Currently we’re in the process of planning a rewrite of our vertical market portal system, delivered as SaaS, in order to bring it out of the stone ages of ASP.NET 1.0 and into to something a bit more modern, mostly so that it doesn’t feel so awkward mixing with our other, more cutting edge applications during customer demos and office integration parties. (We’re sensitive like that).
Anyway, building a portal system from scratch is tempting from a technologists point of view, but a bit silly from a business standpoint as the "portal" has been solved a few trillion times already using every web-capable technology known to man, ASP.NET included.
Choosing a CMS from the perspective of a SaaS vendor looking for a development platform to build a niche product and deliver it using flexible pricing models (including free, at times) is no easy task.
There are three major challenges in this process:
- Flooded CMS Market: The sheer quantity of CMS systems for sale or for free. True, only a few rise to the top, but it takes a lot of sifting to figure out which ones.
- Licensing: Not an issue with the open source projects in this review, but for most of the quality commercial products sporting open, powerful extensibility, this is a huge issue, and probably a deal breaker for us at the end of the day because we want the flexibility to throw our application on any number of servers at any time to suit any purpose without throwing fistfuls of money into the furnace each time we do so. This is probably not so much of an issue for shops wanting to build systems for their own companies, or for consultants or integrators building unique systems one at a time for their customers.
- Technical Fit: This is sort of a two part problem – is the product under review capable of easily being extended to seamlessly integrate with and host our custom applications, authentication mechanisms and Asynchronous Messaging Lifestyle, and is the system documented well enough that it even matters what it is technically capable of.
Anyway, I’ve spend more hours than I care to admit scouring the web for CMS systems that will accelerate our time to market while using modern techniques and technologies (.NET compatible only) and at the same time offers a licensing model that will allow us to operate freely in our own marketplace. While the hammer hasn’t fallen yet in our decision making process, the licensing of models of the top tier commercial options are probably going to be too restrictive. But I’m listing them here anyway because our licensing needs are unique.
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Commercial Products:
Sitecore CMS – very powerful, very polished product. They have a suite of web 2.0 collaboration modules you can buy, a "Foundry" product that allows you to manage large numbers of sites at once, and a nice developer, content designer and end user experience. Their licensing, though, didn’t work for us. They wouldn’t license their intranet / web 2.0 product to us at all because we sell to external customers, and their Foundry product had page limit caps on it. There were no other options, so, unfortunately, not for us.
Ektron CMS – Also a very nice product. The administrative functionality definitely feels a bit old school from a look and feel perspective (especially when compared to the Office 2007 Ribbon interface and "virtual web desktop" features of Sitecore) but the suite of pre-built portal controls can’t be beat. Well thought out, lots of social networking features, easy to integrate, very nice. The sales experience was head and shoulders above Sitecore. The demo’s were all impressive, they have a blue million fully featured "starter sites" you can download and play with that feature various strengths and uses for the product, and the sales team is highly responsive, and willing to work with our devs to build a prototype during the evaluation process. I like this company a lot – BUT – you need to buy a server license for each URL – and we’ll host dozens of URL’s, many for small low-revenue companies, and so that may not work for us.
Kentico – well priced product, you can set up a sandbox without sales intervention and start playing around, plenty of features for the bullet point-sheet, BUT – it just felt a little awkward and clunky to me. Check it out for yourself, but it wasn’t quite what it needed to be for us to built our product out of it.
Episerver – The website got me all excited – the technology looks GREAT – but good luck buying the thing in the US. They only sell through partners, they only list three US partners on their site, and I couldn’t get a single one of them to call me back. Requests for sales support on their website went unanswered – SO… no thanks. (As if I had a choice).
Sitefinity – from Telerik, a vendor of very nice ASP.NET UI controls (and windows forms controls). Attractive site with workflow built-in, *very* inexpensive, but not in the same league with the other players in terms of functionality or maturity. Probably great for outward facing websites, not enough meat for our portal app.
Two others I didn’t carefully review but that look nice enough:
http://www.adxstudio.com/
http://www.contentxxl.com/Home.aspx
Commercial, but FREE?!
AXCMS – Support driven, like an open source project, but not open source. Odd duck. We haven’t looked at this one yet, just found it yesterday, but it looks promising. I’ll update this post once we’ve dived deeper.
Open Source
There are quite a few mature, open source CMS products for ASP.NET out there. Probably the most famous is DotNetNuke, but there are at least five or six mature competitors and a few nascent but promising projects as well.
