Difference between a Knowledge Base and a CMS?

[Fred Ridder]

Sylvia Braunstein wrote:

> Anybody heard of Talisma??? They write that they are a Knowledge Base 
> but according to what everybody seem to say here they are a CMS or 
> rather and Enterprise CMS. Anybody looked at it?


Okay, let's try a third attempt at drawing a clear distinction between a CMS 
and a KB.

A CMS is designed to serve as a managed repository for documents and other
electronic content that is created in some other application and simply stored
in the CMS. For the most part, a CMS handles documents and other content 
as opaque objects, although many of them have the ability to build a full-text
search index for many common file types.

A KB is at heart a database. Single-topic articles are typically written and 
formatted composed *within*the*KB*tool* and using predefined forms 
and stored in the KB as "articles" (basically database records). KBs 
generally do have the ability to link to external files, but their primary 
job is managing and providing intelligent access to KB articles. 

If you take another look at the Talisma website, you will see that the 
information that the system's users capture is authored in the tool as 
articles, which makes it a KB rather than a CMS. 
.  
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