Since content is really at the heart of publishing across all media channels, encompassing both print and eMedia, it is crucial to build an infrastructure that allows you to support the collection and management of content. It is equally as important to ensure that whatever content management solution you choose will easily integrate with and support your design and production workflows.

If you are a printer, the chances are you already have some way to store and potentially manage images and files. Minimally, you have a production server that your staff uses, or in the very, very, very worst case, a large hard disk on your production machines where you keep your work in process. And of course, all of those are regularly backed up… right? Additionally, you might already have a DAM (Digital Asset Management) solution in place. This type of solution allows you to store, manage, and potentially offer some kind of processing of your production assets. In many cases, these DAM systems also provide a customer-facing web component that allows your customers to push and pull these assets in a self-service model. However, each of these types of solutions usually only support manual or semi automated processes, and are relegated to managing images or files. In order to get the most out of cross-media production, you need to manage all of the content at the object level and support fully automated processes and workflows. Keep in mind that once you have this automated infrastructure in place, it opens new opportunities for value-added fee-based services. Customers are willing to pay for this stuff. Don't give it away.

Previously we covered the role and importance of metadata in cross-media production. A good CMS (Content Management System) is at the heart of the infrastructure that facilitates the use of metadata The CMS manages ALL of the content assets down to the object level using a combination of the file and the corresponding metadata information. This includes images, text, video, audio, interactive content, etc. The development of CMS systems and DAM systems actually started in parallel, with the DAM systems designed initially to support image management with the CMS developed to support the delivery of content to websites. Today, they are increasingly becoming a single solution, with DAM features being integrated into CMS solutions.