Web Content Management Tool – Is Joomla The Perfect Recipe, Or A Huge Mistake?
Joomla is highly popular web content management tool. The Joomla CMS software is available on many of the most popular hosting companies servers, and can easily be setup on your own in-house server.
The Joomla web content management tool can be installed on either a Linux server with Apache, PHP, and MySQL, or you can install on a Microsoft server with IIS, PHP, and MySQL. Installing on a Microsoft server requires adding a few other components as well.
Joomla is the most installed open source CMS software at this time. The reason behind this popularity is ease of use and a wide range of features. It allows the easy creation of users based upon LDAP, OpenID, and Gmail.
Where Joomla falls short for most businesses is in integration with other systems. Your company may have a wide range of systems already in place storing the data you desperately wish to share and integrate into your Intranet and Internet sites. Joomla is not an enterprise content management system, and should not even be considered a strong contender for smaller businesses with other data they wish to share. The strong point of Joomla is managing a single website and simplifying the creation and sharing of the content through the Joomla system.
If your business has more advanced needs you must step up to a more robust system. You can still stay within the open source world with a web content management tool like Drupal or OpenCMS.
For higher levels of support and even more features you will want to begin looking at web content management systems like Day Software’s Communique, RedDot CMS or LiveServer, Percussion Software Rhythmyx, FatWire Content Server, or Interwoven TeamSite Content Management Server. These are robust, enterprise level solutions designed to integrate multiple servers, handle diverse types of data, and to give your staff a great end-user experience. Each of these solutions has their strong and weak points and must be evaluated based upon your company’s particular needs.
For even more proprietary web content management system you may need to look to solutions from Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, or EMC. Their solutions are highly customized to work with their unique software, databases, and operating systems. If your shop is based upon solutions from any of these companies make sure to include them in your evaluation.
The great news, once you have selected the right web content management tools for your company and finished your initial implementation, you will have systems which provides you greater security, ease of use, and great performance for many years.