Solutions on Hand for "Librarian as CM Leader"

-- Library Journal, 09/15/2005

Solutions on Hand

Hundreds of content management solutions (CMS) exist, offering a wide range of services. Before selecting one, it is crucial to understand your organization's current and future business needs. Otherwise, productivity and growth could be hampered. The right CMS can enhance accessibility to all internal resources, lessen the time required to make site content changes, improve availability to timely information, and accommodate new initiatives.

Every CMS practitioner should have detailed knowledge of the technical and nontechnical requirements before committing to a CMS system. This is accomplished by compiling a comprehensive inventory of business and infrastructure needs. Some of the issues to be considered: how often content needs to be updated; the type and extent of changes required; and whether image, video, and other media files will be used. Does content need to be personalized for the site visitor? Are technical resources (designers, content repositories, applications) available to support content authors and software? Are archiving and audit trails necessary for corporate compliance?

The CMS solution chosen should satisfy as many of the highest priority requirements as possible, addressing content timeliness, site usability, manageable deployment and maintenance costs, and system interoperability.

Large-scale CMS systems on enterprise-wide platforms addressing many functions can cost upwards of $200,000. Documentum, for instance, offers 80 components that address content, processing, repository, and integration services. According to Jason Jacoby, a Modis Inc. placement counselor, most Fortune 500 companies use products on this scale, including Vignette Enterprise Content Management, Verity, and PlumTree.

Those looking for a way to handle straightforward web CMS projects may want to consider a smaller product. The less expensive Microsoft Sharepoint focuses more on web content management. Highly scalable, Microsoft Sharepoint can be initiated for smaller projects. One server license and five client access licenses go for under $6000, but larger installations more typically cost $100,000 and up. Other solutions in this category include FatWire Content Server and Percussion Rhythmyx. Another mid-market product, RedDot Solutions, was recently acquired by Hummingbird Ltd.

Even lower-priced solutions can be found for under $15,000, including the MacroMedia Web Publishing System, and there are a number of open source solutions at no cost, including Joomla, which used to be called Mambo, and Plone.