For companies operating with multiple brands or brands with a global presence, content operations can get complicated, quickly. To keep things running smoothly, teams need a way to easily share global content, while simultaneously keeping boundaries and roles well-defined for distinct brands and regions.

Companies often resolve this challenge by breaking their content operations into different silos. Different teams handle their assigned areas, often relying on different technologies for each region, team, or brand. While this seems like a reasonable option, it can result in a lack of knowledge sharing between brands and teams, an inability to reuse content across the organization, and less than optimal content operations at scale.

Collections in Kontent.ai offer a solution. By defining clear boundaries for content within a single project, Collections help businesses organize their content and their people at scale. The benefit? Breaking down organizational silos, instead of enforcing them. 

What are Collections in Kontent.ai?

Collections are a flexible way to define boundaries for your content. Kontent.ai projects can have as many Collections as needed, and companies are free to set up their Collections in the best way for their business. 

A company might want to have a different Collection for each independent region, plus a single Collection for global content. Or they might want to separate different departments into their own Collections. Collections can even be set up for channel-specific content. No matter how an organization needs to split up their content, they can achieve it with Collections.

Users can then be assigned different roles for different Collections. This helps keep roles clear and reduces the chance of someone editing content they’re not supposed to work with.

Organizing content at scale

In Kontent, each content item belongs to a single Collection. This simple organizational principle turns into a powerful instrument for maintaining the integrity of content operations as your quantity of content increases.

Since each content item belongs to a single Collection, Collections become a powerful way to search, organize, and filter content. For brands with massive libraries, chunking content into appropriately defined Collections significantly speeds up the time it takes to find the right piece of content.

Potential ways to divide content using Collections

• By team, business unit, or division 
• By region or market
• By channel, device, or experience
• By campaign or initiative

Kontent also gives users the ability to save specific combinations of filters, making it even easier to narrow down the search for a specific article. For a US-based content manager working for a global company with lots of content specific to individual regions, being able to see all US-relevant content with just one click is a major time-saver.

Collections allow companies to organize content according to their various teams, initiatives, or brands, without requiring any of those divisions to use a separate content solution.

Organizing people at scale

Organizations with a global presence, companies with multiple brands, or institutions with independent departments have many people involved in their content operations.

•  A central marketing team responsible for global content, with regional marketing teams creating content for local markets. 
• A university with one team in charge of school-wide content and separate departments each with their own subject matter experts contributing other content.
• A multi-brand organization where each brand has their own team creating content.

In each of these cases, different people require different levels of access to different types of content. Collections solve this problem by allowing users to have different roles and permissions for different Collections.

Looking at the example of a university, a professor might be a Contributor for their department-specific Collection. But they could also be a Reviewer for the global Collection, which would give them read-only permission for global content.

For a company with multiple regional offices with different content for each region, a similar scenario could play out. A US-based editor might have the Editor-in-Chief role for their US Collection, and the External Contributor role for other Collections.

Assigning different roles for different Collections can help solve the problem of content governance at scale, by carefully defining who is in charge of what content. Having roles based on Collections also simplifies the onboarding process for new hires, since it removes the fear of inexperienced employees accidentally altering content they shouldn’t have access to. 

Removing organizational silos 

With Collections, complex organizations no longer need to rely on multiple content solutions to meet their content needs. Collections help companies manage the complexities of content governance and content management within a single solution.

An advantage of using a single content solution is the ability to share content and content models across an organization. Since content models, assets, and configurations in Kontent can be used across different Collections, it become easier to maintain consistency across the organization and speed up time-to-market. And by keeping all content within Kontent, organizations can get a full overview of their content operations in a single platform.

With the help of Collections, companies and institutions with large or complex content operations can tackle the challenges of organization and governance. For more information on how Collections can benefit your organization, schedule a demo with a Kontent expert today.