Pitfalls in Using CMS When Developing Enterprise Applications

Pitfalls in Using CMS When Developing Enterprise Applications Today,

many

websites

are

built

with

content

management

systems

meant for creating web portals and managing user generated content. Content management systems (CMS) are incorporated with adequate features to handle diverse applications including enterprise application development.

Enterprise

application is software developed intentionally for business application and is commonly complex, scalable, distributed, component-based, and mission-critical.

Enterprise class problems necessitate the maintenance and management of large volumes of sensitive data. An efficient CMS can manage content for millions of websites, within a corporate environment. Even though the system offers benefits such as effortless posting of content, increased usability of website, ease of site design and many more, it is not free of dangers.

Pitfalls of Using CMS for Creating Enterprise Application An enterprise application built with a wrong architecture will ultimately fail. Some of the obvious risks of building an enterprise application using a content management system are: Security: CMS is susceptible to web application vulnerabilities, as they are not designed to manage corporate data securely. It is not possible to obtain industry standard data access and security patterns from your content management system.

While developing an enterprise application, there are possibilities for a security hole to occur. Anyone who discovers this security hole can put the data and the website at risk.

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Inconvenient Upgrades: Developers of CMS applications may come up with upgrades to fix security holes and other bugs. CMS users are forced to upgrade at such situations, even though it may be inconvenient for them.

Risk of Managing Web Redesign and CMS Implementation Simultaneously: Sometimes websites are not designed in concert with best practices for content management. They may lack functionality that can be driven by the CMS, a design that has not accounted for content reuse, and the other advantages of a CMS. Most organizations choose to redesign their website along with CMS implementation. The process is time consuming, causing delays in work flow and scheduled plan. It is better to start with CMS solution and then move to the design phase, after considering the purpose of the website and the features CMS can provide.

Ease-of-use: Sometimes the CMS is too complex to adapt to internal applications and catalyze the work flow. To perform efficiently, the enterprise application should match with the needs of each internal group of users. Simplicity of the system is preferable.

Performance problems: It is often required to evaluate thousands of useless execution paths, before reaching your specific business logic. Performance issues are usually addressed by caching. The method works effectively for content management where information is managed solely by a single application. The solution when applied in an enterprise environment where data is coming from diverse systems starts to break down fast and will produce undesirable results, if not handled properly.

Customizations break the upgrade path. This is one of the potential risks faced by many organizations today. CMS vendors add new things that are not part of the underlying API and change the data schema of content storage. If the customizations

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are not built against the underlying API or CMS’ programming interface, it may break the purpose and meaning of the website, which is quite expensive to fix.

Lack of planning: The performance of a content management system depends on its implementation. To create a successful CMS system, the business goals should be combined with the technical specifications.

Mistakes are ‘Live’: When the redesign of a website is done with CMS software, the changes made will appear "live" on the site. Mistakes that may happen will get reflected instantaneously across the site.

Limitations of CMS Software: When using a CMS to build an enterprise application, the limitations of the software should be taken into account.

Maintenance:

The

complexity

of

enterprise

applications

is

managed

with

appropriate enterprise architectures and software design patterns. Design patterns to address complexity often lack in CMS, because they are unnecessary in the simplistic world of content management. Enterprise software developed without suitable techniques will quickly sludge your project in maintenance costs and yield a brittle application.

Therefore, the selection of a CMS should be done after conducting adequate research and thorough evaluation. It is advisable to obtain the service of a reliable software development team that has proven expertise in enterprise application development.

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