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Ektron CMS200
Company:
Ektron Purpose:
Allow non-technical content contributors to update Web pages.
Starting Price:
$3,000 per server, plus database license.
Reviewer's View:
Ektron's CMS200 provides very high value for its price, but should be considered primarily for small public sites (less than 500 pages) or low-traffic Intranets, You'll need some developer talent (ColdFusion or Active Server Pages) setting it up, but thereafter, the package can be managed by a tech-savvy editor. Look to CMS200 if you value ease-of-editing over content re-use and multichannel publishing. Note that it only runs on a Microsoft Web server.
Web content management pundits like me tend to focus heavily on major enterprise players such as Vignette and Documentum-- whose implementations often exceed $1 million-and mid-market offerings like Microsoft or Percussion that will end up costing you in the six figures.
This begs some obvious questions. You already know that implementing automated content management will be difficult, but does it have to be expensive, too? Can you obtain basic CMS features without spending a lot of money? And if inexpensive CMS packages really exist out there, what do you sacrifice for low cost?
We can begin to answer those questions by taking a look at Ektron's CMS200, a Web content management package that costs a scant $3,000 per server ($13,000 for an unlimited enterprise license).
THE BASICS
Let's start with the assumption that there are two broad things you might want your content management system to accomplish:
* Enable non-technical contributors to add and modify Web content, which then gets published through carefully controlled templates. As you'll see below, Ektron does this quite well for reasonably simple sites.
* Enhance the value of your content by storing unformatted, atomic text snippets that can be re-used independently across pages, sites, and media channels (which also takes a lot of analysis and preparation on your part even before you introduce any technology). Ektron does not do this at all.
GENERAL ARCHITECTURE
Like many lower-priced systems, CMS-- 200 will only run on a Microsoft server. It uses Microsoft's scripting paradigm, Active Server Pages (ASP), to generate pages dynamically from a content database. For that database, you can use either MS Access (which we don't recommend, for performance reasons) or SQL Server. You'll need...