Selecting a Web CMS for your company

I am not going to patronize you by telling you what a CMS is. You know that already which is why you landed on this page. The challenge (often) is finding a good one for your business. By now you are trolling the internet in search for answers and guidance on where to start with a good CMS. Yes, you guessed it. It ain’t easy.

The first thing you need to think about is getting a wish list together. My list spawned through R&D and experience with bespoke CMS builds I conceived. By all means, please do your own research and come up with your own list, although this one is not a bad one to start with.

Web CMS features wish list

  • Content access rights
  • Content approval
  • Content templates
  • Technical transparency
  • Content ownership
  • Content accessibility
  • Content creation
  • Content management
  • Content publishing
  • Content scheduling
  • Time sensitive opportunities
  • Logs of user access
  • Audit trials
  • Version control
  • Presentation consistency
  • Brand integrity
  • Workflow processes
  • Web standards management (accessibility)
  • Auto site map generation
  • XML sitemap generation
  • Newsletters
  • Calendar of events
  • Rich text editor with HTML support
  • Spell checker link checker
  • SEO compliant
  • Scalability
  • Adaptability
  • XML integration
  • XSL transformations
  • Cascading Stylesheets
  • Microsoft word integration and content cleanup
  • Media library with ”alt” text options
  • Form creation
  • Search and advanced search
  • Site map generation
  • User reporting
  • User management
  • Access rights
  • Multi server publishing
  • Multiple publishing formats
  • Dashboard
  • Wizard based content management
  • Affiliate marketing management
  • Advertising management
  • Ad hoc modifications
  • Banner management
  • Blogs
  • Public forums
  • Drag n Drop content
  • Image resizing
  • Undo
  • UI levels
  • Standard contend and keywords bank
  • Content syndication (RSS)
  • URL rewriting
  • Polls
  • Surveys
  • Sandbox
  • Multiple level user membership areas

Build considerations

  • Ease of deployment
  • Minimal training
  • Managing multiple websites from a single licence
  • Documented information architecture
  • Template creation
  • Content migration tools
  • Developer forums

OK, my wish list was massive. Your requirements may be similar, less or even more. A lot of CMS platforms have all of the above functionality out of the box.  Others may need plugins or custom builds. As you can probably ascertain, I was looking for an enterprise CMS solution. These tend to be the most expensive types of CMS.

Costs

If like me, you were looking for an enterprise CMS, a very important consideration is your license cost. An evaluation of the following items should be considered necessary:

  • Multiple hosting servers (authoring, publishing, backup, database, additional web farms)
  • Should cover multiple websites on the same host including sub domains / microsites
  • Should cover unlimited number of articles or web pages published
  • Should cover multiple processors on the hosting machines.
  • Should cover multiple database connections.
  • Should cover a sufficient amount of editors for the CMS
  • Should include multiple installations of the software.

I cannot emphasize enough on the need for putting time and effort into researching and identifying the right CMS for your needs. Your chosen CMS will eventually become an important part of your business operations. You need to make a good choice. I use the word “good” in the context that not every decision is the best one. Business needs change constantly, hence the need for better more robust tools in a constantly changing environment.

Doing the research

OK, enough of the theatrics. Let’s get down to how you will find the information you need. You will find in your research that search engines will render results for both closed source and open source CMS almost equally. My perception is that the big players in the web world have established authority via closed source platform applications, hence glorifying closed source software suppliers. Open source solutions are also in abundance, partly because everyone and anyone can easily get their hands on them but mostly because they are free. In Web 2.0 context, this is known as the long tail.

A good resource in my opinion to get an overview of the products on the market is cmswatch.com and more specifically their vendor list. They do ask you to pay a whopping $975 for one of their reports that gives you a low down on all of the 42 Web CMS providers they cover, but I reckon, with a combination of common sense and Google, you should be able to find answers to all your questions.

Another resource is cmswire.com. It is more of a blog than anything but the content is up the date and right on the money most of the time. You may however find it tiresome to go over all their posts to find answers to your specific queries (if you have any).

If all else fails and you are still in a dilemma about which CMS is right for your business, float an RFP (request for proposal) document to your shortlist of suppliers. Let them do the hard work to try to win your business, you call the shots. I came across a good presentation on building an RFP that you may find useful. There is another tedious excersize of evaluating all the proposals you recieve by doing an evaluation matrix. A good overview of how to contruct your evaluation matrix can be found at positive-way.com.