DotNetNuke – I don’t have much to say about this project, except that it is hugely popular, but just not for me. The code base is in VB.NET, which isn’t a deal breaker, but not my preference all things being equal. Also the extensibility framework seems to be just a touch messy. My preference is to define controls that are fundamentally independent of a framework and easily wire them in. DotNetNuke likes things a little more intimate last time I checked. But there is a huge selection of pre-built modules to choose from for free, and many for sale, but also many of very low quality, so you have to be careful (although they are almost all very cheap, so the risk isn’t high). I believe DotNetNuke has a service organization, so you can buy professional support, and there are many, many vendors and consultants offering everything from full DNN implementations to skin designs.
Raibow Portal – I didn’t take a very close look at this project, even though it seems reasonably popular and quite deep. Mostly because it too suffers from the million-modules of questionable quality issue, and it isn’t very attractive our up to date feeling out of the box. If I’m evaluating a product and feel like I’m back in 1998, it is hard for me to stay engaged. Probably a personal issue, so don’t let it dissuade you from taking a peek.
Cuyahoga Project – this is a sparse CMS framework meant to be extended, and from what I can see extending it is not hard. It comes with a few basic modules, like a blog and news. The admin UI is clean and relatively un-adorned, and I believe its development takes an ALT.NET bent. We’ll be taking a closer look at this one. Documentation is a bit spar
se and scattered, though, but that is common in the ASP.NET Open Source CMS arena, it seems.
Umbraco – A very nice, relatively mature CMS. It is in beta for a 4.0 version with looks vastly improved, with a renovated plug-in architecture, ASP.NET Provider security, and many other enhanced features. The 4.0 release looks like it will be so much better than the 1.x version, we haven’t dived too deeply into the 1.x version and are seeing if we can hold out. This project also has rather spotty, user contributed-feeling documentation, but has an active and vibrant community to help balance that out. Also backed by a support organization if you want commercial support, and you can license the software cheaply for commercial purposes if you want to brand the administrative user interface. We will be taking a much closer look at this project in the near future as well.
[UPDATE:Here is a link to the Umbraco 4.0 beta page. This page provides an overview of the new features, as well as links to download a developer preview and a screencast on installing the developer preview.]
Portal Engine & Enterprise CMS – this project is open source, but not available yet. They seem to be preparing for an imminent beta release, but no source code as of yet. Of all the products I’ve evaluated so far, commercial or open source, this one has me the most excited by far. I do hope it becomes available in time for us to leverage it (and that it is all that it appears to be).
As of this afternoon (10/1/2008) the Sense/Net Beta 1 of this product is available on CodePlex. The product home page is here.
Here is how they bill themselves:
Sense/Net Portal Engine is an Open Source application suite for building integrated Enterprise Content Management (ECM, ECMS) and Enterprise Portal (EPS) solutions running on the .Net and Mono platform. Sense/Net Portal Engine TNG is an Open Source alternative to Microsoft SharePoint
Sounds great eh? It looks beautiful, appears to be backed by a large team, and also has a support organization. Actually, it is the next generation re-write of an established commercial ECMS product. The open source version is the next iteration, appropriately suffixed with TNG - "The Next Generation." They cite as a motivation for the project the lack of an enterprise grade CMS in the open source, .NET space, and I have felt that same vacuum myself, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed. The best part, for me, is that they are providing a technology that I believe can be used outside the portal engine called the Portal File System, which is a robust, open source, hierarchical content repository with versioning and security, etc, like the Java cats have had forever but unlike anything that can be found in .NET (that I have been able to find). You can sign up for the beta, but you don’t get an e-mail when you do that confirms your request, so hopefully the sign-up is functional. Their blog is here: http://blog.portalengine.org/
Other open source projects I haven’t looked closely at:
http://n2cms.com/
http://www.devage.com/
And a nascent but active CMS being build on the new ASP.NET MVC framework:
http://www.codeplex.com/MVCMS
We’ll continue to explore, and report back once we’ve managed to build a few prototypes on the various platforms.
Ultimately, I imagine we have Seth Godin to thank for all these wonderful, free books. Here is another one – this one is about implementing SOA, and from Joe McKendrick’s description, it is part implementation guide, part inspiration to get started now, not wait for the mythical day when your organization’s blueprints for the Hanging Gardens of Babylon of enterprise architecture are finally complete.
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