On Content Orchestration…

All apologies to Disney (don’t sue me), but this promotional image from Fantasia has been speaking to me lately. In my head, this is what content managers aspire to – commanding vast power over their content wherever it is, able to publish to a dozen channels with a click of their mouse, able to cast content across the Internet with a flick of their wrist, etc.

This speaks to an aspect of content that I don’t think should strictly fall under the “CMS” banner –

Once you press publish on something, there’s often a long cascade of things that need to happen before that content is available to be consumed – static sites need to be built, repositories need to be updated, caches need to be cleared.

With a single, coupled CMS, this is instantaneous and not even something we think about. But as channels and repositories fracture and distribute, this becomes less and less trivial, and can sometimes be wildly complicated. How do you get from repository to channel when there are lots of channels and they’re all different?

What do we call this – the moment from pressing publish to having all your content everywhere it needs to be?

• Content Orchestration?
• Content Choreography?
• Content… Wizardry?
• Content… Alchemy?

The dream of most content managers is single-sourcing (we have quite a few customers doing this with Optimizely Content Marketing Platform, for example). But if you aspire to this, then you’re conceding that at least some of your channels will be decoupled and remote.

Is getting newly-published content “settled” into all those channels a discipline all its own? Our CMP has lots of publishing tools for this, but when do you crossover into needing a dedicated tool? Could we distill a set of best practices around this?

Lots of questions here, and they’re growing every day as publishing environments get more and more idiosyncratic.