I’d like to take this opportunity to list down a few of my favourite content management systems:

Established market players:

Open source players:

In conclusion

I would be foolish to assume that my readers are from small, mediocre or large organizations with similar requirements for their CMS. In reality, every business has its unique requirements for its web strategy, which inadvertently does impact decisions. You will find in certain circumstances that even a free CMS fulfils all your needs. This very blog is created on WordPress which is an open source blogging application that a lot of people have customized to work as a fully fledged Web CMS.  You can be certain that all the hard work and time you put into indentifying a CMS that ticks all the boxes will be a worthwhile investment.

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Open source vs closed source

I would like you to read this with an open mind. This is apparently quite a sensitive subject for some, for others – a declaration of war. I have been in the software development industry long enough to know that you can’t win an argument no matter which camp you support. I myself am from the closed source camp; therefore, my views may tilt slightly towards Microsoft, Oracle, Adobe and the likes.

So where do we start? Firstly, you need to ask yourself the following questions.

1.    What sort of technical talent do you already employ within the organization?
2.    What platforms are current systems developed on?
3.    Is there a large user base and means of acquiring support for more technical issues?
4.    How much are you willing to spend? *

*Please be aware that both platforms can end up costing the same. This usually refers to technology resources and developers required to customize applications to meet business requirements. This is explained briefly below.

Technology decision makers in general need to consider future prospects, stability, integration with other systems, expandability and cost effectiveness to make an educated decision. Having a strong technical team is directly proportional to the success of your business (duh).  A lot of things are predicated upon the faith you have in your top tech wonks. I put it this way because “wonks” don’t all believe in open source; nor do all believe in MSFT and more mainstream technologies. Tech people are by nature usually egotistical about these sorts of decisions. The main consideration is not necessarily the technical path — but more: do you trust your techies? Because either way you go, you can have the right applications and still fail.

If you work for a large organization, chances are, you already have the talent you need in either platform yet the decision still remains an important one as it affects the issues mentioned above. If you are in a smaller organization or have a clean slate, your decision may be easier to make.

It is also important to mention the challenges you might face when hiring developers for your chosen platform. Closed source developers can be found a dime a dozen and are cost effective resource-wise. The biggest challenge I faced was hiring open source developers. Since I predominantly worked in the web arena, I was looking for skills in LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) and Ruby on rails etc, for an intranet project. That turned out to be a major disaster as open source developers are as abundant as monkeys in the arctic. We had to ditch the whole open source idea and choose .Net and Cold fusion.  As it also concerns cost (cap-ex type cost) differences, perhaps MSFT/Oracle solutions can trend higher but, oftentimes you can sleep better at night because you’re going through a more established corporate track with strong lines of customer support.

No matter how much research you do on this and how many brains you pick, you will always find advantages and disadvantages in both platforms.

Here is a comparison that I broadly agree with.

Feature Opens Source CMS Closed Source
Initial product buy price “free” Licence Price
Subscription “free” Subscription Price
Project Implementation Services Relatively higher cost , sometimes unpredictable because of poor documentation. Lower and predicable
Documentation Fragmented, less than complete, Comprehensive, relatively much easier to use
Out of Box features Extensive but harder to discover Clearly defined and extensive
Training ramp up Longer, needs a research approach Shorter
Deployment time Longer Shorter
Feature Set Extensive range of plug ins and product extensions available from the community in various stages of release Integrated product feature set that is tested within an integrated product development and release structure
Ongoing Support Will need someone with  technical expertise Can be technical free i.e. just used by publishers etc

Response to bugs

Feed into open source community and wait for a response Prescribed ticketing system with escalation procedures
Responsiveness to market needs Community needs to decide whether to do something need then do it. Commercially driven with defined release schedule
Likely To suit Organisation with tighter budget, longer timescale and in-house technical staff who wish to get ‘into’ the CMS Commercial organisation with tighter timescale.
Ease of Use Adequate Very refined and mature

I found this comparison online somewhere and am unable to give the source at the current time. Apologies to the author.

Depending on your requirements, you may go for open source and spend on development resources or closed source and spend on license costs and support level agreements with some cost saving on developers. May the force be with you.

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