Web CMS and VMS: Improving workflow and content integration
Written by: Claudio Canive
If presenting video content to your online audience is the core of your business model, then chances are you are using a traditional web content management system (CMS) and a video management solution (VMS) in tandem. Both systems are highly specialized for what they do, but until recently they haven’t been well integrated, leading to overly manual processes, sub-optimal workflow, and degraded consumer experience.
Typically, the CMS is not even aware of the video content that is managed in the VMS. The CMS stores and manages articles and images while the VMS manages video, and never the twain shall meet. This situation results in problems for both content editors and the audience.
From a content editor’s perspective, lack of communication between the CMS and VMS creates a more complex workflow:
- When a content editor adds video through a VMS that is entirely disconnected from the web CMS, they can’t access individual video objects for integration into article-based content. Although the published videos will appear in the embedded players, content editors must copy and paste the VMS embed code into the article WYSIWYG editor.
- Content categories are crucial to managing online video content. Using unintegrated systems, content editors might not have the option to add, edit, or delete categories via the CMS interface and have those changes reflected in the VMS as well.
- Content editors need the ability to easily append a video to a story or blog, whereby the video is placed in a sidebar adjacent to the text without needing to copy and paste embed code. Unintegrated systems might not allow for this.
Apart from being clumsy and time consuming for content editors, lack of integration also poses an issue for the visitors. Because the video content does not live in the CMS, it’s generally unavailable via site search and requires a video-specific search tool in the player itself. Wouldn’t your audience prefer to discover related textual and video content in a single, all-site search function?
A fully integrated CMS-plus-VMS lets editors ingest video content through either system’s interface. References to the video objects are placed into the CMS database so that the videos could be attached and formatted automatically into article-based content. Given the presence of the references in the CMS database, the videos could be indexed for search. The integration streamlines the workflow for the content editor, removes the requirement for a federated search mechanism, and enhances the experience for visitors.
The convergence of web CMS and VMS is still in its infancy, but with the increasing need for immediacy in web publishing, you’ll want to ensure that your tools play well together so that all of your content (text, images, and videos) can be seamlessly managed by your team and consumed by your audience.
To find out more about how Platformic has integrated their CMS with thePlatform’s online video solutions, see the Platformic partner page on thePlatform’s web site.
Claudio Canive is the Chief Executive Officer of Platformic.
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