Tips from e-Spirit: Successfully Managing Global Content

London, United Kingdom, April 29, 2010 --(PR.com)-- Companies that are able to use the web to globally market their products and services quickly, reliably, and cost-effectively will enjoy clear competitive advantages. But to reap the full benefits of these efforts, they must first provide customers with information on their product range – and do so anywhere in the world. The main pre-requisite here is to have a professional content management system (CMS). But managing multilingual websites is a complicated task and requires a strategic approach right from the start. e-Spirit, makers of the content management system FirstSpirit, have put together a list of six tips to help you get started:

(1) Formulate a strategy - Successful global content management requires a clearly defined global web strategy. Translating your existing content is only the start. In addition, it's necessary to clearly define requirements, objectives, priorities, and success factors, and to formulate a timeline and cost plan.

(2) Define processes - To ensure that responsibilities are clearly defined, a dedicated project manager and team of experts must be assigned, and processes must be clearly defined. This will help to keep the project on task.

(3) Identify technical requirements - Companies should address the following question: What are our actual needs in such areas as language and translation support at the content level; multilingual authoring environments; scalability and usability features for editors and developers; global, automated workflow models for localizing content; archiving and versioning, etc.?

(4) Select a global design - To foster brand recognition with your customers it is critical that you ensure global consistency of your corporate design, as well as other aspects such as navigation structure and community features for interacting with the company.

(5) Create content - All content, both text and graphics, should be easy to adapt to different markets – without neglecting critical national and cultural details. For reasons of efficiency, strategies for reuse should be defined which automate and simplify content distribution to international sites as much as possible.

(6) Ensure quality - The content reuse strategy and all phases of the workflow, starting with content creation and continuing through release and final deployment, must be constantly monitored for performance functionality and optimized where necessary. A successful global content management system is never "finished".

"Based on estimates from Bitkom, Germany’s Federal Association for Information Technology, Telecommunications and New Media, there are 1.5 billion web users around the world, one in every five. That's a huge market for companies that are able to use the Internet to target their products and services to specific niches anywhere in the world," says Oliver Jäger, Director of Marketing & Communications at e-Spirit. "Professional content management solutions and the right strategy will help them to be successful in this globalized market over time."

About e-Spirit and FirstSpirit™
e-Spirit is the manufacturer of FirstSpirit™, a content management system (CMS) for companies with high expectations of their solutions. e-Spirit is a reputable, internationally-oriented product supplier with global brands in all sectors. International clients such as Pentland, Airbus, Trelleborg Sealing Solutions, Commerzbank, and the Schaeffler Group are all using FirstSpirit™ as a CMS platform within their IT infrastructure. FirstSpirit™ is increasingly becoming the integration platform of choice, replacing existing content management technologies in large businesses.

e-Spirit was founded by former members of the Fraunhofer Institute for Software and System Technology (FhG ISST) in 1999. e-Spirit is headquartered in Dortmund with branch offices in Europe located in London, Zurich, Vienna, Berlin, Cologne, Hamburg, Munich, Frankfurt and Stuttgart.

FirstSpirit™ is a solution for Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and for integration with complex system environments and portals. Discriminating customers use the Content Management System (CMS) to publish a wide range of content over almost any channel (Internet, intranet, extranet, and mobile channels, PDF, e-mail newsletters, portals, DTP, technical documentation). Users expect a high level of usability, performance, integration capability, and investment security. In addition to comprehensive out-of-the-box functionalities, e-Spirit also integrates innovative solutions from its technology partners with the basic modular structure of FirstSpirit™.

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