This potential for multiple sources of content and distribution endpoints also works in reverse. It allows you to meet your content authors where they are.
- A customer service team that does all their work in Zendesk (or a similar support management system)? No problem, just integrate the tools to receive their content into the central content repository.
- A product development team that maintains detailed product specs in the ERP? Again, no problem.
- A member community creating collaborative content in Higher Logic? Easily handled.
- A division/department maintaining content documents in SharePoint? Let’s integrate it.
- Are five partners publishing content through their own CMS? Let’s grab that too.
- Is your Marketing Team publishing landing pages on HubSpot? Check.
- Is excellent content hidden away in the CRM? Let’s pull that over.
The chances are that no matter what the purpose and focus of your organization, you have a vast number of subject matter experts. In fact, every member of your organization is a subject matter expert in something. That is a robust workforce that is going mostly untapped in the mission to create the most compelling and engaging content. By implementing a tool that allows you to meet them where they are and leverage the natural work products of their existing job functions, you unlock a substantial wealth of potential content.
The logical question is why? Why would you centralize this when you could just create seemingly similar integrations to send the content directly from the source system to the destination channel? We believe there are four very compelling answers to this question:
Build one destination integration
No matter how many sources of content you have, you will only need to build a single connector to your destination. This limits your time investment as well as your potential for bugs, and maintenance overhead.
Control workflow
These systems can be configured to trigger workflows that allow for imported content to be reviewed by appropriate gatekeepers, before being released to content distribution channels. This can be well advised for brand identity reasons, but can also be crucial for organizations with compliance, security, and liability concerns.
Firewall
The term is not being used in the traditional network security sense here, but the concept is similar. We want to distribute our content far and wide, but we don’t want to allow all these systems access to our internal business systems. A central repository model provides for access to only processed, publicly distributable content items. This is a huge security advantage for these scenarios.
Stability/Performance
If you’ve published a chat-bot to assist your customers 24/7, you don’t want to break that promise because the ERP system is undergoing maintenance. The FAQ on your website shouldn’t break because your customer service tool is experiencing service disruption. The scenarios are endless, and the punchline is always the same. We must insulate our distribution channels from service disruptions from all other systems that have different maintenance and uptime standards. The central repository accomplishes this by acting as persistent content storage between the various systems.