So lately I’ve seen a lot of interest in what content management product to use with specific portals.  Most portal products give you some form of web content management to make life easier in building your portal site.  The supplied WCM tools range from simple to richly functional.   You could choose to use a completely separate web content management product like Fatwire or Interwoven.  However, in many cases, the extra effort is not worth any additional functionality you might get from using it.  Anyway, here’s a breakdown of what I see:

Liferay

Liferay has a built in product that used to be called Journal but is now called Liferay CMS.  It’s tightly integrated into the portal and lets you publish web content, documents, and images.  It give you simple workflow, supports tagging, and allow inline editing.  It’s more than sufficient for basic content services.  If you have a rich set of content with widely varying workflow and the need to personalize content, this won’t fit your needs but for 80-90% of your needs, it works well.

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Note: check out the comment by Jorge Ferrer who gives more information on Liferay to support more complex workflows.

IBM

IBM’s Lotus Web Content Manager (LWCM) product is very tightly integrated with WebSphere Portal and is the #2 web CMS on the market by licenses.  IBM just released a new version of LWCM with significant upgrades to usability, and maintainability.  It allows for in context search (e.g. a search tells you which portal page in which the content resides), projects that allow you to stage entire sets of content adds, deletes, and modifications, support for tagging and rating which is fully integrated to the portal, and a new UI that lets users more easily find, create, and edit their content.  It’s only a web content management system.  WebSphere Portal has a separate document library that can be accessed from LWCM.  For simple to medium needs, this is a great product and anyone with WebSphere Portal should consider it.

Oracle

Oracle offers the old Stellent product now called Universal Content Management (UCM). It’s the only product I note today that’s a true ECM Product. As such, it gives you a wide range of capabilities beyond simple web content management.  With the wcm components you can create content in Word or a rich text editor and publish to a variety of sites. The newest version provides a tag based architecture, allows you to embed services in content regions, runs and scales on WebLogic Server, and has some interesting web app functionality to create content driven web applications without a lot of coding.  However, it is not as tightly integrated with any portal in the WebCenter Suite.  That means you will spend more time defining the listing and display of content and getting security and in context search working.

JBOSS or Gatein Portal

JBOSS merged it’s solid portal framework with Exo’s content management and Web 2.0 capabilities.  While I know the least about this product, the addition of Exo’s wcm tools finally gives JBOSS Portal a credible entry into web content management.

My Personal Opinion

So what would I choose for a content management solution?  First off, any portal vendor that already has a fairly integrated solution deserves a close look.   Most content management are simple in nature and making them complex only frustrates users.  If you have WebSphere Portal then look at LWCM. If you use Liferay, then look at Liferay CMS.  I would only move to a third party CMS if less than 90% of your needs are not met.  Otherwise, take the easiest approach to managing content on your site and don’t make it harder than it needs to be.