Content Management Systems are tools dedicated to the organisation and publication of  text and  information in different formats and from different sources, as well as multimedia elements.
Publishing is not limited simply to textual information but also encompasses all other media used to publish a message: images, sounds, video clips etc...with their specific publishing systems.

The cost,

The cost of these solutions is a central factor in the decision to implement them. The objective of such a system is to publish more content, more rapidly whilst at the same time reducing the ressources (staff and finance) dedicated to it.
As such, it is imperative to take into account the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership), which encompasses all the costs related to a solution: not only software licences but also maintenance, servers, IT staff etc....

The complexity,

A major objective of a content management solution is simplification: it aims to enable non-specialist staff to modify and publish content or manage web publications, without specialist help.  It must therefore be accessible and within the reach of average IT users.

Over and above the simplification, one must ensure that the system does not encourage the implementation of a “parallel’” process to publish content online.

Integration,

The content management solution must also integrate naturally with the tools available to users to gather existing content and must be able to exchange information with exisiting company databases

The management of diverse content over time,

It is important to anticipate that once content has been put online, it has or can have a defined lifetime. It is necessary to manage the time over which different content is published.

Example

For instance, in the case of a promotional offer, which is on the web or on an e-commerce site, the pages containing the offer must no longer be present once the offer has expired.
Conversely, it is vital to promote the offer during the entire marketing campaign with an appropriate media plan. A content management solution can manage this.