A while back, I spoke to a documentation manager at a large software company. She had put a warning in 74 topics across 6 different product manuals, 3 weeks prior. However, due to a legal update to the warning, she had to update the first place she found it (which was one of the topics in the first manual). After that, she went on to search for the remaining 73 topics, each located manually, one by one. She had done nothing wrong. The problem was that she had grown, and her tool had not. No one had realized that she required a bigger tool.
That story has stuck with me for a number of reasons. For one, it is a very accurate depiction of where many content teams are today: functional but struggling to maintain performance. In most cases, there is no single point in time when things begin to decline, they just do.
So what actually is a CCMS?
A CCMS is used to manage Component Content. This is opposed to managing whole documents. In the past, documentation was managed as complete standalone documents, i.e. a 40 page printed manual would be created from start to finish as a single document. Any subsequent changes would then be published as a completely new version of the entire document. A CCMS manages content at the component level. The basic building blocks of content in a CCMS are individual Components or pieces of content. These can be things like a single step in a procedure, a note, a warning, a description, etc. All of this content is stored in a single repository as individual Components and can then be used to create many different documents or published as many different outputs. All of the output is created from a single source.
A CCMS is defined at the following link what is CCMS? This contrasts to a traditional Content Management System (CMS) which typically manages published content i.e. documents. There is much confusion in the market between a CCMS and a CMS, although as stated above a CMS manages published content, a CCMS manages the individual components or building blocks of documents, typically stored in a repository as separate items.
| Feature | Traditional CMS | CCMS |
| Content unit | Full page or document | Reusable component (topic, snippet, variable) |
| Reuse model | Copy-paste or manual duplication | Single-source, referenced across outputs |
| Update process | Find and update each instance | Update once, propagates automatically |
| Best suited for | Web publishing, marketing content | Technical documentation, regulated content |
| Translation overhead | Translate full documents repeatedly | Translate components once, reuse across products |
Who actually benefits — and who probably doesn’t
Vendors selling a CCMS must be wary of selling to every content team. A 5-person marketing team who is publishing a few blog posts and corresponding social media copies of content does not need a component-level architecture for their content. However, if any of the following describe your situation, you should take a look at CCMS.
- Technical writers managing documentation across multiple product versions, where 60% of the content overlaps but every version currently lives in a separate file
- Learning and development teams building courses where the same compliance module needs to appear in onboarding, annual training, and a manager track
- Regulated industries (medical devices, aerospace, financial services) where traceability matters and you need to prove exactly which version of a warning appeared in which document at what point in time
- Localization-heavy teams sending content to translation vendors, where duplicated content means paying to translate the same sentence twelve separate times
The cost of translation for large multi-language organizations can be reduced by significantly reducing the amount of duplication in their content. For example, translating a 40 page document can be significantly less expensive than translating 80 pages of nearly identical material. As long as the CCMS recoups its cost in the first year (or less) in translation cost savings alone, it will be a cost effective solution for large multi-language organizations.
The signs you’ve already hit the wall
I don’t mean to suggest that all documentation sets will inevitably go down hill but there is often a point of no return and this is not always dramatic. I have seen documentation sets continue to slowly deteriorate until someone asks how many places a particular warning or note appears. Often the person who asks the question is shocked by the answer but this has been obvious to others in the organization for some time.
- Your team spends more time maintaining consistency than actually writing
- Version control is a shared folder with filenames like manual_v3_FINAL_reviewed_USE THIS ONE.docx
- A single product description lives in a Word file, a PDF, a knowledge base article, and an internal wiki — and all four have quietly diverged from each other over the past eighteen months
- Audits are terrifying because no one can quickly answer what content went out and when
(An additional sign of problems is when new employees take two to three months to gain an understanding of the current state of the content because they cannot find the “gold” or current version of the information).
What switching actually involves
However, I also want to caution that a CCMS is not for the faint of heart. The content on your team will have to be reorganized into discrete topics or “topics” as MadCap Software calls them. The writers on your team will have to learn to see their work in a whole new light. That is, instead of writing a document, they will be writing and managing individual components (such as a warning, a procedure, a note, or a product description). These individual components will then be single sources that are used to generate a number of different output files or “published outputs”. The publishing process will also be significantly different than what you are used to.
It’s a one time “reinforcing” of a house as opposed to ongoing “space-heating”. And that initial lift of getting content into a CCMS will continue to pay-off long after the first major content update that, before the CCMS, would have taken weeks to update, now takes hours to complete and continues to expand as time goes on.
A practical way to think about readiness
Determine if your team is ready to move to a CCMS before booking demos and finding out the prices of the proposed CCMS. To help you get started, below are some simple questions that you can pose to your team and answer together as a team to determine if your team is ready for a CCMS. If you’re working at scale, the answer is most likely yes and you’re already on the path and the only thing left to figure out is when.
- Count how many places your most-reused content block currently lives
- Estimate the time your last major update required across all those instances
- Multiply that by how often you do similar updates annually
- Then ask honestly whether a structured system would change that number by any significant margin
For large-scale content production teams the answer is almost always yes. And most have already thought about where they are headed. The only remaining question is when.
