Any website needs to have fresh content to attract and retain visitors. While you can have plans to generate content, you need a good content management system to manage the content on the website. After CRM (Customer Relationship Management), CMS (Content Management System) has become the new buzzword. 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.

There are hundreds of vendors that have CMS offerings ranging from $0 (Open source) to more than a $1M. Most of these vendors claim that they are the market leaders in the CMS arena. Deciding on a CMS for your company website or a portal depends on the actual needs and requirements. However, you do need to probe your CMS vendor on some of the features discussed:
Security Model: Moving beyond authentication, security models should support access control at the object (e.g. image, page or a document) level. The access should be based on the roles. The CMS should provide easy administration features to modify and update these controls.

Delegated Content Management: As your website grows, one need would be to create sections or sub sites that are managed independently by a team. A good CMS will have delegated content management where sections of the site (sub-sites) can be handled by different teams.

Version Control: There are times when you need to get back to a previous version of the website. Strict version control is necessary for legal accountability, backup and disaster recovery. Version control is a complex phenomenon and CMS systems provide varying levels of support for this feature. Determine if your website needs this feature. Strict version control is necessary for legal accountability, backup and disaster recovery.

Strong template support: While content needs to change on a website regularly, the “look and feel” also needs an overhaul every few months. A good CMS will provide the user interface elements (template) and the business logic. If a clear separation exists, user interface can be easily changed without incurring heavy programming costs. CMS vendors provide varying levels of template support. The worst case would be to sign up with a CMS that does not have a template support.

Integration with Search capability: Most websites grow over time and the fastest way to get to the right information is by searching. A good CMS will come a solid framework for integrating with a search engine. There are some CMS systems that have search as one of their components. Ask for details on efforts involved in integrating search software with your CMS. If a CMS comes with a search engine, it will be a bonus!

Real time indexing: Content added or modified to the system should get indexed in real time. Content repository and the search engine index go of out of sync if search engine indexes are not updated in real time.

Migration Support: Most large websites have several environments (development, staging and production). A good CMS should provide proper support for easily migrating changes (code and data) between these environments. If the CMS does not provide these features “out of the box”, find out what customizations need to be carried out to put them in place.

Workflow: Many organizations go for CMS to automate their internal manual processes using a web based workflow model. Workflow describes content creation, including presentation, update and delivery, by each participant group and individual. It can be customized to conform to each company’s unique business practices. Most of the CMS systems support workflow. But find out how easy it is for a manager to add or update a workflow process without taking the help of technical team.

Integration with external systems: A CMS is typically only one of a number of systems used to present information on the intranet or website. An enterprise-wide CMS will only be successful if it can be cleanly integrated with existing business systems.

Reporting: Identify the kind of reports needed for your organization. The CMS must provide an extensive range of reports, for both users and administrators. Ideally, the system should pro-actively report on any issues that arise. Check to ensure that the support for customized reporting is provided.
Web based Interface: Many CMS solutions require you to install a client for supporting several admin and content management functions. While this may work for small operations, it might create a nightmare in certain scenarios. Some scenarios where having a desktop client may cause problems are as follows:

When you have a large number of content managers

Content managers are geographically dispersed

Content managers do not have similar desktop operating environments (Windows, Macintosh)

Content managers have limited knowledge of software and frequently need desktop support.

The more ideal solution would be a 100% browser based administration and content management interface. Check to ensure that there is no special browser plug-ins required to operate the system.

Support: Make sure the CMS vendor provides full support for your application. There might be two different models for support, based on the type of CMS.
Community-based (open-source) CMS: These are the ‘traditional’ open-source systems, completely free, produced by the volunteered efforts of many individuals across the globe.
Commercially supported CMS: Here, there is one organization that provides professional services or support for the product. Whether the CMS is community-based or commercial, make sure there is a stable organization supporting the CMS.

Rajesh Setty is the president and Munwar Shariff is the CTO of CIGNEX Technologies. CIGNEX helps companies to get better returns on their web technology initiatives and has participated in numerous engagements successfully implementing open source content management systems.