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Content Management System Requirements & CMS Search Proposal
Purpose and scope of document
This document is designed to lay out the rationale and requirements for the acquisition of a new Content Management System for the Ring Customer Support Content Team. It will discuss the features required for any new CMS along with the level of support needed from a CMS vendor. It will also provide the basis for any RFPs sent out to vendors.
The Guru evaluation
The impetus for this document and the proposed separate search for a new CMS was the recent multi-week evaluation of the Guru CRM system. Guru is a customer relationship/knowledge management system designed to keep customer facing teams such as customer service reps up-to-date with a constantly evolving database of institutional knowledge. A secondary benefit of using this database system was that the knowledge contained in the system could be organized and published in a searchable public-facing help site.
It’s a marker of the inadequacy of Zendesk, our current CMS solution, that Guru’s secondary feature -- the forward-facing help system -- was nonetheless more powerful and attractive than Zendesk. RIng’s Content Management Team did a thorough evaluation of the system, noting the system’s benefits and drawbacks. What they found was that while many of the system’s features would be enormously helpful in the project to expand and improve Ring’s help content offerings, the system was ultimately too limited to adequately implement future plans. In addition, Guru itself is primarily focused on the software as a CRM solution rather than a CMS, casting doubt on the level of support and content-related feature expansions we can expect to see from the developers.
The search for a CMS
The biggest benefit of the Guru evaluation was that it crystallized in the minds of the content management team the list of features that are sorely needed in a CMS. In addition, it also impressed upon the team the need to search for a CMS that is created primarily as a CMS rather than as an adjunct to a CRM or other piece of enterprise software. The result is this document, a list of required features for a new CMS and a proposal to begin an immediate search for and evaluation of potential CMS candidates.
CMS Features
Ease of organization
One of the key issues that the content management team is struggling with under Zendesk is maintaining, publishing, and organizing help content. Internal search functionality is wholly inadequate, forcing content managers to have go on slow hunts through the entire Help site to find content they need or wish to reference. Any CMS should be able to support the following search functions:
In addition, it’s extremely difficult to sort, tag, copy, or move help content to where it needs to go. Under the current system articles cannot be listed under multiple categories without duplication (which hurts the ability to keep the content updated), and the labelling system is wholly inadequate (this has a bad impact on internal search, site search, and SEO.)
This also extends to the neighbor-facing help site. The current site’s organizational structure is inadequate to the task of properly organizing our current help content, to say nothing of future content. In just one example, it’s currently impossible to properly categorize multi-product pieces of content, leading to empty slots under current products where there should be help available. Another would be the lack of control over content links on the page itself. Any prospective CMS would need to provide the content team the power and flexibility to properly organize help content.