Choosing a content management system (CMS) is not just about finding the product with the right functionality. It’s also about dealing with a vendor who can support your needs for the lifetime of the solution.

You need to be confident that there will be more than just help-desk support – the vendor should offer regular (trouble-free) product upgrades, a clear development plan, and good mechanisms for handling the needs of each CMS customer.

The challenge is that many vendors are great at code development, but poor at product management. While they are small this doesn’t matter, but as they grow in scale, customers start to feel the pinch.

This briefing explores the way most CMS vendors have evolved, what this means for the way they work, and what you should be looking for when purchasing a solution.

Evolution of vendors

Most CMS vendors start off as web development or web design agencies, custom-creating websites for their clients. Over time, customers increasingly demand the ability to maintain their own sites, and a variety of simple editing interfaces are developed on a case-by-case basis to support this.

Once this has been done a dozen times, this editing code starts to be pulled together into a single code-base, which is still tailored for each customer. As the agency grows, there comes a point where this editing and publishing code is given a name, and it starts down the road of becoming a ‘product’.

[CM Briefing 2007-16, read the full article]