[Sigia-l] "Study: Content Management Tools Fail"

[George Olsen]

On 2/27/03 4:30 PM, "Peter Merholz" <peterme at peterme.com> wrote:
> In fact, I would argue that the main reason that CM tools fail is not
> because of some inherent problem with content management, but because
> businesses do a poor job of understanding their own requirements.

I'll second that. In my experience, few of the CMS vendors actually really
understand publishing processes very well. Usually because they don't bother
hiring any one with publishing experience to help design their products.

I've worked with a number of major CMS packages and they often don't support
some of the things that really matter -- like good traffic management (i.e.
knowing who's working on what, and what the status is).

Granted you can find this out through user research, but I they'd hire
someone who'd worked as an editor as part of the design team, these would be
no-brainers.

In fairness to the vendors though, it's rare that one CMS solution will work
enterprise-wide -- a mistake companies often make when buying. I talked with
one company that wanted to find the same system that could support an
external site of a few hundred highly pages and an intranet that had tens of
thousands of pages. Trying to satisfying the former, meant the system would
be inadequate for the latter, and trying to optimize the latter created
something that was overkill and too rigid for the former.

George