[Sigia-l] DMS vs CMS

Karl Fast karl.fast at pobox.com
Fri Jun 11 12:05:39 EDT 2004


> I personally can't think of why one would use a DMS for information
> sharing within a company (which is what's under discussion), but I'm
> also afraid that it's my own background and bias showing. 

The line between a DMS and CMS is so blurred as to almost make no
difference in many situations.

Even so, the historical roots of a system are important depending on
the kind of information you are talking about.

A classic DMS, like Documentum, was designed to solve high end
document managament problems. A good example here is pharmaceutical
firms and the enormously complex paper management trails they need
to create for things like drug testing and government approval. 

A CMS that was originally designed to meet Web publishing needs
will, in many cases, still fail to meet the high end, paper-centric,
situations, like in the pharma example.

My general rule of thumb is that the more you think of "documents"
as things that must be printed on paper (often for legal,
bureaucratic, or regulatory reasons) then the more you want a system
with a DMS heritage. If you think of "documents" as more fluid,
digital, and less defined by the constraints of paper then you
probably want a system with a Web-style CMS heritage.



--karl
http://www.livingskies.com/



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