User Roles
The Editors and Contributors Perspective
Whilst editors and contributors may fulfil other roles within the system, they will principally be involved in the day-to-day management of content.
It is important to remember that due to the browser-based nature of Contensis, these people may be located internally or externally.
It is absolutely key to their role that they can work intuitively and this is another key strength of Contensis ECMS. The Word® like editor is immediately familiar to anyone with basic word processing skills and individuals are normally contributing content and developing new pages within minutes of their first encounter. This leads to rapid buy-in from staff who probably already have enough to do without learning a new and difficult to understand piece of software.
Editors are provided with a full set of design templates and commonly used site components, such as logos and images, that are accessed from the project tree menu. Once again these templates are completely intuitive to use, and their use ensures that whilst individual editors have complete freedom to contribute text elements, modify existing text and use images from the Image Library, their work will always be presented within a corporate design structure that they cannot change.
Since templates predetermine the look of individual pages they can be designed to suit every circumstance, with greater or lesser degrees of flexibility provided for the ways in which content can be presented. Templates can, for instance, be created for whole pages with predefined text styles and image placeholders, or for individual page elements from which pages can be more flexibly created.
Depending upon their privileges, editors will find that advanced image manipulation facilities are available beyond the ability to crop and resize individual images.
The project tree menu is the repository for the many different content types which, depending upon the design template selected, can be added to a page using simple drag and drop functionality. Additionally, Contensis allows import directly from Microsoft® Office products such as Word and Excel - a considerable bonus to the busy editor.
Text created within the system or imported can be formatted using specific predefined styles to ensure corporate uniformity. It is, however, possible to grant individual editors complete freedom throughout the editing process, but care must be exercised if corporate look and feel is to be maintained.
When working on a page, editors have access not only to the current live version but also all the previously created versions of a page. Full rollback facilities additionally ensure that if mistakes are made, any previous version can be restored.
In normal circumstances, editors and contributors work within a defined workflow, passing their completed work to the next step as it is completed, leading ultimately to authorisation and publication. This mechanism ensures that only approved content goes live.
When an item of content is passed on, notes can be added to keep everyone informed. Equally, declined content can be passed back to editors with appropriate comments from authorisers.
Take a look at some other user roles & functions