CMS Landscape: Another view?

Last week, our friends at Idealware published an article on the Content Management System landscape penned by yours truly and our resident solutions architect, Usha. We also got plenty of help, particularly from Laura Quinn, Idealware’s esteemed leader. Thanks Laura. If you haven’t read the article, I encourage you to have a peek as it is a pretty solid overview of the CMS market.

As we note in the article, there are literally hundreds of software tools that get the label of CMS these days including the blog tool used here. This isn’t surprising nor a bad thing given the range of needs the CMSs are asked to solve — everything from basic page updating for non technical users to distributed publishing that enables efficient management of thousands of pages of content.

To make sense of the plethora of tools we tried to put them into neat little categories as a way to help nonprofit decision makers get their heads around the options. Categories like Open Source, ASP, Installed product, CMS + eCRM etc are helpful in understanding the options. However, those categories are only tell part of the story.

It struck me that there are other characteristics that can also be a used to classify the landscape of CMS vendors. One of the characteristics that could be very meaningful is the complexity of the tool? Another still is the  complexity of the problems it solves for the organization.

So in one category, there’d be tools that would be useful to organizations for whom the web is a new tool or isn’t yet a strategic part of their business and have very simple needs. Call this category the starter tools. I’m pretty sure that  we could put less than a dozen tools in this category.

What about those organizations that have been on the web for years, have redesigned their site 3, 4, and 5 times, support thousands of pages, manage several sites and have teams of people who work on the Web site? Clearly they have complex needs and require more complex tools. Let’s call this category the advanced tools. I think there are a clear set of tools that fit into this category — perhaps there are even sub categories based on price alone!  :)

Of course, then there is a category (or three) that makes up the messy middle. The tools in the middle are likely to solve complex problems or be complex in a specialty or niche area. For example: Collaborative publishing, community engagement, CRM, and traditional publishing are all examples of a special capability/feature. For each of these, I can think of a at least a handful of tools that otherwise would be in the messy middle that could be categorized by the niche capability.

Of course, even if we successfully categorize the tools, the reality is that determining which one is right for you still requires a comparison of your needs against what the tool provides. But perhaps the starting point will help reduce the effort for all.

For our next article on this subject and for our continuing Executive Dialogue seminar series on  the CMS market, Usha and I will explore alternate categorization methods to see if it can help us make better sense of the landscape for those who don’t have the time or money to work with a consultant. For now, I hope I’m on to something. :)