Taking Content into the Future: Tera’s CMSA
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The challenge to newspapers and other organizations that publish content is to manage the disparate and often times nearly incompatible content sources, manipulation, storage and presentation formats and technologies.
The management goal of any production system, whether publishing or otherwise, is to produce a consistent, premium product, reliably and at minimal expense. The more complicated the manufacturing process, the higher the risk, and the less reliable and uniform the product. All of which results, directly or indirectly, in lower profits through a less acceptable product or a higher cost of production.
In contrast to the long ago hand management of content – passing sheets of paper from one hand to another – today’s content exists in a sea of disparate formats, technologies and systems, each of which requires its own expertise to manage and convert content from one editing and presentation format to another.
The advantages of Tera’s CMSA are:
- • A system built upon Tera’s CMSA is not monolithic. It is a group of cooperating software components operating within a well-defined, extensible architecture that is able to accept new technologies and presentation methods
- • Tera’s CMSA means that as new content technologies and formats become available, third parties and technology developers can add ‘‘plug-ins’’ to input, manipulate, display and archive content.
- • The architecture allows new functionality to be added through the addition of new plugins, access to local and other services, and through new content definitions.
Products implemented using Tera’s CMSA are web-based, extensible systems that are compatible with all past Tera systems and data. Products using CMSA are able to accommodate new technologies, data formats and processing concepts as they are developed.
Communication between software and services takes place through the standard web protocol, http, which means that anything that talks standard web protocol can request services, submit and receive content from anywhere. Needless to say appropriate, robust security measures are part of the architecture.
Tera’s architecture allows the developers of new technologies and other third parties to access, manipulate, and archive content using standard web facilities. Standard web facilities, in turn, allow decentralized organizations to work together.