for the new adidas intranet we were looking at different content management system (CMS) and i would like to share the findings with you. the following functions were required:
- good usability (preferred what you see is what you get (wysiwyg) editor)
- web 2.0 technology (meta tagging, AJAX technology, etc)
- SAP integration
- authentication via LDAP
- acceptable price
- (optional) collaboration tools wiki, bulletin boards, IM
we looked at many CMS, had workshops and discussions with a lot of companies including the leading ones (by gartner): reddot (opentext), interwoven, sdl tridion, first spirit and others.
all CMS are quite powerful but i have to admit that i was pretty disappointed by the quality of the products. last time i had something to do with CMS is a couple of years ago and i expected that they made a huge progress. i was expecting tools with the usability of wordpress and a setup for interfacing SAP and LDAP easily. and a price not above 100.000 euros (of course we were considering using open source like joomla, papaya or opencms but they will need a couple more years of improvement and tests in smaller environments before we can really start using them for such big projects). thanks to AJAX technology some CMS have wysiwyg editors out of the box. this actually is a great step ahead from the time when i dealt with CMS last time. but no CMS uses AJAX the way i wish it would be used. i would like to write a text, add one two or ten pictures, crop the pictures, drag and drop a movie, rearrange everything, and publish. like wordpress – quick and easy. but there is no tool that really offers this kind of functionality. you still have to define the templates, the exact amount of media, the exact alignment etc. its like hard coding html-sites, way not as dynamic as it could be.
regarding interfaces: we want to authenticate the user via LDAP and show private information from SAP. as well we want a seamless login to our SAP portals. all CMS we looked at somehow offer SAP integration but, to be honest, most of them more or less just try to.
at the very end we have to decide for the lesser evil with the best chance to meet our requirements. we have to accept some drawbacks and a very high price. a couple more years development and open source projects will hopefully be as powerful as the major commercial CMS providers. they are already much cheaper…
Gartner MarketScope for Web Content Management, 2008
