15 Minute Guide To Interactive Content Management

What is interactive content management?

Interactive content management (ICM) is a set of technologies for managing the production process and content types that deliver compelling communications. Whether it's a web page that combines a variety of rich media types, such as a Flash animation and streaming video, a PowerPoint presentation with still images and audio clips, or page layouts for marketing collateral that will be rendered for multi-channel distribution, the variety of interactive content formats presents challenges that go beyond traditional content management.

The underlying technologies-digital asset and web content management

Over the past decade, the Web has evolved from a publishing medium into a venue where people meet, collaborate, and conduct business. Within organizations, this change is driving line-of-business (LOB) units to put more thought into their websites, give them a sharper focus and greater depth, and launch more sites with narrower purposes - niche micro sites. The nature of websites has changed as well. Most are composed of rich media - as much as 80 percent - including still images, complex graphics, full-motion video, Flash animation, and audio. For example, YouTube, a company that didn't exist just a few years ago, hosts 100 million video streams a day.

This evolution has had a direct impact on the tools that enable websites and other communication mediums- digital asset management (DAM) and web content management (WCM). DAM has grown from a specialty application primarily used to store and manage fixed brand assets such as still images and graphics for traditional marketing collateral to a multi-channel publishing tool. Today's DAM solutions manipulate all forms of rich media, support complex workflows, and integrate a diverse set of creative applications from Adobe, Quark, Microsoft, and others. Likewise, WCM solutions can render and publish rich media to websites and mobile devices.