Factors selecting WCMS for your Enterprise

For organizations looking for a WCMS to manage their website, intranet, or portal there are literally over a thousand potential solutions from which to choose. WCMS solutions vary significantly in price, design, functionality, and in many cases, provide far more than just content management capabilities.

A WCMS will typically serve as the foundation of an integrated e-Business or e-Information delivery platform. As such, there is more to consider than just how content is managed. The goal of this whitepaper is to provide industry insight that will help organizations to effectively evaluate and differentiate WCMS solutions and ultimately make better informed decisions.

Identify Business Drivers

The first step is to clearly identify the core business objectives driving your organizations need for a WCMS solution. The key business drivers behind why you need content management will play a significant role in identifying potential WCMS solutions.

Get Help from A Content Management Specialist
Unless your organization has had extensive experience deploying a WCMS, it is highly recommended that you recruit the expertise of a CMS consultant with strong industry related experience. A good CMS consultant will:
 Ensure your stakeholders fully understand the complexities and scope of work involved in deploying a WCMS solution.
 Ensure your organizations business objectives and budget are realistic.
 Evaluate your organizations business needs.
 Evaluate the capabilities of your internal resources.
 Guide your organization in evaluating and then selecting both a WCMS solution and content management integrator that best meets your project need.

Define Your Base System Requirements

In identifying your WCMS solution requirements, you need to include both business requirements and technical requirements. In defining your business requirements, begin by asking the internal stakeholders that will be using the WCMS what they need the system to do. In defining your technical requirements you will need to work with your IT team by making sure that your solution aligns with your organizations IT infrastructure and long-term strategy.

Identify Potential Vendors

Evaluating WCMS Vendors

WCMS vendors vary hugely in price, design and capabilities. We have often said that WCMS products are 30% similar and 70% different. They all have the same bullet-point list of features, but it is how they work that makes the difference between success and failure.

Evaluating WCMS Products

While WCMS evaluation often focuses on a checklist of features and functionality, this rarely leads to the best selection. In most cases, a typically deployed WCMS solution uses less than 30% of the out-of-box features and functionality available in a WCMS solution. Every organization has unique needs and business processes. As a result, our experience quite often has been that out-of-box features and functionality do not match the clients individual requirements, thus, custom solutions have to be developed.

Technology platform

Many organizations have a single coherent IT platform such as Microsoft, Linux or Oracle. If this is the case, it should be specified as a precondition in the evaluation or tender. The same goes for the corporate-wide database standard, and it is reasonable to expect that the WCMS will use this database to store its content repository.

WCMS Usability

WCMS Solution Costs

When evaluating the cost of a WCMS solution, you need to consider all the costs of deploying and maintaining a CMS solution including the following:

*WCMS software licensing
*Additional software costs such as web server and database application licenses (may be included in web hosting services)
*Consulting services
*Implementation services
*Content and data migration
*Training for WCMS administrators, content editors, and developers (if required)
*WCMS hosting services
*Ongoing maintenance and support costs