Today word-combination "content management system" at all on hearing. The market of similar products grows, but till now in the given area there are no uniform standards, including, and on terminology.

The history of a content management has begun with management of documents in traditional sense of this word - text files. In process of development of concept "document", control systems of documents began to name control systems of a content. Why? It is considered, that it allows to emphasize ability of such systems to operate the information irrespective of the form of its representation, and also to separate the information content from the document-form. However abstractly to operate the information it is impossible - it should be necessarily presented in any form. Trying to operate a content, we inevitably come to management of documents. Control systems of a content, really, "have learned" to divide management of documents (storage, change, etc.) and their representation to the end user. But they all the same operate documents in any form, instead of the information.

The concept "management of a content" originally strongly associated with process of the publication and updating of the information on Web-sites - the technology, allowing to watch its urgency was required. Therefore as a synonym content management often use term Web-content-management. With reference to the organizations operating huge quantity of the information, pertinently to speak already about control systems of the enterprise information resources (enterprise content management, ECM). As a result the term content management has extended: it began to designate management not only the information on a site, but also all isolated and various fragments of the corporate information. There are also other definitions. In encyclopedia Wikipedia the control system of a content names the system applied to the organization and simplification of joint creation of contents.

Creation - granting to authors of convenient and habitual means of creation content.

Management - storage content in uniform repositories. It allows to watch versions of documents, to supervise, who and when them changed to be convinced, that each user can change only that section for which it answers. Besides integration with existing information sources and IT-systems is provided. CMS supports the control over a working stream of documents, i.e. the control over process of their approval. To put it briefly, management of a content includes storage, tracking of versions, the control over access, integration with other information systems and management of a stream of documents.

Publication - automatic accommodation content on the terminal of the user. Corresponding tools automatically "adjust" appearance of page to design of all site.

Representation - the additional functions, allowing to improve the form of data presentation; for example, it is possible to build navigation on structure of a repository.

CMS operate small interconnected units of the information, and in the given context the document gets sense of the hypertext. As CMS operate the information, and the information has a life cycle, that, naturally, these systems should have adequate control facilities a content on each of stages of its life (creation, updating, the publication, transfer to archive, etc.). In this sense CMS it is possible to consider as a part of complex ILM (information lifecycle management).

Among CMS often allocate so-called "skeletons" (content management framework, CMF) - toolkits for creation of system. As it was already spoken, natural expansion CMS became ECM-systems which operate all isolated information of the enterprise, cooperating with other appendices, such as ERP and CRM. Perhaps, the most known manufacturer of ECM-systems - company Documentum. Many companies, including IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Macromedia are engaged in System engineering of management by a content. The organizations Recently have started to appear, trying to unite developers CMS, to create the uniform information environment for potential users of similar systems, to advance and approve uniform standards. First of all, it is associations OSCOM (Open Source Content Management) and CMSWatch.