Enterprise Technology: Choosing the Right Content Management System

Content is the key to the success of any Web site. But once you've posted even a few pages, managing your material can become daunting. Text, graphics, video, and audio files all need to be organized and made easily accessible, preferably with as little manual labor as possible.

Content management software is the answer--but the wrong choice can produce a financial and workflow nightmare. In this month's Enterprise Technology, we look at CMS options that range in price from a few thousand dollars to upward of $500,000 and deliver a wide range of features and benefits. In some cases you may be better off developing your own CMS. We'll help you decide.

What's the least pleasant part of running a Web business site? Whether they're in a Global 1000 boardroom or in a cubicle at a little dot com, Web people kvetch about CMSs the way farmers complain about the weather--often with the same sense of resignation. But as the following survey of content management products indicates, it doesn't have to be that way.

There are so many content types, from simple text and graphics to video and audio files. A successful CMS must integrate diverse content from various sources, customize it for the user or site, and deliver it in a format appropriate to the user's access device, which could be anything from a desktop PC to a mobile phone. Not surprisingly, vendors haven't come up with a one-size-fits-all program.

"Content management as an industry is still in its infancy," says Gordon Kent, director of product marketing at EBT (EBusiness Technologies), a CMS vendor based in Providence, Rhode Island. According to a small study by Forrester Research, about 70 percent of the companies surveyed that use a commercial CMS have had it for less than a year.

Moreover, like all software, CMS suffers from a serious catch-22: If it includes enough extra features to satisfy every likely customer, it becomes impossibly hard to use. "The system has to try to accommodate a variety of users while still keeping some sort of order and consistency," says Timothy Appnel, director of technology for New York-based Agency.com, which has installed content management systems for many Global 1000 customers.

Though establishing the value of Web-based information as a strategic asset can be difficult, companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to try to manage their online content. They hope to gain a CMS that will help them understand and maximize the value of their content, and minimize associated costs by letting customers do much of the work themselves without relying on the Web site staff.

Replacing an Utter Failure

Take BestBuy.com, an online electronics and entertainment retailer in Eden Prairie, Minnesota. "Like a lot of people, we started off developing a home-grown CMS," recalls Greg Perry, manager of the company's Content Systems Group. "Basically, it was an utter failure. It had no workflow and no stability, and it required custom development for everything."

Seeking an off-the-shelf solution last summer, the company looked at products from Vignette ("too expensive," Perry says) and Blue Martini, before settling on Interwoven's TeamSite, citing its strong workflow features and its ability to work with BestBuy.com's existing systems.

It took a team of 12 to 15 developers and business members three to four months to get BestBuy.com's system running. Though Perry wishes that Interwoven had had a smoother interface at installation time, he's pleased with the results overall.

The View at Ground Level

For people who actually work on a Web site, the difference between a home-made system and a good third-party CMS can be dramatic. Before monitor maker ViewSonic engaged Allaire Spectra to help manage its 5000-page site, "users would e-mail me and say, 'Here, this is a new product; put it up on the site,'" says Internet applications manager Amanda Allen. "With Spectra, once you have all the rules set up, it's very simple for them to put in the content themselves."

Those benefits are costly. CMS prices begin in the $15,000-to-$50,000 range, but the average deal size is $300,000 to $500,000, according to Nick Wilkoff, an analyst at Forrester Research. And that's just the cost of the software license. When you take services and deployment into account, Wilkoff says, users spend an average of nearly $2 million and from 8 to 14 months implementing a system.

What do you get for the investment? The answer depends on which CMS you choose. For a features comparison of major products, see the chart.

In general, however, Wilkoff divides vendors into four main camps:

Content management veterans: Companies such as CMS pioneers Vignette and Interwoven have been around almost as long as the Web itself and remain market leaders. Extremely powerful and versatile, their offerings are correspondingly expensive. Some, including Vignette, bundle e-commerce options into their products.

Document management vendors: Companies like Documentum and FileNet have drawn on their expertise in traditional document management to tailor products for Web content formatting and delivery. The resulting CMS programs tend to support strong management of workflow, version control, and the overall process.

E-commerce crossovers: These companies are e-commerce software vendors that branched out into content management. Open Market made CMS its flagship product after it bought FutureTense in October 1999, and BroadVision acquired InterLeaf in January 2000.

Niche players: This segment of the market is composed of smaller companies that specialize in key areas. IntraNet Solutions, for example, concentrates on extranet and intranet deployments, and EBT is known for its work with XML (Extensible Markup Language), whose predecessor was the language HTML.

A subset of niche players consists of companies that offer solutions for smaller customers. These include Percussion Software's Rhythmyx Content Manager, PaperThin's CommonSpot 2.0, Reef's Reef Publisher 2.1, and Ektron's EMPower 2.5. These products cover the basics of content management, though they tend to be less configurable than the offerings of high-end players. Even Microsoft is entering the fray--at least tangentially--with its new SharePoint Portal Server.

Whatever its heritage, every CMS has to address a number of key issues, either alone or with the help of partners. According to both users and analysts, the three most critical areas are workflow and collaboration; integration with existing corporate infrastructure; and the ability to deliver content in multiple formats to a wide range of audiences and devices.