Integrator is a system that connects various kinds of sub-systems or you can say devices together. Content Integration encompasses the philosophy, theories, practices, and tools. It is based around the re-use and adaption of content from our core repository into other uses and channels, or vice-versa. The creation and ingestion of content from other channels into our core repository. Content Integrator is a system which enables this integration.
Reasons
Contents created are supposed to be stored in some repository, which is kind of a delivery channel. From there, the content moves between systems, applications & processes. A Content Integrator is a tool, which assumes importance in the collaborative environment. This tool is put to use by team, which is responsible for creating, editing, publishing and administering content. This is the generalized pattern which every CI tool follows. But then this whole process of content integration involves content transfer, accessing the content from different locations, exchange of thoughts among team members. Thus, such a system involves cash flows, switching of locations and might lead to:
- Frustration, since you have to every time put the content on a single machine. This creates problems when you are editing it from your own machines. Then you have to every time reach out to that particular machine. Previous version of content and not the latest one which someone recently modified.
- Done with the editing, but how to publish it back?
- Inability to work on the content since you might get burdened with whole lots of issues with the device you are working on
These are some of the problems which users face, at an individual or organizational level. This has, infact, led to the organizations following Digital Marketing strategy saying” We don’t have an effective plan yet”. Or they build their contents but are not able to optimize them. This may be due to lack of mass review, unclear vision while building the strategy and similar such reasons.
Solutions
Yes we do have one. Stratbeans Consulting comes up with a “Content Integrator tool”. It provides access to the updated and most recent content to all the team members at any given time. For example, some content is created by one or more authors. Over time, that content may be edited. One or more individuals may provide some editorial oversight, approving the content for publication. Later that content may be superseded by another version of the content and thus retired or removed from use. This tool can be used as the service on cloud. The tool allows different types of users to login. All content is stored on a cloud based repository. Different users can be provided access to this repository. The tool helps to categorize content based on the specific attributes into different types of content. Different types of content can be assigned to different types of users. This can also serve as a tool for employee collaboration and engagement.
Thus, users can have better control over the data through access based roles using collaborative environment. Another important aspect of Content Integrator is the ability of the tool to present the single updated and most recent version of the content. For example, if a piece of content is being created on 5 different machines, then the creators of content do not have to transfer the content on any other machine instead they can put the content directly into the content integrator and then if they want to view the same content on any other location for editing or publishing purposes then they can login to the cloud from this new location and download the content and work on it. Once the editing is done it can be published back and marketed as finished piece of content.
Conclusion
Finally the team which is responsible for signing off of the final content can see review the content in the “finished” category and approve it or put it back as next version along with comments. So this allows fast collaboration between large teams and maintains the health of the knowledge base.
So, there goes our content which can be modified at any instant much more cost-effectively and the team gets updated with the latest version of the same using collaborative environment.