How to Evaluate a Content Management System

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Selecting and implementing a content management system (CMS) will be one of the largest IT projects tackled by many organisations. With costs running into the millions of dollars, it is vital that the right CMS package be selected.

This article outlines some of the lessons that we have learnt when assisting clients to chose a CMS. It offers ideas and tips, and provides an approach for identifying your business' actual requirements for a CMS.

With so many vendors and products, it can be very hard to compare between them. Preparation, and a disciplined approach to this evaluation process is critical.

What this article isn't

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No vendors or products are mentioned in this article: this is not a survey of current commercial solutions.

Instead, it provides tools to assist you to conduct a review of suitable products. There is no 'one size fits all' solution: no two organisations have the same requirements.

Assumptions

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In developing these guidelines, we have made several key assumptions about the type of organisation purchasing a CMS:

• medium to large organisation
• current publishing systems will be replaced by the new CMS
• CMS will manage both the intranet and internet website
• CMS will be enterprise-wide.

A wide range of content will be published using the CMS. This can be characterised as:

• simple pages
• complex pages, with specific layout and presentation
• dynamic information sourced from databases, etc
• training materials
• online manuals (policy & procedures, HR, etc)
• general business documents
• thousands of pages in total
• extensive linking between pages.

Why are you purchasing a CMS? Before identifying specific requirements, you must determine the business goals that will be achieved by implementing a CMS.

These must also reflect the long-term strategies and directions of your business.

It should be possible to succinctly outline your business goals on a single page. Make sure these are well-understood and agreed to by all stakeholders before starting the requirements gathering process.

Identifying requirements

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There is no single best list of requirements for a content management system. Every organisation has unique needs.

Involve all your stakeholders in the requirements process. This includes relevant IT groups, business units, and end users.

This is particularly important if you are purchasing an 'enterprise-wide' CMS.

Use structured investigation methods, to ensure that the list of requirements is both manageable and sufficient. If this process is approached in a disciplined way, there is little danger of the project suffering from 'feature creep'.

Structuring requirements

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The list of requirements for an enterprise-wide CMS will grow quite large. Group the items into categories, to make this list more manageable.

One classification scheme that has worked well for us is:

• Content creation
• Content management
• Publishing
• Presentation
• Contract & business

This list covers the full lifecycle of a content management system, from initially creating the content, through to delivering it to end users.

Ideas box

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This section gives you some starting points for your requirements gathering process. These ideas have been distilled from the CMS projects we have been involved in.

This is far from a complete list, and is no replacement for a full requirements gathering process.

(See the Content Management Requirements Toolkit for a comprehensive list of over a hundred individual requirements.)

Content creation

This is the functionality required by the authors (content creators) using the CMS.

Without an effective authoring process, use of the CMS will wither and fail within a year of implementation.

Key requirements may include:

• Integrated authoring environment

  The CMS must provide a seamless and powerful environment for content creators. This ensures that authors have easy access to the full range of features provided by the CMS.

• Separation of content and presentation

  It is not possible to publish to multiple formats without a strict separation of content and presentation.

  Authoring must be style-based, with all formatting applied during publishing.

• Multi-user authoring

  The CMS will have many simultaneous users. Features such as record locking ensure that clashing changes are prevented.

• Single-sourcing (content re-use)

  A single page (or even paragraph) will often be used in different contexts, or delivered to different user groups.

  This is a prerequisite to managing different platforms (intranet, internet) from the same content source.

  (This is a complex requirement that warrants a whitepaper of its own.)

• Metadata creation

  Capturing metadata (creator, subject, keywords, etc) is critical when managing a large content repository.

  This also includes keyword indexes, subject taxonomies and topic maps.

• Powerful linking

  Authors will create many cross-links between pages, and these must be stable against restructuring.

• Non-technical authoring

  Authors must not be required to use HTML (or other technical knowledge) when creating pages.

• Ease of use & efficiency

  For a CMS to be successful, it must be easy to create and maintain content.

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