WCM Vendors – Who Should You Trust For Your Web Content Management Solution?
There are many different web content management solutions available today. Your challenge may be identifying the WCM vendors who provide the highest value, best feature sets, and high quality support. Your CMS system is not an area of your business you can afford to take a risk with, it can either produce a smooth running efficient system, or a long term nightmare. It is imperative you do a complete WCM comparison, including checking the top WCM comparison website for additional opinions.
WCM vendors come from two primary camps, proprietary systems and open source systems. There are strong contenders in both camps for you to consider.
From from the open source content management camp you could consider OpenCMS, DotNetNuke, Drupal, and Alfresco WCM. All of these systems are very robust, offer great community support, and offer professional support through third party vendors, or through sponsoring companies.
From the proprietary camp of WCM vendors you have Oracle, Microsoft, FatWire, Interwoven, Vignette, IBM, RedDot, and many more. The level of support on most proprietary systems is exceptional. Any comparison of WCM vendors must include their quality of support.
The advantage to proprietary systems is going to be the level of support and ongoing development. Their website content management systems are updated often, security issues are fixed rapidly, and you can often receive support 24 hours per day, 7 days per week.
The free CMS offerings from the open source camp are not truly free in the long run. You will still have the cost of the underlying operating system, server hardware, and most commonly you will want to have a support agreement with a vendor to make sure you can have fast answers to questions which may bring your company’s web content system to a screeching halt. Open source content management is often still your lowest cost option to get started. Many companies have discovered the Alfresco WCM to be the best free WCM available.
Enterprise content management systems should never be evaluated on cost alone. If you evaluate on purchase price alone you will be ignoring your long term training costs, support costs, and the possible lack of features which could be crucial to the long term success of your system. You must consider your needs for multilingual support as part for your WCM comparison, also.
A good starting point in any evaluation of WCM vendors is to look at their list of features and see which features you need today, which features you can imagine using in the future, and which ones are likely to never be needed. This will help you narrow your list.
Then in your next step of evaluation consider the underlying operating system, database, and programming languages. If you can choose a system which uses systems your staff are already familiar with your long term costs will be reduced.
These two steps are just a beginning in choosing the best CMS software and the proper WCM vendors for your solution. It is better to take a little extra time as you get started, rather than face the nightmare of choosing the wrong system.