What does a web CMS do?
Categorised under: Content management
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:
| Capability | Obtain in the CMS? |
|---|---|
| Authoring and publishing web pages | Yes, definitely |
| Multimedia content | Yes, if simple needs (no streaming) |
| Personalisation | Yes, depending on specific needs |
| Online forms | Yes, if simple |
| Online calendar | Yes, if simple |
| Blogs | Maybe, maybe not |
| Search | No, CMS only provides very basic search |
| Collaboration tools | No, obtain separately |
| Wikis | No, obtain separately |
| Web 2.0 functionality | No, obtain separately |
| Mailing lists | No, obtain separately |
| E-commerce functionality | No, probably not |
| Corporate document/records management | No, whole market of its own |
| Digital asset management (DAM) | No, obtain separately |
| Usage statistics | No, obtain 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.
James Robertson is the Managing Director of 