I was asked to sit as technical lead on a team built to pick a new Web Content Management system (WCM) for Kodak's Graphics Communications Group, a $3 billion global business. This was a hugely valuable experience for me in gaining insight into the variety of products on the WCM market and their pros and cons.
The first goal of the team was to determine approximate costs to purchase, deploy and migrate to a new Web CMS for the Graphics Communications business. The team included IT and marketing members as well as technical team and content analysts like myself. I developed some WAG numbers that came out around $1.8M including development, IT and other resources over a one year project. Halfway through this phase we discovered that the business had in mind something like $600K. This later got chopped to $400K which isn't really enough to do anything. The WAG is going to end up being more accurate. Remember this is a $3B global business.
The second goal was to pick a system. We started with a list of 6 vendors: Red Dot, Day, Ektron, EMC, Hannon-Hill and ATG. ATG and Hannon-Hill self-selected out as being too high-end and low-end respectively for what we were trying to do, as captured in an RFP. I sat through multiple vendor sales demos, some of which were downright horrible. Our requirements included multi-language, multi-regional site, easy template development, forms development, migration import tools and reporting features. We bought the CMS Watch Report and used it extensively, and I highly recommend it.
My favorite from a technical standpoint was Day Communique, but their pricing model eventually set them out of the running, even though their product is being used elsewhere in the company. We ended up recommending Red Dot, with Ektron CMS .NET 400 as a fallback. Initially Ektron seemed much cheaper, but when we added up developmen, staging and production server and SQL Server costs it ended up being much closer to Red Dot, almost $200K in licenses.
In the end, this doesn't leave much budget left for implementation and migration, so the business has gone back to the drawing board. Nevertheless I learned a tremendous amount about the Web CMS market from working with this highly skilled team.
