There are many different vendors providing content management packages currently. Two particular types of content management systems are open source and commercial.

Two types of content management systems offered by both open source and commercial vendors are horizontal and vertical in structure. Horizontal CMS options are capable of being utilized in different industries and organizations with customizable interfaces and navigation structures for presenting and storing content. Vertical solutions tend to be much more specific in terms of the types of content that they are able to store and disseminate – making them less attractive to some industries than to others – because they really appeal to specific industries.

Open source content management system solutions are a cheaper alternative, attractive to many organizations initially because of not only their lower installation and maintenance costs, but also because of the scalability and ability to completely customize a solution as necessary and over time. However, as with anything there are drawbacks to OSS CMS systems. Drawbacks of open source include:

There is no guarantee that the software creator will ever make updates or produce add-on features for the package.
There is no guarantee of support, and in some cases no support at all is offered.
Your initial costs may be low, but if your organization plans to modify or upgrade the OSS package at any time there will necessarily be overhead involved in either time of programmers and technical personnel or cost in hiring an outside consultant or programmer to assist in the customization.

If you determine that the list of associated costs above are feasible within your organization in exchange for the ability to modify and personalize an OSS CMS package.

Commercial CMS vendors are gaining popularity with their fully-integrated, cost-effective, supported content management solutions. Many of the vendors currently marketing content management solutions have been formed by company mergers, and the development of OSS content management packages to the point where they are applicable to the needs of organizations prepared to actually purchase a complete CMS solution.

Some of the commercial CMS vendors and their products include:

 Vignette - V7
 Open Text - Livelink
 Interwoven - Interwoven 6 Platform
 Microsoft - Content Management Server
 Stellent - Stellent Content Management System
 DotnetNuke

Again, the most important step required in the content management solution selection process is making the determination of your organizations needs. Management will want to consider the following decisions:

1.What types of content will be managed within the CMS
2.How much content data has to be integrated with enterprise data
3.What are the security requirements
4.Cycle of content from creation, publication to deletion.
5.Is the CMS going to be a website content management or an enterprise content management solution?
6.Conducting a thorough assessment of an organization`s specific business application or processes prior to installation.

Secondary to determining the initial needs of your organization, it is imperative to determine the user groups served by your CMS package. You will need to deliver content to users, who can be generic visitors to your website or internal users who will authenticate to your website. Who will place that content initially into the content management system? Who are the editors, and what editing capabilities should they have? Who are the administrators of the content management system? What functions will be granted to each of these groups, and how will you differentiate your content and access levels among these different groups?

Once you have identified your needs, and defined your constituency groups, you are prepared to being to identify the right CMS solution for your organization.

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