IntroductionThe MCMS or Mobile Content Management System is a type of CMS (Content Management System). It is capable of storing and supplying content along with services to mobile devices like cell phones, PDAs and smart phones. The MCMS can be a discrete system or can exist as a feature, module or an add-on of a bigger CMS that is capable of the multi-channel delivery of content. There are specific and unique constraints on mobile content delivery that include variable device capacity, smaller screen size, limited bandwidth, smaller storage capacity and a relatively weak device processor.
As mobile devices became increasingly sophisticated and ubiquitous, the demand for mobile content management increased considerably. Initially the MCMS technology concentrated on the B2C (business to consumer) cell phone market with games, news, text-messaging, ringtones and other similar content. However since then, the MCM systems have also acquired a root in B2B (business to business) and B2E (business to employee) situations. This allows the companies to provide much more timely content and functionality for business partners and the mobile workforce in an increasingly efficient way. In the year 2008 an estimate put the worldwide revenue generated by mobile content management systems at 8 billion US dollars.
Important featuresThere are three important features of mobile content management systems.
- Capacity of multi-channel content delivery: The capability of multi channel data delivery allows the users to manipulate the central content repository and at the same time delivering the content to mobile phones, desktop web browsers and other similar devices. The content is stored in raw format and you can apply device specific presentation styles to it.
- Special templating system: The conventional web content management systems handle the templates for a few browsers only. However the mobile content management system templates can be adapted to a range of target devices having multiple limitations and capacities. You may use two basic approaches for adapting templates: multi-site and multi-client. The multi-client way makes it possible to view all the versions of a website in the same domain and the templates are displayed based on the device being used by the client for viewing. On the other hand, the multi-site approach presents the mobile website on a single targeted sub-domain.
- Targeted location based delivery content: A targeted content is provided by the location based content delivery to the mobile devices based on their present location. The content may consist of advertisements, directions, maps and information. The most popular location based services are currently being provided by the GPS (Global Positioning System). The navigation systems such as GPS are special systems; however, if you add mobile phone functionality to it, you can get a better exploitation of location aware delivery of content.
