Two recent announcements from Really Strategies and Nstein Technologies highlight the shifting role of content management systems as platforms for developing publications in a world that demands content reusability for targeting multiple markets and user needs. Really Strategies has focused for several years on providing upgraded infrastructure to publishers with custom installations, but has now introduced its RSuite CMS system as a packaged service. RSuite uses back-end technology from Mark Logic to mine structured and unstructured content sources and to make them accessible to RSuite's content management system as publishable XML objects. RSuite in turn makes it easy to assemble these objects into complex documents and to add formatting and metadata that will make them suitable for multiple audiences. On a similar note Nstein's announced Ntelligent Content Mangagement Suite straps Nstein's semantic analysis and search tools onto a content management platform provided by Eurocortex to provide easily repurposed content with rich metadata.

Both of these announcements underscore the rapidly evolving needs of publishers for whom neither traditional CMS solutions nor text mining solutions alone have been adequate to keep up with both the widening array of content sources needed to add value to publications and the need to make those sources highly findable and usable in a wide variety of publishing environments. Publishers are seeking "one-stop" solutions to their publishing infrastructure needs in trying to come with flexible "electronic first" production operations. These two new services are the type of platforms that can allow publishers to modernize their publishing back ends with easily repurposed content and metadata for highly focused audiences. You can thank a new generation of search technologies that focus on creating publishing assets as much as on staples such as relevance and semantic analysis to provide a new approach to developing content that frees publishers from the traditional strictures of database-oriented content management systems.