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Computerworld - Colette Askeland is group director of IT at San Jose-based Cadence Design Systems Inc., a provider of electronic design products and services. The company relies on software from Sunnyvale, Calif.-based content management software maker Interwoven Inc. to help it operate two customer support Web sites and four corporate sites. Each site uses Interwoven's TeamSite product for content storage, workflow and versioning, and its OpenDeploy for deployment from the development environment to production.
Askeland answered some questions from Computerworld about what goes into procuring content management tools.

What made you decide on these particular tools? First, we set out primarily looking for a solution that would give key content providers the ability to manage their own content and publish information quickly. TeamSite provided us with the functionality we needed, with an easy-to-use interface.
The second problem was to automate the manual processing of applying metadata to the content. We needed the ability to apply and change product metadata quickly on large volumes of content. Since implementing TeamSite, we have reduced turnaround for publishing content from a couple of weeks to 24 hours. We now have a centralized store available for managing all of our enterprise content.

Colette Askeland is group director of IT at San Jose-based Cadence Design Systems Inc.

What's the best way to choose a content management product? The approach we took was to spend a lot of time educating ourselves on the problems each Web group was experiencing with managing Web content and assessing their readiness to use functionality provided by a content management system. We selected a cross-functional team for our evaluation and used formal processes for ranking features and functionality of each of the vendors.
Armed with our vision, our current needs and a capable team, we were able to arrive at a decision that could provide immediate impact, as well as the bandwidth to carry us toward our future goals.

What sorts of things need to be considered? Integration with other key systems is critical, since content can be leveraged from multiple content sources. Open standards enable seamless integration with existing e-business infrastructure, enterprise systems, authoring applications and development tools. [Content management software] tools should support market-leading standards such as XML, Java, J2EE and HTML.

Read more about Applications in Computerworld's Applications Topic Center.