Do You Need an Enterprise Web CMS?
This blog was originally written for the meltmedia blog and is part of a multi-part series on Content Management Systems. Stay tuned for our next installment on Enterprise Content Management Systems.
If you’re anything like me, you’re scratching your head when you hear the term “Enterprise Web CMS.” You’ve got someone called an “architect” with bedazzling whiteboard skillz and you’re nodding along hoping no one asks you a single question. Trust me, as a technology director, I’m there half the time when I hear my team talking about new “web frameworks” or “computer codes” or “not playing Angry Birds in our staff meetings.”
So let’s start with the basics. “CMS” is an acronym that stands for “Content Management System.” A “Web CMS” is a platform for authoring, editing and publishing visual content on the web. Adding the word “Enterprise” to “Web CMS” does a couple things: makes you sound totally business and increases the cost and complexity of the implementation by at least an order of magnitude. There’s a bunch of reasons why, but first let’s talk about some CMS basics.
Web CMSs (or WCMSs) let millions of people run personal and professional websites. WordPress, Drupal, Tumblr, Joomla, and Webflow are some popular WCMSs that run tens of millions of websites. Seriously, WordPress alone runs over 60 million websites. These systems let users blog, share useful information, integrate with other web services, and more.
Some WCMSs are even free and open source, so you (or your dev team) can add, change, and remove functionality as you see fit. You can host them on your own servers or you can pay for services that host them at varying cost tiers. And the features provided by these systems are empowering people to do amazing things on the web. It’s pretty incredible and it’s become a gigantic ecosystem.
Now, Enterprise WCMS is where things gets rich. An Enterprise WCMS allows large companies to run sophisticated websites with all sorts of complex features that support the large company’s complex needs. They allow different business units to have their own websites, that can share global features and design patterns. They let companies host and share big document repositories with serious permission structures. They let companies take their workflows and processes to the web. And they’re generally expensive to implement, even if the software is free or open source.
In case you’re wondering, typical Enterprise WCMS implementations usually start in the 6-figure range and can easily go into 7- and 8-figure range. Yeah, really. Why? Because they’re hard to do and have real risk of failure. The bigger the implementation, the more stakeholders want input, the less agreement there may be. If the company has a lot of process, then the WCMS needs to work within those processes, which usually aren’t clearly defined or universally followed. The bigger the implementation, the greater the scalability needs.
It’s seriously tough.
So, what are the key concerns you want to start thinking about if you’re looking at Enterprise WCMS? Here’s a list we hope will be helpful. And we’ll get more in-depth in some upcoming posts:
One other thing to note, that sets us up for some further discussion… implementation of an Enterprise Web CMS is rarely looked at in isolation. Rollout of a platform like this is generally part of a larger effort to modernize and improve the effectiveness of all the tools that tie together to form your digital ecosystem. If you want to talk about this stuff and need a little more depth or personalized information, let us know! We’d love to help.