Understanding the basics of CCMS and Adobe Experience Manager Guides

 There are cases where we might need to manage content beyond the capability of a CMS Solution. Component Content Management System (CCMS) lets you manage content at a component level by providing capability of managing content at granular levels. Here content is created in the form of components.

What is a component in CCMS?
A component is a piece of structured & self-contained content. It can contain a single word, a series of paragraphs, an image, table, or a video. The components are written in a modular manner without any style dependency. Component manages the relationships and associations and tracks all its usage and status.

Metadata is the one piece which makes a component more efficient. Components also enhances the way of content publishing to multi channels effortlessly.

What are some of the common use cases of a CCMS?

Some of the major usecases of a CCMS are given below,

• Product/Technical documentation
• Help & Support Content
• Datasheets/Data booklet
• Policies and procedures
• Long-form marketing content

CMS Vs CCMS
CMS usually store content as pages or documents. But CCMS manage content as individual paragraphs and words.
CCMS helps distribution of granular content by enabling re-use of the content instead of re-writing or copy/paste.
It helps multi-channel publish to any output or system while providing content analytics with a built in security.
Translation capabilities are one of the major feature in any CCMS.

An example implementation could be a chatbot picking up exact content from a CCMS and providing relevant information to user based on his query.

What is DITA w.r.t CCMS?
Majority of the CCMS uses a structured open standard known as DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture ). DITA is a set of specification about document types for authoring and organizing topic-oriented information, as well as a set of mechanisms for combining, extending, and constraining document types.

 Other platforms and programs can be easily integrated with a DITA Component Content Management System via REST/API calls.

Adobe's role in CCMS world.

'Adobe Experience Manager Guides'  A CCMS from Adobe, provides a structured content management for experience-driven documentation. Adobe Experience Manager Guides is an end-to-end solution which is scalable, agile and cloud-native with below capabilities.

• Structured content management - Enables content creation, versioning, translation & reuse, reference management, search and metadata management, Workflow enabled process.
• Web-based content creation, review and collaboration - Creation & migration of any content to DITA with the out-of-the-box ingestion framework via seamless workflow process
• Omnichannel content experiences - Seamlessly delivers content to AEM sites, Mobile Apps, CRM, IoT,Chatbots and other forms
• AI-powered documentation - Smart tagging & smart cropping based on Adobe Sensei for faster content discovery and delivery
• Native integration with Adobe products - Built in integration with Adobe Creative Cloud and Adobe Experience Cloud
• Cloud Enabled - Leveraging the Adobe Experience Manager cloud native capability of always current, scalable, secure & global.

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