...generally expensive, it’s critical that you choose wisely.
Some important considerations in selecting a CMS/ECM solution include:
- Ease of use for content creators/authors (for example, authors shouldn’t have to learn HTML or have programming/technical skills to create their content).
- Ability to manage different platforms from the same content source.
- Ability to easily create cross-links that will survive restructuring of the content.
- A workflow model that you can customize to fit your organization’s needs.
- Good archiving, backup and version control functionality.
- Ability to integrate with other systems and applications you have in place.
- Security mechanisms to protect the content.
- Support for all document formats in use in your organization.
- Extensibility so you can upgrade features or add custom features (such as support for additional formats) later.
In doing your research prior to selecting a CMS solution, you should ensure that the vendor provides adequate training, documentation and support.
Don’t overlook the people factor. Even though the new content management system may offer great benefits to the enterprise and to individual users, most people don’t like to change the way they work. A system that requires them to drastically change the process of creating content will be met with resistance by many — perhaps most — users unless you can convince them that there’s really something in it for them.
Scalability considerations
In terms of scalability, you’ll want to know the capacity of the system. For example, for a Web content management system, is there a limit on the number of Web servers supported? For a document management system, is there a limit on the number of documents or file size? You should also be sure to clarify whether additional software must be purchased to upgrade to a greater capacity as your company and document-load grows, and investigate what hardware requirements will be necessary so those costs can be factored into your scalability projections.
