There are those (web designers, developers, and other IT folks) who mistakenly believe that the purchase of an effective web content content management system by their employer, will serve to effectively eliminate their responsibilities.

Nothing could be further from the truth. While one of the components of a good content management system is ease of use for the content managers, this does not mean that the web developer and web designer are now useless (more on that later).

A content management system is an application, it's got a code base and other complicated stuff that the marketing content manager does not need or want to know about. Before the content managers (CMs) can access the system, the IT staff needs to install and test it:

• To determine whether or not all of the system requirements have been met and the various parts of the system are playing nicely together
• To make sure that they know how it works so that they can train and/or assist CMs down the road when problems are encountered
• To eliminate any issues or bugs

Once a web content management system gets rolled out across the enterprise, the IT department will initially handle coordinating the training of the content-managers-to-be. There is usually training provided by the CMS vendor, but it's usually a one day or one week event, and many non-technical usersremain confused even after they have had this first level training.

Keep in mind that many of your users are not accustomed to the technical language used in training and in the training manuals (no matter how simply it's written, how does one explain XML simply anyway?). What usually happens is that someone from IT will then have to spend a little time on the phone or in person, helping the CMs to get acclimated to the new system.

Point Dynamics CMS is feature rich and fast to deploy. This means that John, who owns that small web design firm in Columbus, can take on more clients without having to immediately expand his staff (or sleep in the office).

We have many clients like John, who have landed a large piece of business and suddenly realize that there are not enough hours in the day to get the job done on time and within budget. With Point Dynamics CMS, John can design page templates and clone as many as necessary (whether one or one hundred) to create in a few days the same Web 2.0 enabled site that used to take months. John can then clone the entire website, make a few cosmetic changes and present it to yet another client.

As you can see, a web content management system does not make the developer and designer obsolete. What it does for the corporate web developer is remove the tedium of cresting and updating content, leaving her time to do the fun stuff - such as extending the API to create new components. The web developer who left the corporate world to start his own business will benefit from an affordable and easy to use product that helps him to attract more business with fewer resources.

What if your company has some budget constraints and you want your non-technical staff to be able to build and manage their own intranets or internets with very little IT involvement?

Visit our Blog to learn how one Content Manager was able to create over one hundred professional and specific web pages and is able to keep the site updated with very little assistance from her IT department.