Last week I attended the Future of Web Content Management Debate hosted by Squiz at Australia House. I met many interesting people and saw a range of presentations from analysts, customers and software vendors. I’m not sure that the future of the WCM was really debated that much, but perhaps the acquisition of enterprise search engine Funnelback by Squiz tells us that content management may well be rendered obsolete by improved information retrieval technologies… The debate instead seemed to focus on the advantages of open source content management software, as you might expect given that Squiz is an open source CMS vendor.

But why should open source even be a consideration when selecting a CMS? Increasingly we see drives by government and other organisations to promote open source, but as Adriaan Bloem points out, the only generalisation you can really make about open source software is legal: the licence. So unless being able to get into the nuts and bolts of the application and feeding back into its source are important to you, then open source shouldn’t really matter.

What should matter, and is often confused with the open source requirement, is:

• cost: initial licences, project costs and on-going support;
• who’ll carry out the development and support: an external supplier or an in-house team;
• relationship with your suppliers and how easy it is to change them if something goes wrong without throwing away your technology;
• upgrade path: ensuring you don’t over-customise your application so that you can’t move off it once it has outlived its usefulness.

Certainly, open source has a strong case to make with many of these issues, but fundamentally choosing the right CMS is about matching business requirements and budget to a technology and supplier, not about licence models. Hopefully the one-sheet guide we just published will help you in this respect.

Many thanks to Squiz for organising the debate and in particular to Kenton Ward, who was very open about his company and its development approach. Kenton also organises the Last Thursday group who meet in Shoreditch on the last Thursday of each month to discuss content management. Do join us!