Component Content Management, or CCM, is a term often used to define the class of technologies that can effectively manage small components of content, notably those encoded with XML. The common thread among both early and more recent adopters of CCM technology is the need to manage large content sets that can benefit from single sourcing, reuse, and translation and localization. While early adopters were mainly tied to large government projects, CCM technology is now increasingly used at a wide variety of hardware, software and large platform manufacturers.
CCM technologies typically share several characteristics—a repository for storage of XML-encoded content objects; mechanisms to check-in, check-out, and version the content; workflow to support editorial and publishing operations; and interfaces to connect the CCM technology to editing, content transformation, and publishing tools. More recently, CCM technology has been bolstered by the widespread adoption of XML schemas such as DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) and S1000D.
