Re: CMS vs. Wiki

Choosing a CMS is a lot more complicated than choosing a Wiki.  This is 
mainly because the CMS is broader than the Wiki market, there are more 
products, and there is a diverse set of definitions of what is a CMS 
is.  I highly recommend the CMS Report by CMS Watch.  There is a free 
downloadable version that gives some information that you are looking 
for but the whole report (I have heard) is excellent.

Bob Doyle's site CMS Review has some excellent free content.  In 
particular, you should check out:  http://www.cmsreview.com/Steps/

Many CMS (open source and proprietary) focus on managing content at the 
page level.  Just managing data in a database might not be a good fit 
for what is classically defined as a CMS.  Recently, I have been talking 
to multiple clients who initially call us in for a content management 
project.  After digging deeper into their requirements, we learn that it 
is more of a data management problem with some content management 
aspects (particularly workflow and deployment).   Just something to 
think about.  Let me know if you want to discuss further. 

--Seth

 

Dierk Seeburg wrote:

> Thanks, Seth!
> I was contemplating the collaborative aspect for our purposes and 
> appreciate your pointers.  We need to manage a number of records in a 
> database for which I would like a web interface.  Is there a place 
> with information on how to choose a CMS like there is for Wikis at, 
> e.g., http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ChoosingaWiki ?
> Thanks again!
> Die
>
> Seth Gottlieb wrote:
>
>> Hi Dierk,
>>
>> In general, Wiki's are more appropriate for collaborative content 
>> management with little or no need for editorial control.  Web CMS are 
>> better for situations where you want to have an editorial process 
>> that controls what goes on the site.   Here are some questions that 
>> might steer you to one or the other.
>>
>> Which is worse, having something wrong appear on the site (like a 
>> typo or incorrect information) or discouraging/impeding someone from 
>> publishing an idea or some information that has the potential to help 
>> others?  If the goal is to harness the creativitiy and knowledge from 
>> as many people as possible,  a Wiki might be the right tool.
>>
>> Is there any need for workflow?  Wiki's generally do not have 
>> workflow or even an approval mechanism.  Once a user makes an edit, 
>> it is live.
>>
>> Do you trust your users to manage the content?  Or, said another way, 
>> are your users motivated to improving the quality of the resource?  
>> If so, go Wiki.
>>
>> Is your organization engaged in a taxonomy initiative to organize 
>> content?  If so, a traditional CMS model might be preferable because 
>> you can delegate an authority to organize and tag content according 
>> to the corporate taxonomy.  The organiziation of a Wiki is totally 
>> organic.  People create pages, people notice redundencies, people 
>> merge pages.  It is a chaotic process that eventually gravitates 
>> towards order (or doesn't).
>>
>> Do you intend to reuse conent in an automated way?  Content in Wiki's 
>> is totally unstructured and, therefore, difficult to reuse in other 
>> applications.   Many web CMS have structured content (including 
>> metadata) that allows assets to be used by different sites in 
>> different ways.
>>
>> I realize that you can solve a lot of these problems with some simple 
>> access control, but I believe it is best to choose a technology for 
>> what it was designed for.
>>
>> So here are some examples of good Wiki's
>> * Wikipedia is able to harness the knowledge of thousands of readers 
>> with a common goal of sharing information.
>> * Open Source Software documentation.   Most Apache projects have a 
>> Wiki where project contributors can quickly and easily add 
>> documentation about the project.  The ease of contribution is one 
>> less excuse for a programmer to procrastinate documentation!
>> * My company uses a Wiki for an internal knowledge base and also a 
>> collaborative workspace on projects (however, we need to take the 
>> text from deliverables and port them into professional looking 
>> documents).
>>
>> Here are somethings that would be better served with a traditional CMS
>> * Your corporate website.
>> * A policy manual.  While I would not be worried about people 
>> tampering with it because their is an audit history, someone might 
>> with good intentions add information that he thought was correct and 
>> temporarily mislead another reader.  Plus, you might want to 
>> transform the online version into a print version and that might be 
>> hard with a Wiki.
>>
>> Dierk Seeburg wrote:
>>
>>> Hi,
>>> I'd be interested in people's opinion on when to use a CMS and when 
>>> to use a Wiki?  For what tasks would you use or not use one and not 
>>> the other?  What are advantages of one over the other?
>>> Thanks a bunch!
>>