Any updates must pass through commissioning, creation and one or more predefined signoff steps before the system will publish it.
Many sites are operated by a team distributed between offices, companies or even countries. The CMS could notify a participant by email or by SMS. Because all the major tools have a web interface, participants can perform their task and view its results from anywhere with web access.
You can specify dates and times for the content to go live and be archived or removed. You can also impose review dates to ensure that information is not simply left on the site to rot until a new product replaces it.
When you have a CMS, you suddenly have a tremendous advantage in the time it takes to react to market intelligence. You can write, edit and publish updates in a matter of minutes without suffering from "WebMaster Bottleneck".
Alternatively, you take the decision that the visual design isn't working. Because your CMS is maintaining the site's structure, content and visual presentation in separate layers, updateing the aesthetics of your site couldnt be easier as you only have the CSS to contend with.
Similarly, you can restructure a site, merging and splitting areas, without substantial manual intervention, as this layer is also maintained separately.
By automating the building of pages on your site, you will cut substantial sums from the site's maintenance costs.
At its simplest, this means that you know, and can control, what content is supposed to be live today, what is sitting ready to go live next week, and what is being prepared by your team for the week after, and keep them separate on an piece-by-piece basis.
Many sites are now pulling content from, and pushing content to, systems run by other organisations, best handled by a CMS. At its simplest, this will allow you to pull headlines and articles from a relevant news site, or gain an income stream by syndicating your own material to other sites & customers.
Publishing the wrong price or availability information on your site can bring strongly negative PR and class-action lawsuits, by systemising the publishing of your content through automated workflows, you can ensure that all content is checked and signed off before it is publicly exposed.