A component content management system (CCMS) stores and manages content as small, reusable components rather than as whole documents or pages. A component can be a single sentence, a warning, a procedure, an image, or an entire topic. Each component is stored once and assembled into different documents and output formats, so a change made in one place appears everywhere the component is used.
CCMSs are common in technical documentation, especially for large documentation sets, multiple product versions, and content translated into many languages. Many of them work with structured content in XML, often based on the DITA standard.
ClickHelp is a help authoring tool rather than a CCMS, but it handles the main task a CCMS is used for: content reuse. Topic-based authoring, snippets, variables, and conditional content let you write once and publish from a single source to multiple formats.
