How does a business choose the right CMS on which to build their site? This blog post is part II in a series designed to outline the different tiers of content management systems available and their pros and cons.
In my last post, I defined some terms, so make sure you check out that post if, as you’re reading, you start thinking, “Wait a second, what about…”
So today, we’re going to review what is a commercial proprietary CMS.
Commercial proprietary CMS means there is a licensing fee for initial use of the CMS, as well as (typically) annual maintenance fees. It also means the code is not open to the public, and if there is the ability for third parties to make code contributions, it’s not open to just anyone.
Commercial Proprietary CMS are the oldest and typically most mature tier of content management system. Oddly enough, it’s the group I’ve had the least contact with. It’s most common to see programming languages like .Net and Java in this space, although PHP has produced a fair number of CMS in this tier.
Le kiosque de Sitecore by Frederic Harper via flickr
Names like SiteCore and Immediacy are popular names in space (both .Net).
The advantages of this tier are fairly obvious. As mentioned earlier, these platforms are highly stable, mature, and have a great deal of experience “built in.”
What I mean is that SiteCore and Immediacy have been used on a lot of BIG websites, and presumably what they learned from those experiences are built into current releases (both are on version 6). They also come with strong corporate support, which is important to companies whose website is actually getting traffic (this eliminates most organizations) and needs to be kept online at all times. It’s always a plus to be able to call someone when something breaks. It’s also unlikely that these platforms will disappear tomorrow. This is a significant risk with open source as hundreds of communities are born and die every year.
Another significant advantage to these platforms is they tend to be secure, and their vulnerabilities are not nearly as public as some of their open source counterparts. (I’ll review this more in later posts.)
On the down side, this software can be expensive. Really expensive. Licenses can easily run $10,000 one time plus $2,000 annually. On larger installations, this number can be significantly larger. And this doesn’t even include installation. The total bill for integrating a commercial proprietary CMS into your website can run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. But then again, what’s the only constant brand presence your company has worth to you?
Another down side is that your internal programming resources (if you have any) can’t extend these applications as easily as they can extend open source software. Everyone has heard “wouldn’t it be nice if the CMS could do X? Most of these CMS’ have certified partners that can help you write extensions, but it does not compare to the ease and cost-effectiveness of extending Open Source.
Lastly, there aren’t scores of developers contributing new, creative modules to these platforms every day (although scores of developers could also be viewed as a security threat). A quick glance through the extension libraries of Drupal and Joomla will give you an idea of just how much intellectual capital has been thrown at this software by its contributing members.
That’s my outline for commercial proprietary CMS. As I mentioned above, this is the category I have had the least experience with. If there’s something you’d like to add, please do.
We’ll cover true open source, and agency or professional services (in house) CMS in future posts.
In the last post I discussed commercial open source CMS which are open source in that their code base is available to the public but are not entirely free like open source.
