Nowadays we are hearing and talking about ebooks, ezines, ebanking, econtent. Knowledge content gatherers, analysts, support staff and workgroups come together throughout the day to create, gather, analyze, communicate and publish digital econtent in various repositories. For people and organization to make use of these vast unstructured repositories, viable techniques, technologies and tools have to be adopted to structure, catalog, classify index and personalize this electronic information. It has become critical to make information readily  accessible and understandable. Information technology professionals were not only pioneers in the procurement of electronic information, but also can quickly adopt to manipulate, deliver, and organize electronic information. Also information professionals are well positioned to take on the additional responsibilities of econtent and einformation management, eprocurement, and ecommunication leverage.

Thus the important disciplines such as content management and knowledge management came into existence. The core challenges ahead are to devise efficient methodologies for sharing information, collaborating on projects, and restructuring work processes to improve operational efficiencies. As market research, competitive intelligence, procurement and other functions become virtual and e-enabled, the mission of the information professional is to merge technologies and philosophies in order to create a visible, vital and vigorous information service for the organization.

Content management broadly encompasses the overall processes of content publishing, retrieval and reuse. Content management includes creating, tagging, submitting/contributing content, creating compelling applications, integrating a variety of content, and personalizing it for consumers. The process of gathering usage metrics and managing the content throughout its life cycle also fall under content management.

A cost-cutting and easy to maintain content management module that remains expandable and flexible has become one of the main requirements for an intranet.  An intranet site is composed of several layers, each of them talks about very specific functionality. The topmost layer insists on hierarchical subject and functional classifications, controlled vocabularies, taxonomies, ontology, and all kinds of language-base heady work. The main functions are thesaurus management and information architecture.

The second layer is all about taking structured, semi-structured, and unstructured textual content and applying indexing techniques to optimize the content for information retrieval. The third layer is Web application development. That is, to define and create a structured repository for the storage of content, a series of Web-based content contribution and content validation interfaces, and then one or multiple interfaces to navigate, search and retrieve/utilize the content.

The fourth layer for building an intranet site is to have an security/access control engines. The fifth layer is collaborative communications layer. Collaborative communication includes content created and stored in e-mail, messaging, forums, chat rooms, white boards, video conferencing and the growing field of groupware and project team-based collaboration. Properly managing collaborative content exposes this content and the wealth of embedded knowledge it contains. This layer enables both knowledge mining and knowledge sharing.

The sixth layer is content integration. The concept behind this layer is mapping metadata and indexes from two or more dissimilar repositories so that the consumer in a single step performs retrieval and distribution of information. Competitive intelligence databases need content integration. Both internal and external documents, on integration, will become a powerful competitive knowledge provider. Apart from that, sales, marketing, and strategic planning information source will force for having a fair content management system in place.

Content integration represents providing links to Web sites that have to be updated in regular basis, links to reports and various files like PDF and MS Word .

The seventh and the last layer is content personalization. This one presents interesting opportunities for portals, dashboards and personalization. There are various kinds of portal such as enterprise portal, employee portal, educational portal etc. Dashboards use the car dashboard that provides drivers with real-time indicators to help in navigation. This works as a metaphor for portal views of real-time monitoring of important events. An user can set set threshold values and the dashboard will accordingly signal when the threshold limit gets surpassed. Thus both portals and dashboards are exciting prospects and poised to take a very popular role in the evolution of Internet applications.

The main focus for going for personalization is to design a portal or dashboard keeping in mind the content needs of an individual or group of people. The quality standard of an personalization can be mainly enhanced by innovative content classification, through consumers recommending content to others and through heuristic -based software components.

Content management (CM) is an important component of every major intranet site today. The information portals and dashboards are the two main applications that needs CM. Also personalization is another vital factor that needs a lot of attention to attract the perspective consumers and to retain them. There are a number of IT solution providers in the market supplying robust and efficient content management solutions.