Content as as Service (CaaS) Solutions

CaaS is focused on managing structured content into feeds that other applications and properties can consume, and, as we shall see in this piece, the benefits are numerous.

When it comes to CaaS, the CMS is a content provider, delivering content as a service to multiple outputs and experiences, which can be syndicated across a wider digital landscape, enabling the potential for wider audience consumption.

In the cases of WordPress and Drupal, for example, they are marketed as single solution software, equipped to handle both the management of content, as well as its output and display. This approach can mean that content requires the CMS as a pivotal element when it comes to the creation of content-driven customer experiences.

For most companies, however, their online must be able to drive customer experiences far beyond the CMS-powered primary website, which is where providing content via an API becomes an option.

In simple terms, it’s all about managing your content.

When it comes to delivering CaaS, we are a company that is all about solutions and business benefits, which include:

• Ensuring that all content flows freely across multiple platforms
• Delivering fluid content for desktop sites, and native apps
• Developing to guarantee content is optimized across connected
• Integrating content for use on third-party sites and social networks

In terms of what CaaS should deliver in terms of superior digital experiences, again, the benefits are axiomatic, especially for those with multiple users, platforms, content editors and administrators:

• Content flexibility
• Scalability
• Intuitive Editing Interface
• CMS infrastructure capabilities
• Seamless and Innovative Development Ecosystem

To expound further, it is important to look at the deeper value delivered by CaaS which, in a content driven online environment, becomes ever more important, especially in a global market…

Cross Platform Pollination

As part of a wider digital strategy, content owners need to disperse and publish their content across as many platforms and multi-channels as possible, ensuring that they all content is available on all devices.

Efficiency

This can be ensured by installing a single editorial team, as well as a single software stack for all channels.

Productivity

Developers can be much more productive, and subsequently more efficient, when allowed to use the technical tools that they are both experts with, as well as one that they enjoy using. CaaS solutions, more often than not, fall into this category of tools.

Quod vide, providing solutions through CaaS is one of the ways we maintain our status as leaders in the field.

Though not exhaustive, the following list showcases precisely what can be done, and what the direct business benefits are:

Web Editor

Enables content architects to create content model

Allows content editors to manage content, from creation, to updating, all with collaboration options at each step

Technical Infrastructure

• Performance and scalability, ensuring that you can trust vendors to deliver content in critical applications
• SLAs with shortened incident response times and access to dedicated staff allowing mission-critical apps to be back up swiftly
• Mobile delivery capabilities providing a superb user experience across all network environments
• API-based importing, management, and delivery enabling full content control
• Thorough and up-to-date documentation allowing your team to start using the tool quickly and efficiently
• CDN (content delivery network) to deliver content quickly

Development Ecosystem

• SDKs and libraries making your team faster and more efficient on all tech stacks
• Demo app source code, for coding efficiency
• 3rd party integrations, utilizing existing tech tools where possible

How can CaaS help Future-Proof Your Content?

• Drupal CMS allows you and your team to decouple the back and front ends where necessary and/or useful
• Drupal content can exist as reusable content snippets, free from presentation, allowing content to be ready and available for creative delivery to sites, multi-media platforms and apps
• Drupal Content becomes future-proof

Building Better Experiences

Drupal boasts many business benefitting elements:

• Presentation-neutral content structure
• RESTful API (allowing front-end developers more creative and development bandwidth
• Capability to build interactive sites and apps,
• Fewer technical restrictions throughout development

Tools and frameworks include:

• Node
• Angular
• Backbone
• Ember

Crucially, these solutions remove CMS constraints, allowing creative vision to be realized within, rather than compromised by the CMS

Third Party Content

Online content is much more fluid and flexible that it once was. It can come from within your company, or be externally authored, or even promoted on your site via a partner

Drupal can deliver:

• Easy and seamless ability to deliver and incorporate third-party content (e.g. from aggregators and syndicators
• Seamless bringing together of content into your Drupal environment
• Allowing easy to push content, across to any other site, app or multi-channel to which you have access
• Advanced Content Sharing

Content sharing solutions:

• Ability to share content across multiple different channels
• Content sharing across apps
• Distributing content audiences are inside of content aggregators (disrupting the news business).
• Allowing easy content creation/sharing with minimum time and effort
• Drupal’s content-as-a-service capability allows content to be easily and openly consumed sites and apps of your selection

And, just do add more to the value, here’s a few more benefits to consider when looking at CaaS options:

Mobile content management: A CaaS content management system allows businesses to update app content dynamically instead of having to resubmit the apps to marketplaces each time a change is made.

Multi-channel publishing: A single content repository makes it easy to deploy the same content to multiple channels (apps and websites) rather than having to create and maintain separate content systems for each one.

Greater UX flexibility: Because content in a CaaS CMS is separated from display and presentation layers, designers are practically free to build any UX they can imagine.

Artificial intelligence and chat-bots: Structured content provided via API is easier to move around for use by artificially intelligent agents and chat-bots. Robots like to be able to consume structured content via API because it's a lot easier and has better relevance than screen scraping and natural language processing unstructured content.