McGovern on CMS

March 03, 2003 | 1 Comments

In his March 3rd edition of New Thinking: Why content management software hasn’t worked, Gerry McGovern talks about why the promise of Content Management has thus-far fallen short. He makes some good points, and to those of us who have dealt with an over-hyped and badly designed CMS, we can totally relate.

He also talks about how most organizations don’t need a CMS, and this I can’t agree with enough. There are many alternate solutions out there for distributed authorship. Movable Type and Macromedia’s Contribute being two great ways we are using down at the hospital. Our new Intranet that launched last week is built solidly on MT for it’s main information channels and is working great, and thus far, while we’ve not rolled out Contribute, it seems to be the perfect tool for all those pesky departmental updates.

However, there is one thing he mentions that I will wholeheartedly disagree with. I guess you could successfully run a massive Web site on FrontPage, but that doesn’t mean you should do. I’m my experience FrontPage causes way, way more problems than it’s worth. It’s probably one of the biggest barriers to our own redesign and rolling out of Contribute down at the hospital. I’d suggest avoiding it like the plague.

Filed under: Web General