To attract more visitors to direct banking

thereby improving the chances of converting

prospects into customers.

• To provide useful, quality information to

all customers.

• To respond to customer needs faster.

• To improve productivity, cut costs and

enhance services.

Today, content management solutions are

addressing the content related issues faced

by many banks to reduce operational cost

and increase profit. That being said, content

management with Web 2.0 and XML-based

technology will continue to distribute content

across multiple channels to create richer customer

experience and spread the workload of content

creation across the business and beyond.

Why Should Banks Invest in a Content

Management system?

Conclusion

Content Management