RE: ask for help

Hey Darrell,

I've noticed your posts quite frequently and have always enjoyed reading
them.

As it relates to your note on Contribute below.....It is sort of like
FrontPage on steroids (with workflow and versioning), but unfortunately it
is really for just Web content And is not database driven so all storage is
file based - which I personally think file based systems are definitely NOT
the way to store content....but I'm trying not to create too much
controversy today!!

Graham

-----Original Message-----
From: cms-list-admin-/[email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On
Behalf Of Austin, Darrel
Sent: Wednesday, December 31, 2003 11:20 AM
To: 'cms-list-/[email protected] '
Subject: RE: [cms-list] ask for help


> Today when the technology has advanced so much do you expect the 
> customers to use different tools for 1) content management 2) 
> versioning 3) workflow 4) delivery 5) publish.??

Everyone has different needs, of course, but I'm a CMS customer that found
that if the product claims to do all 5, it probably doesn't do them all
well.

I'm now much more in agreement with Graham's line of thinking. A good CMS
will be good at content management. A good publishing system will be good at
publishing. Find the best for each need and then connect them together. 

> customers who are using CMS from scratch would like to do all of them 
> in one GUI or under one desktop...

Again, I think everyone has different needs. I think there are a lot of
people that do want one system for everything, and then there are others
that would prefer the opposite. The CMS we attempted to use lumped
everything together in one interface...authors, web developers, workflow
process, etc. It was nice on the surface, but you soon learn that the CMS
really needs to be usable by a wide range of users and thinking that one GUI
is going to work for that is a bit short sighted, IMHO. (And yes, in
hindsight, we were shortsighted as a customer ;o)

I also agree with Graham in that it seems a lot of CMS products tend to have
workflow systems that are really much more complicated than they need to be.
Granted, a lot of customers probably tend to have a internal workflow that
really is much more complicated than it needs to be. ;o)

> Templating has always formed a core and crux of the content 
> management.. The ability to templatize any given website using fixed 
> number of templates always gave the buisness users ease of using .. 
> and playing with the system.. it gave a lot of consistency to the 
> otherwise inconsistent websites with bad look and feel.

I think that sounds GREAT on a brochure/side of the box. But in my limited
experience, it is just silly to expect the CMS to handle this issue. This is
an issue for the web team. Usually part IT, part marketing and a mix of
IA/business analyst folks. 

This was one of the major issues with the product we had. Yes, it forced us
to have a site with a consistent look and feel. But it was oppressive. The
templates were bloated, confusing, proprietary and quite limiting compared
to having direct control over the markup. In the end, it would have been a
very marginal improvement over the current mess of a site we have but a
great limitation in terms of the potential improvements a competant web team
could introduce in terms of the front-end delivery to the browser.

If your organization has a problem with their site being inconsistent,
poorly organized, and, well, ugly, no CMS will fix that. 

> templatizing gives u the ability to seperate the content layer and the 
> presentation layer giving more flexibility to change the presentation 
> layer any time based on the standards of the company and keeping the 
> content layer constant.. ability to share data across different 
> websites ... too..

Again, that sounds great on paper, but I don't think that is always
delivered in the actual product. I think a lot of CMS products are still
being sold as Web Site Management products. Yea, they'll make it easy for a
non-tech person to update and maintain a site. Which is fine, but that's not
really Content Management. 

While I was skeptical of Macromedia's Contribute product, I think that they
actually hit the nail on the head. If you want the web site tool, Contribute
does a lot for $100. It's not a CMS, and MM doesn't pretend that it really
is. I see a lot of expensive 'CMS' products that really appear to be
competing with contribute more than anything.

> sorry if i missed any thing.. and Hope i don't stir too much debate on 
> a new year eve..

Isn't debate what this list is all about? ;o)

And happy new year!

-Darrel
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