Looking for a Content Management System?
The topic came up again on HighEdWeb-L. I wanted to reply, but I also wanted to inject some much needed levity, while keeping in mind that it’s a very serious topic. So, here were my “talking points:”
- Fight the ‘everything to everyone’ syndrome. Not every CMS has a pony for everybody.
- Fight the urge to select a product that hits the most checkboxes. Look at the products and see which one you could adapt to the best. The more you try and bend a product to you, the more chance it will bend until it breaks. I’m not saying change your entire workflow around a product, but be willing to meet it halfway, or some other reasonable distance. This is hard because of the way the RFP process is laid out, but just keep it in mind.
- Depending on how decentralized your website is, the rollout may be as much, if not more, political as it is technical.
- Do you have enough technical folks to keep the system up and running? Most of them want to use Oracle or SQLServer, so make sure you get a DBA in the discussion in advance of picking a product. You don’t want a grumpy DBA.
- What are updates to the product like? What do you do if an update goes bad? I know these sound like things to worry about after you deploy, but they’ve been a big part of our post-deployment life and life could be better.
- If you have to have WYSIWYG keep in mind that sales folks or white papers may “gloss over” some incompatibilities with non-Microsoft browsers, like Firefox or Safari.
- Speaking of WYSIWYG…the idea that there is a magical tool that allows people with absolutely zero knowledge of html to create semantically rich and highly accessible sites with intelligent architecture is just daft. But if this magical tool does exist, I’ll trade you a unicorn for it.
Again, I was trying to lighten it up while giving some relevant information.
November 30th, 2006 at 10:23 am
You made me chuckle. I forwarded that off to my colleagues here as we’re also laboring under the “We’ve got to buy a CMS NOW!” problem with our marketing folk. As if that will solve everything. Of your bullets, I think I’ve said many of them many times to various people. Scary. #1, yep. #2, agreed. Doing the “it meets all these needs” approach just means it’s bloated and more time-consuming to use. #3… Oh yeah. I’m hearing from faculty that they may not be too pleased with the marketing people telling them how to present their departmental information. #3 is the biggest unseen obstacle. Your last point is just brilliantly stated.
November 30th, 2006 at 1:23 pm
I’ll see your unicorn and raise you 2 elves