E-Handbook: New rules for WCM tools enhance the search experience Article 1 of 3

WCM tools transform web content into digital experiences

Adopting web content management tools used to be relatively simple: Find a web platform and build a tech stack with tools that could handle the rich media your organization wanted to post for viewers who were using laptops and desktops.

Today's WCM tools are platforms that dynamically render pages to many different devices -- the desktop-laptop population taking a back seat to phones and tablets. They must sift through data lakes of text, words and images to find the right snippet a reader, customer or employee seeks and produce it in a readable form in a fraction of a second.

Thankfully, assistive technologies like voice, object and sound recognition can help create what WCM makes -- no longer webpages in a browser, but rather digital experiences (DX), which include the browser and overflow into apps and other viewing platforms. Today's compute power and cheap cloud storage can pull all that off. Assistive technologies coupled with AI automation and smarter search can create the DX we could only dream about just a few years ago.

This handbook on WCM tools delves into these technologies and how they work in concert to create cutting-edge DX. While DX may seem like a passive thing we consume, it's not. It's an enabler of customer journeys and e-commerce, manufacturing paths and other more lofty goals.

None of that can work without better AI-powered search that can tap into hitherto impossible-to-catalog image and video content to augment the text, so we also bring you a dispatch from that technology frontier.