Adigital flood is upon us. Content inundates us. It begins as bits of content swirling everywhere—a document, an image, a written corporate procedure, a web page, or an email. The binary mist mixes, combines, and rains down on us. It pools in laptops, on desktops, and in server farms. Creeks and streams meander to corporate reservoirs. Modern civilizations prosper and thrive as continents surrounded by oceans of content.

But content is a resource that must be actively managed in order to safeguard its freshness. Left unmanaged, it seeps away, picks up funny odors, or simply becomes stale. It is no longer adequate to store content in odd-sized barrels and ladle out more to anyone who needs some.

Interwoven TeamSite is a modern content distillery. It assists content creators who brew new tonics. You can combine an essence from here with an ingredient from there with the help of customized content-entry interfaces. Workflow enables the sequencing, routing, notification, and coordination between the stages of creation, review, post-processing, and dissemination. Search adds cohesion to the repository by vastly increasing individual productivity and by fostering the organizational reuse of existing content. Underneath it all hums a controlled storage repository where standard components interact with custom modules to bring carefully refined business logic to life.

With this book, Brian Hastings and Justin McNeal have assembled a practical guide to help information technologists and business analysts grasp the essential concepts on which content management systems are built. Having constructed systems many times themselves, the authors know that practitioners learn best from case studies and true-to-life examples. For example, what is important to know, and what are common mistakes? What factors convince an organization to embark on a journey to bring its content under control? What principles and insights from the Rational Unified Process can be applied to content management? The Definitive Guide to Interwoven TeamSite answers these questions and more.

The authors bring an impressive breadth of experience to this book. On one hand, a system architect can find example code for presentation templates and workflow tasks to give them a concrete understanding of the technical skills required to complete the intensive Construction phase of the project and give them a glimpse of possible features. On the other hand, in Chapter 18 a project manager will find suggestions for reaching out to the internal community during the Transition phase. Activities could include sponsoring information sessions, identifying potential solution champions within the organization, and devising a detailed training strategy.

Content management has come a long way over the past ten years, compared to earlier times when it seemed that only software writers cared about building repositories and versioning content. The flood of content has risen to new heights. With this book, we all become better navigators.