The Essentials to Adopting a new CMS and Self-Publishing

One of the biggest hurdles after implementing a CMS in organizations, is preparing for the rollout and user adoption by self-publishers who have little or no HTML or coding skills. To increase internal user adoption by non-coders, your goal should be easy,  intuitive self-publishing. The easiest ways to do this is to strip down the admin interface to the bare essentials, after that, create a really terrific and engaging user tutorial. Doing both will reduce the never-to-be-underestimated "intimidation factor" of learning new software and processes.

Of course there are other needed requirements to adopting a new CMS like creation of a user support site, coaching, email support and of course a great CMS to begin with, but the two essentials for adopting and using a new CMS internally are:

- a user-friendly, intuitive CMS admin interface
- a user-friendly, engaging, step-by-step CMS user tutorial

What's the right CMS for your organization?

That depends on a number of factors like:

What Business Are You In?

If you're a large and dynamic multimedia company with content-rich productions being streamed on the web, then your CMS will need back the backbone and flexibility to deliver media rich productions in a variety of formats.

If you're a large information rich company that produces a variety of research and data, then your CMS will need to have the flexibility for top-notch metadata and easily create user-friendly URLs to optimize your content for search engines (SEO) for users to easily find your specific information searching in Google or other search engines.

How Deep are Your Pockets?

A simple CMS such as Wordpress costs next to nothing and offers Web2.0 functionality like easy updates, instant publishing, and plug-ins to a variety of formats to extend site functionality.

Open Source CMS like Drupal and Joomla are free of charge for the software, but the services component to develop and add modules has to be factored in. It gets more expensive depending on the complexity of the requirement. Free is not free unless used "out of the box" - and most sites and users want some form of customization. The good news is they can be deployed quickly reducing total cost of ownership, they are scalable, and a variety of modules can be added to extend functionality to meet any requirement.

Enterprise class CMS's such as Interwoven Teamsite, Sharepoint, Oracle are very expensive due to the cost of licensing software and cost of services, integration and configuration. Some can take years to deploy properly. And some still require HTML coders after all that.

Then there are the mid-range CMS offerings like Sitecore and HotBanana. Software is licensed and needs an integrator to deliver but they can be very viable solutions depending on your business needs.

Check out:

• CMSWatch for a list of vendors and CMS classes.
• My other posts on CMS best practices.

What You Should Look for in a CMS

While there are many things to look for when considering a content management system (CMS) there are a four considerations that are the most important:

1. Quick and easy installation with a helpful user community
2. Simple administration interface to ease user adoption
3. Add-on modules that easily add extra functionality as required
4. Simple template design

Choosing a CMS

I have used a lot of Content Management Systems (CMS) over the years, everything from a custom developed CMS, to a simple CMS, to an industry standard CMS, to open source CMS. There are key factors to choosing, deploying, using, and widely adopting a new CMS. The most important factors relate to technology integration and self-publishing user adoption:

Technology integration

1. Review your existing technology environment. What technology stack are you using? Research and choose a CMS that integrates and deploys easily because integration will be one of the biggest sources of failure - and the biggest financial cost to your organization. Enterprises CMSs that I have used are Sharepoint and Interwoven. 

2. Your other choice is an Open Source CMS which can be deployed stand-alone to quickly migrate existing content and get your new site easily deployed. Once deployed you can spend the time integrating with the existing technology stack. Good open source options that I have used are Joomla, WordPress and Drupal. This CMS Rating Guide accurately describes how users rate the many OpenSource CMS options.

User adoption

Other than how easily your existing techology integrates, the only big thing you have to think about is how easy it will be to have internal users adopt and self-publish in your new CMS. This should be treated as a separate project, after the new site(s) is deployed.  Best practices include creating:

• governance for your new CMS
• publishing workflows
• training guides and tutorials
• first and second level user support
• user support site
• CMS rollout schedule starting with internal users who are eager to be your champions
• simplified admin panel

The big thing here is making sure the admin interface is easy to use - strip or comment out any fields that aren't required. Your users will thank you and your user adoption/self-publishing success rate will sky-rocket.
Check out the CMS best practice links posted on the side of my blog.