Acquisition is the collection phase of assets for a CMS. Assets can be text files, images, audio or video files, or animations including Flash files. They can be XML documents coming from other servers, like RSS news feeds and Web Services.

During acquisition all assets need to be tagged and then stored in the data repository (in the database or file system or both). Digital Rights Management (DRM?) establishes the licensing requirements for all assets. Modern assets may be accompanied by Metadata with authorship, terms of use, etc. A sophisticated CMS helps to manage this metadata.

The CMSML Feature List has the following quantifiable facets under Acquisition:

• Support for native filetypes.
• Multiple (block) file transfers, e.g., by secure FTP?.
• Conversion utilities (e.g., Word sections to XML "chunks")
• Rights management (detecting terms of use)
• Mandatory Metadata tagging (enforcement of semantics and structure)
• Ontology support, e.g., Dublin Core.
• Automatic Metadata extraction
• Auto Categorization