Re: [OSCOM] Open source CMS

On Tue, 16 Mar 2005, srinivas mohan wrote:

> I am very new to CMS concepts..
...
> The application i am intrested to build is to manage word and pdf 
> documents with support to workflow mgmt and content distribution.


This sounds to me like a "document management system" more than a "content 
management system".  I guess there's a lot of overlap between the two.

My understanding is that document management systems are primarily 
concerned with the production and management of documents. They provide 
workflow tools, archival, searching, and are usually agnostic about the 
format of the stored content.

CMSs are primarily concerned with content publishing.  They provide many 
features similar to document management, and also provide content editing 
tools.  They typically require that the content be stored in a format 
editable and manipulable by the CMS, which usually means not Word or PDF.

If your application is more about production and management of documents 
than it is about publishing documents, perhaps the assumptions and feature 
sets found in document management systems would be a better match.


Oliver