Over the past 8 years I’ve managed around a half dozen enterprise level CMS’s for various companies and universities. I’ve come to a couple of conclusions - none of them are perfect and cost is not a measure of quality.
I worked for the better part of a year and a half with a system that managed upwards of 75,000 documents and the process for choosing the CMS took over a year just to evaluate and push through. We had around 6 or so “admin” users who took care of the editors, managers, etc. and upwards of 200 or so that made edits on a semi-regular basis. This was serious enterprise content management.
I don’t want to mention products specifically; I’d rather keep this generic. The process of choosing a CMS can be extremely difficult and time consuming. The marketplace is extremely crowded and it’s very hard to find unbiased information about them. CMSMatrix is a great way to learn about some, but it doesn’t really tell you where the cream of the crop is.
You must decide what features are most important to you, such as workflow, migration, platform, language or scalability. Cost can also be an important piece of the puzzle, but let’s save that for the latter half of this write-up. Once you have prioritized your features, it’s time to go out and hunt down a list of 20 or so products that you think could be a candidate.
Now, our CMS that runs downtowncartel.com is Wordpress. It can sometimes be referred to as a “blogging platform”, but in reality it is a system that manages our content in blog-form. Wordpress is at the exact opposite end of the spectrum as the system I mentioned previously.
The larger system cost nearly the salary of two employees while Wordpress was absolutely free. They are both quality products and cost should not be looked at when deciding which CMS is right for your organization.
If you would like for me to talk about some of the things that I’ve learned over the past few years leave a comment below and I’ll be sure to cover it in the next part of this series.
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