Choosing a CMS and Understanding Open Source
March 27, 2009
BALTIMORE, MD—One of The Berndt Group’s core activities is helping organizations select and purchase the right content management (CMS) tools, which can result in great savings and a better experience all around. With budget pressures, mid-market products are under price pressures, and organizations are increasingly looking at Open Source alternatives. But watch out, you often get what you pay for.
A crucial aspect of picking a CMS platform is understanding its total cost of ownership, and how it will work with existing staff skills.
There are a number of considerations:
- Many mid-market CMS vendors are getting more aggressive to close deals, and there is a lot to consider in the fine print. For instance, some vendors will talk about modules you need but not include them in the initial sale price. Then, once you’ve bought the product, you find out there are another $20K of modules you need. So, it’s important to ask the question, more than once, “does all of the functionality we’ve discussed come in the package included in this quote?” (Sometimes no bad intentions are in the mix, just harried, busy sales people who lose track of what they are selling).
- Open Source options are increasingly viable and impressive,
but typically harbor hidden costs that can end up being 75
- 150% of those of commercial software. That’s right—your
Drupal, Plone, Hippo, or Alfresco implementation can end up
costing you MORE than commercial software at the end of the
day! This is because of three primary factors:
- Most of the Open Source products require more ongoing support (difficult upgrade paths, more maintenance) than their commercial brothers. Plan for 4 - 8 hours of programmer time a month under normal conditions to keep some of the more popular Open Source platforms running and up-to-date for a busy site. If more serious issues arise, your only recourse is developers (and developer communities) for which you have to pay hourly—taking far more risk than in a commercial “support circumstance” for problems of runaway scope.
- Although Open Source is catching up on features and user experience, many of the products are incomplete relative to the needs of organizations maintaining public web sites. This often means significant customization, often not understood until well into the project. Yes—it’s amazing how much you get for free with Open Source—but don’t expect it to be complete. This means time and money.
- Open Source products often lead one in the direction of commercial modules and plug-ins, which create a secondary commercial market around Open Source. So, be aware that though they may not cost much, there are likely to be some hidden costs for commercial extension modules.
- Significant web sites require considerable care and feeding once development is complete. What sort of skills does your organization need to have in house: Java, VB, C#, PHP, Python? It’s important to get a clear picture (from the vendor, but also from their client references) of how deep your programming organization needs to go, and with what languages. As always, there are inefficiencies to supporting too many technology stacks, and to having your programmers work outside their core competencies. That can make for some expensive CMS!
There are ways around all this problems, but they require a detailed understanding of the trade-offs and real-world scenarios that follow from different CMS packages. It’s crucial to think about the total cost of ownership before you commit to a platform, just as it is crucial to understand how a platform will actually work in your total web operation. Time and money—both in a positive, and negative sense, hang in the balance. You can delve into evaluating CMS platforms yourself, or you can save time and money by working with an experienced firm like ours to take advantage of expert analysts who are familiar with the ins and outs of these products.
There are great mid-market and Open Source platforms out there. Ultimately, it’s a matter of finding the right tool for the job, and understanding all the cost implications before you commit.
About The Berndt Group
The Berndt Group has been a leading Web design, development and brand communications firm since 1991. The firm provides an integrated set of creative services, including strategic consulting, brand and application development, software implementation, web site design, and internet marketing. Based in Baltimore, MD, the firm services a diverse international and regional base of over fifty active clients, including: The National Aquarium, Johns Hopkins Institutions, SafeNet, Inc., Raytheon, U.S. Immigration, The Federal Aviation Administration, The U.S. Forest Service, The Abell Foundation, and many others. For more information, visit www.berndtgroup.net.
Media Contact
Inquiries? Please contact:
Michelle Géczy
Vice President
phone: 410.889.5854 x 12
email: michelle.geczy@berndtgroup.net
