CMS for the Accessible Federal Agency

Friday, April 25, 2008

Every now and then I'm tasked with an especially interesting assignment at the office. A real "humdinger" of a task that breaks the cycle of normalcy and helps to pad the old resume. By default my job tends to revolve around a few tasks that are repeated throughout the weeks and months: website design, maintenance, Section 508 issue resolution, UI support, and helping to write standard operating procedures/white papers. So when new, important tasks come up, I always jump at the chance to help break the monotony. Today was one of those big days.

Today I was tasked with taking the lead on picking a Content Management System (CMS) for the federal agency that I currently work for on-site. It's a very big, very important responsibility that will have a deep impact on everything that I and the web team here do from now until the end of our contract in four years. This will steer the direction that we go and lock us into a very expensive piece of software. Obviously not a task to take lightly.

So, what is it we're looking for in our CMS? Well, the "need-to-haves" are:

• Works on the .NET / IIS platform with SQL/Oracle database support
• Generates valid XHTML
• Uses templates that are/can be easily made to be Section 508
• Costs under $30k
• Can be implemented on both an Intranet and Internet site
• Highly scalable
• Licensed and supported commercially
• Includes a user friendly WYSIWYG editor for non-technical content managers

Those are the basic elements of the CMS solution that we're looking for. At first glance those seem like a lot of requirements, but really those are just skimming the surface. Cost will probably be an issue and if we decide to go with one of the more expensive packages there will no doubt be discussions back and forth about whether or not it's worth it.

So far in my research, I've come across three CMS packages that fit the basic bill. The first (and best fit thus far) is Percussion Software's Rhthymix, which ironically is being used by HHS. It's got a lot of bang for the buck, and seems to be fairly easy to implement. The price is also listed as "negotiable", which means it's either ridiculously expensive or might actually be within our budget.

The other two packages I've found thus far are called Immediacy CMS and RedDot CMS, which seems to be the more solid of the two at first glance, but starts at $55k - way out of our price range. Never the less, it's going to stay on the list for the initial presentation.

Next Steps

As today was the first day of this project, obviously nothing major will come of what progress has been made thus far. The process of picking out our CMS is going to be long and thorough since it represents a major paradigm shift in the way we currently get our content out onto the web.

After picking out three or four solid CMS packages I'll call the vendors to ask the tough questions (price, support, availability, scale, upgrades, true Section 508 compliance, etc.) as well as try and setup a good date for them to come out and give us a nice demo. That's followed up by discussion, demo testing, more discussion, and then the real work begins: setup, implementation, and moving content from flat ASPX pages to clean, database-driven content.

There's a lot of work ahead of me, and I don't see this really getting to the decision point until May or June, but that will give us a lot of time to get our pages cleaned up and ready for the transition and for me to continue growing my hair out I'll have something to tear out while the transition is going on.

Technorati Tags: cms, content management system, immediacy, reddot, rhythmix.

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