The OpenEngagement CMS ships with no content, other than one DMS Area and one KMS Area. It does, however, include several defined content types. Users must add content themselves, either through the web browser, Quick Upload or Go-Between. The Quick Upload, though, can only create File, Engagement and Image objects and the Go-Between can only create Engagement objects, which requires the Sections in which they will appear to have already been created using a web browser interface.

To use the DMS, firms must have at least one DMS Area. Firms that wish may create multiple DMS Areas within the CMS root and/or multiple sub-Areas within any other DMS Area. Areas are themselves very simple. As with Sections, they have no workflow states and are used only for site organization and as a location to assign local roles.

Entities may represent the entities of internal or external audits. They may represent client companies of the firm, or departments within a company.

Entities have names, short names, and numbers. The Entity names do not need to be unique but Entity numbers must be unique site wide. Entity names and Entity short names can have all characters except ` * “ \ and ?. Entity numbers must be alphanumeric. The short names will always be in capital letters.

The short name can be either set by the user, or automatically created by the OpenEngagement DMS. If it is created automatically, it will be given the first ten characters of the Entity name in upper case.

The navigation portlet shows the Entity name, but the table views in the Documents tabs show the Entity short name.

Entities may be created within Entities any number of levels deep, and so some Entities may actually represent groups of Entities. It is not necessary that any given Entity contain any Sections, so some Entities may simply contain sub-Entities and no Sections, and therefore no Documents. Other Entities may contain both Sections, and so Documents, as well as sub-Entities. 

Sections, like Areas, are used primarily for organization and for the assigning of local roles. Like Areas, Sections do not have any states. Sections are used to contain Documents.

It is possible to specify in the OpenEngagement configuration that Sections be automatically created in each Entity as the Entities are created. This is recommended as it allows sites to maintain a consistent organization across all Entities.

Pages are used for entering content directly within the OpenEngagement DMS, though it is also possible to upload text to a Page object. Users can use a WYSIWYG editor to edit the Page objects, so can use bold, underline, sub scripts, super scripts, different text and background colours, tables and so on. It is also possible to insert URLs and images.

Files are used to save content that is not appropriate for Page, Image or Engagement objects. Plain text should generally be kept in Page objects, though users may wish to keep Word documents in File objects. Images should be kept in Image objects, and Working Papers client files should be kept in Engagement objects. File objects may contain any type of file.

A Calendar X is a calendar, used for tracking and displaying Events. The page viewed when hitting the Calendar link on the top navigation bar (with the Home, Calendar, My Workspace, News and Help links) is an instance of a Calendar X object. Most sites should require only this one Calendar X object, and users are not encouraged to create additional calendars, though this is possible.

Events are visible on the small calendar found on the right side of the home page, and on the large calendar, accessed from the Calendar link on the top navigation. Events, though, must be Published to be viewable on these calendars. There are no email or other notifications associated with events; they are simply for display on the calendars. Future versions of the OpenEngagement DMS will create events related to the schedules of Engagements, such as due dates and lock-down dates.

Smart Folders allow users to create saved searches, which may be used to repeatedly search for a certain set of documents or to repeatedly generate a report. Smart Folders may, as well, be nested within other Smart Folders, refining the search results at each level. In this way, Smart Folders may be viewed as a means to create alternative site hierarchies. For example, a site may use a series of Areas and nested sub-Areas to organize the Entities in a certain way, say, by region. But the site may also use Smart Folders to organize the Entities in other ways, for example by corporate type.

Keywords can be a powerful tool to build Smart Folders. For example, if every Entity has either the keyword public or the keyword private assigned, it is easy to define Smart Folders to list all the public and private Entities. Or, if every Engagement included a keyword indicating the industry, it would be easy to create a Smart Folder listing all Engagements for any given industry.

Smart Folders may only be created within the CMS root and can not be created within a DMS or KMS Area.