This International Standard provides requirements for the management of the content used in product life-cycle, software, and service management system documentation. Content management allows an organization to control the storage and retrieval of content objects, track content revisions, maintain a content audit trail, and enable a collaborative environment. Component content management supports the reuse of content objects among deliverables and supports multiple deliverable formats. The standard defines the characteristics of an effective and efficient process through which content is gathered, managed, and published, including the requirements of a system that is supported by an electronic database. Such a database should support documents or topics and content units that may be assembled to produce complete documents for print, electronic output, or content collections published through electronic media. This database is defined as a component content management system (CCMS), as distinct from a document management system. The objective of component content management is to create content objects once and use them through linking mechanisms in multiple output formats including but not limited to documents. Systems conforming to this standard can fulfill business needs for content development and management, especially the need for a single source of authoritative information. The standard includes business case considerations for acquisition of a content management system. Content objects that are unique and are maintained as independent database objects are efficient to review, approve, and update; may be combined to produce multiple deliverables; and are cost-effective to translate. This International Standard is independent of the software tools and markup languages that may be used to manage documentation content, and applies to both printed documentation and on-screen documentation.