How many content management products do you think are on the market today? Too many to content! How do you go about selecting the one that's best for you?
Okay, try this - go to Google and search on "Content Management Products". How many results did you get? I got 32 million! Wow! Now I know they aren't all unique products, but I think this shows you just how many vendors are out there vying for your business. So how do you choose which one is right for you?
First things first...are you sure you really need one? That's a huge question that you need to answer. Have a read through the article on Content Management . If you still think you need one, move on.
What's your company's policy on development technologies? Are you a JAVA shop? Do you prefer to write .net applications (a Microsoft shop). Maybe you are really into open source, in which case you would be working with PHP, Linux and MySQL.
Know what your internal skills and experience is in each technology. Maybe you don't intend to implement the CMS on your own, but at some point you will need to support it.
What's your company's policy on Open Source? Many companies are slow to support open source internally because it's well - open source. This doesn't mean there aren' t a lot of good open source CMS products out there.
What's your company's policy on SaaS / hosted solutions? Are you open to considering products that are not implemented internally, but are hosted by the vendor? There are a number of Software as a Service (SaaS) CMS solutions out there that are very nice. No implementation, lower cost to use and support.
Once you answer these questions, you may be better able to narrow down the options for CMS products and solutions. If you don't narrow down the field this way start moving through the 32 million Google search results and see how you make out.
