Personalization is all the rage, but deploying a personalized intranet portal or website is a complex process. Most companies don’t offer personalization, don’t need to, and have users (employees) that don’t want to use personalization. While personalization might be overkill for most, it is important to some and distinguishing these complex solutions from traditional CMSs is an important consideration.
Seth Gottlieb, a leading expert on open source CMS and the founder of Content Here, has published an intriguing analysis of CMSs (see CMS Deployment Patterns) and uses the baking versus frying analogy to distinguish two principal types of CMS.
“Baking style rendering systems generate pages when content is published. Frying systems generate pages on the fly when they are requested by the end user,” writes Seth. “Whether a system bakes or fries content tells a lot about its architecture and what it is good at. Baking systems are great for high volume sites that do not need to personalize content. Frying systems excel when requirements include personalization, access control, and other presentation logic that uses information about the user in order to decide what to show and how.”
What are the leading baking and frying CMSs?
“I can't risk my vendor neutrality by showing favorites,” exclaims Seth. Good answer. Some systems work well for some organizations, but do not work well for others with differing priorities and requirements.
However, Seth did share some of those that he likes, and I’ve added a few of my own to mask both his neutrality, and mine (Prescient Digital Media is also technology neutral with no technology partnerships):
Some of the leading ‘baking’ CMSs (commercial and open source):
- Percussion
- Serena
- Hannon Hill
- TerminalFour
- Contribute (not true CMS but can be built upon)
- CrownPeak
- Tridion
- Bricolage (open source)
- Krang (open source)
- Alfresco (open source)
Some of the leading ‘frying’ systems (commercial and open source):
- Vignette
- Sitecore
- RedDot
- Day
- Stellant
- IBM
- Quantum Arts QP7
- Ektron
- Mediasurface Morello
- Fatwire Content Server
- eZ publish (open source)
- Drupal (open source)
- Joomla! (open source)
- Plone (open source)
In his annual review of the CMS marketplace, CMS Kudos and Shortcomings, CMS Watch founder Tony Byrne is careful not to single out winners and losers. Instead Byrne focuses on specific areas of a CMS(e.g. personalilzation, templating, usability, etc.) that particular solutions excel at, or are found to be lagging.
“Some vendors might get several mentions, and others none at all, but that doesn't automatically mean you should include (or discount) them in making your short lists,” writes Byrne. “Alfresco doesn't offer decent personalization services; should you care? Perhaps not.”
Instead, Byrne urges caution when looking at CMS vendors. Instead of evaluating vendor offers and technology, evaluate them against your specific requirements using likely scenarios in which a CMS will be used.
“I urge you to take a scenario-based approach that will help you understand which functionalities and attributes matter most to you,” adds Byrne. “And, as always, carefully evaluate the implementation team as closely as you vet any software vendor.”
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