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.

King's solitude - La soledad del Rey by Manuel Marin via Flickr

Content is king, so it’s no surprise that content management systems have become one of software’s fastest growing industries with hundreds (if not thousands) of offerings. As the primary means for non-technical workers to update a website, web content management systems have become part of the everyday work lives for tens of thousands of employees.

So how do you choose which content management system to run with? Better yet, where should you even start looking?

If you want to make sure you’ve made the right choice, I recommend that you start by outlining the different tiers of content management systems available, and the pros and cons of each. Once you’ve decided on a tier, it will make drilling down to a particular CMS much easier.

Over the next few articles, I’m going to do just that. These articles will be geared to help a business person make a decision on which tier of content management system to investigate further.

NOTE THIS DISCLAIMER! This is not intended to be a comprehensive comparison of the feature/functionality of any particular CMS or CMS’. I’m also not trying to argue one way or another about the validity of content management systems themselves. For these articles, I’m assuming they’re a worthy investment. Let’s just run with that assumption. Maybe someday I’ll write about who really needs a CMS in the first place. That won’t be discussed during these articles.

To start it all off, we really need an operational definition of “content management system” so that we can all understand exactly what I’m writing about. For the purposes of these articles, we’re going to use the term “content management system” or “CMS” to refer to web content management systems like drupal, joomla, concrete5, etc., and NOT true enterprise content management systems like SharePoint and Confluence. The difference between them is that web content management systems only allow users to edit pages on the website, whereas enterprise content management systems help employers manage and collaborate on everything content including documents, spreadsheets, slides, and the website. In terms of a CMS, the basic functionality we’re looking for is a text editor (WYSIWYG or WYSIWYM), Navigation Manager, Form Builders, Template Engine, and File Storage. So, when you’re reading these articles, remember that we don’t mean enterprise CMS systems – so that there’s no confusion.

Now that we’ve defined what we’ll mean by “CMS” for this article, I can list the tiers we’ll discuss in upcoming posts. The different tiers of web content management (at least for my purposes) are commercial proprietary, commercial open source (there is a fine line between commercially backed open source and commercial open source), true open source, and agency or professional services (in house) content management systems.

Check back for the next article and we’ll start discussing the different tiers.