A CMS may support the following features:
- Identification of all key users and their content management roles.
- The ability to assign roles and responsibilities to different content categories or types.
- Definition of workflow tasks for collaborative creation, often coupled with event messaging so that content managers are alerted to changes in content. (For example, a content creator submits a story, which is published only after the copy editor revises it and the editor-in-chief approves it.)
- The ability to track and manage multiple versions of a single instance of content.
- The ability to capture content (e.g., scanning).
- The ability to publish the content to a repository to support access to the content. (Increasingly, the repository is an inherent part of the system, and incorporates enterprise search and retrieval.)
- Separation of presentation and content so material can be refactored for new uses. (E.g., use the same base content in different ways for desktop browsers, mobile browsers, and print output.)