CMS Selection

CMS Selection! Not an Easy Task

By Savan Patel

The content management market has grown up in recent years, with the availability of market like open source and software as a service. As available product is more, selection is really tough task to do. When any organization selects CMS for their business problem that CMS must be able to fulfill their future problem also. But in most cases CMS fail due to so and so reason, and unwillingly organization has to migrate for the second one.

Through this article I want to highlight the main point about selection is that, there is no fix plan for selection of CMS because content management is a process rather than a product. In this article I have given information about each type of CMS So you can easily pick the right one for your organization according to your requirement.

Why you need content management system?

This is the primary thing you have to take care before selection process. I will not go in depth, but here some advantages of CMS listed below:

• Speed and ease of content updates.

• Content stays timely.

• Permission-based publishing.

• Automatic link maintenance.

• Version-control.

• Work flow and staffing.

Types of CMS

I have put CMS in 4 major categories.

• Homegrown / custom • Open source • Commercial • Software as a Service

Home grown / Custom CMS On the first look requirement based CMS seems to be a nice choice. After all it is the best way to gather all the requirements and then sit down with developers to make CMS, exactly as per your organization need. But as the market grows scenario changed, commercial vendors offering more functionality in CMS that can be customized to all most any organization.

Disadvantages: 1. When organization requirement change, custom CMS needs up gradation.

2. Due to non availability of original developers you cannot easily upgrade your CMS 3. To build CMS from scratch when requirement change, requires lots of time and investment of money.

It can decrease your Return of Investment.

Open source: As custom CMS has its own unique usefulness but only in limited situations, the popularity of open source makes its own place in developer's mind. As the name implies coding of open source is freely available as well as ready for customization. There is no doubt that this CMS offers some very significant advantages:

1. Source code either available free or at very low license fee.

2. Customers have option for further customization and can integrate other programs with CMS 3. There is no need for product demo in open source, means what you see is what you gain, no hidden product configuration.

Disadvantages:

1. Lack of support: As all the support comes from the community not from any vendor. It means that when you need support for any problem, that support will be based on specific nature of the community and time when that problem arises.

2. It isn't free: Open source CMS depends on design, implementation, maintenance, hosting and many other factors, which require investment. Open source CMS mainly based on templates, which should be customized for each and every organization, requires more development time for designers. Due to large development community, open source product upgrades and patched frequently then installed solutions.

3. Security: As code of open source is widely available on net, sites made using CMS has higher risk to be hacked easily.

4. Not have enough functionality: Most of the CMS doesn't have all the functionality as per your organization needs or might not be in your required format.

Commercial: Commercial CMS is built as per your need and implemented faster than open source. Documentation and training in commercial CMS is better than open source. Commercial CMS is more secured and user friendly compare to open source as it's built as per your requirement. In commercial CMS, you can get better support than open source.

One reason not to accept commercial CMS is its prize, small and medium scale business can't afford it due to its higher license fee. Changes and up gradation in CMS required additional cost to pay.

Software as a Service The Primary feature is to provide application as a service via the internet. Because these applications are hosted on vendors' server so there is no need for installation at clients' computer. Moreover its' reduces the need to purchase and maintain the hardware.

Cost and maintenance are the main factors to use Software as a Service in small and medium scale business. Small and medium size businesses do not have IT departments or can't afford much IT expenses.

envisage CMS is a fully feature packed CMS, designed to be a true WYSIWYG website editor.

The content management software is accessed via any browser, wherever you are in the world, allowing you to manage your website with no technical knowledge of HTML or any other languages.

For more info visit : www.envisagecms.co.uk