If an organisation has an existing CMS, it’s “ways of doing things” will unavoidably influence ways of thinking, and expectations.

The new CMS will most likely work very differently. At the end of the day, you want to keep the best of the old, but take the opportunity to find new ways where they will work better.

Keep an open mind – quite often people come in with ideas based on old ways of doing things. Those with an open mind can take advantage and reap the benefits of the latest developments.

Look for the best-fit solution for the next three years. Investing effort into something which will only meet your requirements for a year or so will have a long-term detrimental impact.

The ongoing running costs will always outweigh the initial investment. Make sure the system delivers on the day-to-day tasks as well as the initial setup scenarios.

Our experience of various CMSs is that OSS can be excellent for simple promotional sites, but once you get into complex environments and commercial projects then there is still a material gap in the functionality that they deliver.

I’ve got a house and an office full of computers, Mac, PC, Linux (I use 3 different Linux distros on servers, laptops, appliances). I’ve invested thousands of hours in applications that run on them. I carry no water for folks trying to sell you an OS or application. I love and use OSS daily.

That said, Bain’s comments smack of cant. First, the old saw “MS Windows is insecure”: I’m no fan at all of Windows (really, really hate the experience of using it), but it’s just as easy to run an insecure Linux install as it is to run an insecure Windows install. Both of them come not terribly secure right out of the virtual box. Getting any OS securely installed, provisioned and updated requires expertise, laser-like focus, experience, best practices and lots and lots of work and time.

Anticipating Bain’s comment on this thought ‘It’s not so hard to secure Linux’; yes it is. It’s hard to secure ANYTHING, particularly production-grade applications. And it does take lots of time on any OS.

The other comment: “open source (OSS) CMS’s are destined to prevail sooner or later” seems equally deluded on its face.

It’s a false assumption that commercial apps offer no value over open-source apps. Hey, let me know when GIMP knocks Photoshop out of the market, OK?

It’s a false assumption that the usability of open-source community projects designed for the whims of geeks will be well-managed for average business users who shouldn’t have to care whether the software is open-source or not in order to get through their day. Commercial vendors have more invested in making software work for business than for geeks (though it’s clear that most commercial CMS vendors have not done a great job at this)

It’s a false assumption that there is a single kind of open-source CMS software that will win out over commercial offerings. Certainly server-side-scripted open-source offerings like Mambo/Joomla, Drupal, etc. have a great future ahead for some uses, but they can’t, simply can’t replace an enterprise-class CMS at the level of Vignette, Interwoven, et al. I don’t see an open-source enterprise-class WCMS that’s ready to step in here, and I’ve looked. Hard. Yes, I’ve had commercially-supported OSS CMS vendors in for demos. No, they’re not ready for our needs yet. When is this “sooner or later” you’re talking about going to happen?

Finally you ask, “Damn! Why are the CMS “analysts” so stupid?”. I find this most interesting of all. In my mind, stupid+analyst comes from waving around a bunch of talking points unsupported by facts or data – much as you’ve done in your post. I find CMS Watch quite insightful and entertaining. May not be your cuppa tea, but they’re far from stupid.

DC

You are, of course, correct. Whether a CMS is open source or not bears no relation to its relative usability.

And of course, it must be said that open source solutions are *not* inherently superior in terms of usability (in fact to suggest so is quite a good indicator of how “clueless” one is). I’ll even go out on a limb and say they are typically less usable, by and large.

Great list James, if only more people would follow your guidance when selecting a CMS.

http://www.slideshare.net/jamesr/opensource-web-cms-the-right-question-audio-presentation/

OSS CMS’s shall ultimately prevail over proprietary CMS’s. If you do not understand that by now, then you are stupid.

If you do not understand the OSS Revolution by now, then you are just as clueless as Tony Byrne of CMSwatch.com. Damn! Why are the CMS “analysts” so stupid?

–Paul Bain
paulbain@pobox.com

Regardless of the licensing model: if you are going to have decentralised authors using the CMS, then the usability and simplicity of the solution is paramount.

Of course, if you are choosing an open-source solution, the evaluation process will be different than when selecting a commercial solution.

Nonetheless, there needs to be a way of evaluating the usability. Pick one or more of the options above, or find a different way!

A second factor is information security. MS Windows is insecure, and you should avoid any CMS that runs exclusively on MS Windows and not also on Linux or OpenBSD.

– Paul Bain

That’s why I recommend that first-time purchasers of a CMS get the smallest, simplest, cheapest solution that meets their immediate needs.

They should then plan to outgrow the solution within 3(-ish) years. If they haven’t outgrown it, they either haven’t grown (and learned) or they tried to by too much.

That way, the second time around, they can learn from their experiences with the first CMS, and can be much more confident about many issues, including CMS usability.

It also means, to my mind, that you don’t want to customise the CMS at the outset of the project, before you’ve understood how it’s going to work in pratice.

Then you get a clear picture of what does and doesn’t work and the extra features you need (and the extraneous ones).

On this basis I’ve found that wen implementing a replacement system, the best approach is to start by uncovering what users of the existing system really think.

This can be hard, we all develop habits designed to get around limitations – however where it is possible to observe and identify these suboptimal workarounds they lead directly into the usability experience people would like to have but cannot under the current system.

Note also that sometimes usability is not the goal. Witness the creation of the typewriter, which still curses us with the QWERTY keyboard of today.

Sometimes systems are designed to slow down users, add barriers to processes and force conscious reflection before publishing. This is not always a bad thing IMHO.