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What does a web CMS do?

In a lot of the work that I'm doing at the moment, I'm seeing very ambitious goals for content management system (CMS) projects. Bundled up in the project are many different capabilities, beyond just page publishing functionality.

This is causing a lot of problems. Organisations are going out to market looking for too much, not understanding what CMS products are best designed to do. This leads to a lot of disappointment, as well as blown out budgets.

So I thought it might be useful to post a quick summary table listing what a CMS does, and what should be obtained and implemented separately:

In practice, there are three reasons why you would get something separately from the CMS:

• CMS doesn't do it
• it may be a module, but could be obtained separately
• there is a whole other marketplace of tools in the required space

Note of course that the capabilities of CMS products vary widely, and many have various "modules" that can offer some of the functionality listed above. I would still argue that this isn't core functionality for a CMS, so I would always think twice.

Posted by jamesr on September 17, 2007 05:04 PM
Categories: Content management