[Sigia-l] the environment of CMS

[John O'Donovan-INTERNET]

I would agree that many CMS are immature but they are also overpriced and very poor value for money if you follow this logic. They certainly proclaim to be premium products.

The maturity argument doesn't hold up for me, because around about 95 - 96 I worked with Notes for a while at a major corporation. This corporation was using Notes to manage content, workflow, collaboration, web publication, community discussion, email, etc...As you may know, Notes (or Domino) is the daddy of groupware and I have to be honest, I still look at many CMS and think - Notes did that better 8 years ago. It probably still does and I felt that this product offered a lot out of the box.

This is not to evangelise Notes but to say that CMS products are surprisingly immature and incapable in many ways. The lack of flexibility to easily meet customer demands is astonishing for the price charged. You can also buy a CMS and find that you need to purchase this plugin, or that extension, to perform what you would have considered to be essential functionality.

I do agree that the CMS should be a platform to develop a solution on, but then a CMS needs to offer considerably more value out of the box than an Applicaition Server such as coldfusion etc. to quickly meet customer requirements.

And if they don't compare well with other 'established' software products, it also then has to be asked what do they offer that freeware such as ZOPE does not?

Cheers,

jod


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