There are two kinds of CMS (Content Managemen System) solutions on the market; Open Source and Closed proprietary solutions. There’s over 300 to choose from as well. These all break down to basic CMS solutions, Enterprise Portals, Social Networking Systems, and Enterprise Content Management or ECM solutions. Confused yet? We propose that “proprietary systems” may just be a dangerous path to take. Here’s why.
It’s all about “managing content”, usually a mix of audio, text and video. Let’s face it, the Web has reached the tipping point with users and active engagement. No longer is the Web just a marketing channel. It’s your entire corporate presence that enables you to communicate with ALL of your key stakeholders at the same time. That means through the Web, your finance, HR, marketing, sales, operations and administration people are talking to their stakeholders. That’s a lot of content to create and manage.
To do a comparison on the various solutions out there, CMS Watch is the best resource, including a comparison of vendors and their key features. So we won’t go into the ins and outs.
The fact is, no matter the size of your organization, you must be updating your content regularly. Not necessarily daily, but certainly weekly or monthly. This serves multiple ends, from keeping your ranking up in search engines (not just Google) to engaging your audience better.
There are a number of proprietary solutions out there. For the Enterprise the most well-known is probably Vignette, which has been in the market well over ten years. The problems with proprietary solutions however, is that they carry the baggage of many years of upgrades, heavy code and tend to bog down processors and servers. Additionally, they are built on old Web architecture and new features or plug-ins tend to be challenging to deploy on your system, making upgrades expensive and time-consuming. You may also wait longer for upgrades, given proprietary solutions suffer from lack of resources and time to develop them.
Open Source solutions however, benefit from many hundreds of developers tweaking them and sharing their solutions. Upgrades and patches arrive quicker and they tend to be more robust, less of a space and processor hog and deliver more control. Additionally, they are cheaper. You’re not paying for development time, your paying to have the system customized to your needs rather than being forced into a box.
Smaller businesses can leverage the power of WordPress to act as their website with a reasonable degree of creative capability built into the system. At the end of the day, Open Source CMS solutions are more flexible, more robust and less expensive now and in the future. IBM’s CMS solution is built on open source software, Toyota and the Royal Bank of Scotland use Open Source solutions among other notable global names.