When it comes to enterprise-wide intranet CMS (Content Management System) tool selection, there are a few obvious choices that most organizations will lean towards. SharePoint is often the best choice for this type of management for its flexibility, scalability, and seamless integration with Microsoft Office and related toolsets. This is a topic for a different type of post (conveniently, there are many posted at this blog by my colleagues).
The challenge that many marketing professionals face is what type of CMS is best for their public websites and related microsites. In this space, the options vary greatly and choosing the right platform is often difficult. Often, organizations can get trapped in a solution by making the selection before completely understanding how their team is going to use it and the scope to which it will be leveraged.
To begin, marketing professionals need to ask themselves a few questions to help them define the criteria for selection:
- What type or types of sites are we planning on publishing? A fundamental question is the intent of the site and how the content is to be published and consumed. Is the site simply an online brochure, a personal or company blog, a knowledgebase of product and service information, or a little bit of everything? Getting clear on the type of site will often help to point the team in the right direction.Additionally, understanding the audience being served will also help in identifying the type of site. Different demographics often point to different preferences in the consumption of content. Depending on the nature of the sites you will need to manage, simple, single-task solutions such as wikis and blogs may suffice, or more sophisticated solutions like SharePoint may be more appropriate.
- What type of system or systems do we currently use for our website or internal collaboration? Organizations that already have websites may be using a CMS to manage the site’s content. Sometimes this can be leverage for usage in smaller microsites and in creating new large-scale sites as needed. Many organizations also use tools such as SharePoint internally and can potentially extend these systems to usage in a public space as well. Inherent benefits to this is less burden on an IT department to manage a new system and shorter learning curve for content authors and administrators that already have familiarity with the internal system.
- How sophisticated is the team that will be updating and managing the sites? Different CMS tools have different levels of expertise required to set up, use and maintain. A success factor for your site will undoubtedly be how easily and quickly your team can edit, update, and maintain the new site. Additional workflow and approval requirements may dictate a direction as well. Some CMS tools are very easy to set up and maintain while other require a lot more technical expertise. SharePoint is a good example of a tool that, while requiring a strong technical team to install and set up initially, is relatively easy to use by a wide range of administrative personnel, primarily due to its tight integration and similarity to Microsoft Office tool often already being used across the organization.
- What timeframes are needed from idea to launch of site? Full-scale website initiatives can take a long time to plan, author, design, and produce. Practically any tool can fit a schedule such as this. The difference really is apparent with promotional and targeted microsites that often need to be created in a tremendously short amount of time. Depending on how you answer earlier questions, the candidates for usage may narrow significantly when you look at the time to launch a new site. Complete systems, such as SharePoint, provide the flexibility to set up specific layouts and templates that can be modified for reuse as often as needed. While the initial deployment may take longer, there can be considerable advantages to the speed and flexibility that SharePoint can provide.
These are just a few fundamental, strategic questions that you should ask yourself and your team before committing to a CMS toolset. I have often referenced SharePoint in the above examples, but that may not always be the best approach for your specific needs. While we at PointBridge have had great success deploying SharePoint-based marketing websites and microsites, there are alternatives that you should explore. At the very least, you may find that it helps build a business case for the use of a robust CMS such as SharePoint. What has been your experience in selecting a CMS for your marketing efforts? And in making that selection, what other questions did you need to answer?
