Diane: Scott, you’ve spoken for years about the need for organizations to control content. Now that content management is finally on the minds of the masses, can you tell us more about the difference between managing documents and managing content? That is, pieces of content?

Scott: Yes, I can. Let’s start with document management, an approach to controlling files of various types. User manuals, presentations, web pages, annual reports, brochures, animations, and white papers are all types of documents that need to be controlled. Document Management is the process through which organizations manage whole documents; move them through approval processes, control versions of the doc, and store them.
However, documents are comprised of smaller pieces of content called components. We need to manage components of content —not just the documents they end up being used to create—in order to deliver the right information, to the right people, in the right language, at the right time, and in the right format. So, content management is really about managing all of the pieces of content that are used to assemble documents, whether they are physical documents like printed user manuals or virtual documents like Web pages or information delivered to a mobile device.