CMS on Microsoft servers

March 15, 2005 5:05 AM

I'm working for a large, well-known organisation, which is looking for a content management system that will run well (and securely) on Windows 2003 servers.

We're looking at Microsoft's Content Management Server, but in the interests of checking every avenue (and - personal bias showing through - desperately looking for something that isn't actually by Microsoft) I was wondering if anyone had any experience with other systems with similar features? We need to be able to let different groups of users have different permissions, and I was particularly enthused by the Microsoft CMS's ability to let people publish from Microsoft Word.

I know that sounds pretty horrible to most of us, but allowing non-technical people to contribute rich content in as easy a way as possible while keeping final control at the web administration level is the goal.

posted by bwerdmuller to computers & internet (7 comments total)

Well, its hard to make any specific suggestions without knowing more details or that much about MS CMS, but a good place to start is a site like CMSInfo.org or OSCOM.

Some of the ones I've found to be more "professional" while doing a similar search are:

• Drupal
• Zope, or its derivative Plone

It also comes down to is this for internal or external use. I personally decided that a wiki was the best choice for our internal CMS and that a full on CMS was overkill. YMMV.
posted by gus at 8:19 AM on March 15, 2005

Yeah, this'd be for managing an external website with an image dictated by marketing but content contributed by various people around the organization. Zope et al always seemed a bit like PostNuke to me in look and feel. We're going to be paying a lot of money for a very swish design, so whatever we go for has to cope with that - no login fields anywhere, for example, and certainly none of the little-boxes-of-information look that seems to be inherent to open source CMS.

(Normally I would go for these in a shot, but I know they're not going to quite be what people are after here.)
posted by bwerdmuller at 8:28 AM on March 15, 2005

But thank you for the links :) I'll certainly check the first two out thoroughly.
posted by bwerdmuller at 8:28 AM on March 15, 2005

"Content management" systems can do a lot more than publish stuff on a website, and of course you'll pay a lot more, as well.

A relatively inexpensive option (which may not be of interest to a large organization, which often tends to think that inexpensive equals lack of appropriate features) (and which may or may not mesh with the swish [expensive] design) is CityDesk.
posted by WestCoaster at 2:57 PM on March 15, 2005

We've done some research on this exact topic at work (we're webdev & apps, but some clients insist on a CMS. 1/10 is right to do so). Two we've tried are Ektron and SiteRefresh. The former has a very nice back-end to it, but we did some serious customizing. The latter was not good enough, as of 2 years ago.

It all comes down to a trade-off: how much flexibility (design, functionality, whatever) are you willing to sacrifice for the democritization of content authoring? This is why so many people build their own (I've done this on MS as well), because you can bake the business process and design logic right into it. Of course, there's hell to pay once you want to change the underlying process. My email's in my profile if you have any questions I can help with.
posted by yerfatma at 3:37 PM on March 15, 2005

There's a wide range of products and solutions that fall within the CMS category. On the low end, you might consider using Macromedia's Contribute Publishing System, which is a static HTML file management system. It uses the CPS server to manage the files on your server, as well as security, logging, etc. On the client, you use Dreamweaver to design your site layout, build templates and so on, and your end-users/authors use Contribute, which is a much-simplified version of Dreamweaver. It's a little over $100 per seat, which is pretty cheap for most large organizations. You can integrate the CPS with your existing LDAP directories if you want, which is nice. Plone is very nice actually, too, and free.

On the high end, there are plenty of web-based applications that do all sorts of things for you. As one example, my company does a lot of work with a product called CommonSpot, which is a CMS written in ColdFusion. You get a lot more out of the box with CommonSpot than you do with MSCMS, in my opinion, but you don't get the fantastic MS Office integration that you can get with MSCMS and Sharepoint.

I don't have my email in my profile, but I'd be happy to answer any followup questions you might have if you post them here.
posted by me & my monkey at 4:36 PM on March 15, 2005

We're going to be paying a lot of money for a very swish design, so whatever we go for has to cope with that - no login fields anywhere, for example, and certainly none of the little-boxes-of-information look that seems to be inherent to open source CMS.

Actually, that usually has more to do with the people using open source CMSs than with the capability of the CMS itself. You can do nice designs with Plone, but organizations that are willing to pay for nice designs are usually willing to pay for expensive CMSs too.
posted by me & my monkey at 4:38 PM on March 15, 2005