Andrej Tozon's blog

This is the introductory post about Anthology, an ongoing content management project, which I’ve been mentioning in some of my previous posts. There is a lot to write about Anthology, so let me cover the basics first. More specific and detailed information will follow in the next posts.

Anthology was conceived as a Content Management System [CMS], which really wasn’t a very appropriate title, since the term CMS is still widely used only in the context of web content management solutions. It’s true that Anthology can be used for managing web content, but it is much more than that. It is also a Document Management System [DMS], your personal photo album, information aggregator or your CD/DVD collection catalogue, to name just a few basic scenarios. The abilities like handling any type of electronic content, preserving the timeline with full history of changes, extending the system with user-defined types of content, powerful, customized searching, intelligent content recognition and analysis, advanced classification and information cataloguing, combined with ‘knowing the user’, make Anthology a special environment – Intelligent Content Environment.

Anthology is user-friendly information system for storing and managing any type of electronic content, putting the user in a total control of the whole content lifecycle: capturing existing data or creating your own document, storing it in a reliable storage, allowing further changes with full versioning support, including linking and interacting with other documents, publishing on the internet or the other media. For example, when used as a document management system, Anthology will help you manage your documents, in a multi-user, workflow-driven environment, from the very first draft, to final publishing, or, if necessary, termination.

What exactly is ‘Content’?

With Anthology, every piece of electronic data is ‘a content’. Microsoft Office documents, text files, images, web pages, Xml, … Different formats, but the information, written in these files carry some important value to us. Anthology offers a common storage for any type of electronic content, treating all types of content the same way. Because of this, I usually refer to Anthology content as ‘Anthology document’ or just plain ‘Document’, instead of ‘Content’. I’ll be using these terms interchangeably in my posts.

I’ll end this first post with slightly more technical information: Anthology is available as a desktop application or a web portal. Both use the same storage options and because they are built on the same code base, they share all common features and functionality. However, at this moment, the desktop part is more suitable for content capturing and system administration, and the portal is oriented more towards content delivery. The whole solution is built from the ground up in .NET Framework 2.0, using the SQL Server 2005 for storage.

Read more about its modular and expandable design, Anthology Content Management Foundation, including all other features and details, in the forthcoming posts.

There is currently more information available on these pages (www.anthology-on.net, in Slovenian language only and a bit outdated). The site will be updated in the near future.