CMS or Portal?
Published 24 Oct 2005
I have a question for all you university web pros lurking out there: if you were to somehow secure the resources to implement one enterprise-level project, would you choose a CMS or a portal? Lots of you out there have experience with one or both of these— care to share?
Although I haven’t actually secured the resources needed (sigh…), I am starting to prepare for that magical day. And I keep going back and forth about which one would be best to go for first. Both of them have their advantages, and both of them are major projects that would be tough to pull off well.
I like the idea of the uniformity that a CMS could give our site, and I also like the idea of having a framework that would allow folks with no web development experience to update their sites easily. This is what all the CMSs promise, but I guess the cynic in me finds it hard to believe that they can actually deliver on it. Plus, being a Standardistatrix, I have yet to see a enterprise-level CMS that outputs the kind of code that I am comfortable with. I would love to be wrong about this, so please tell me if I am!
As far as a portal goes, I would love the idea of the functionality and targeted content that it could provide. I also like the idea of diverting on-campus users to a portal, and using the main university home page to target exterior audiences. I think it would be a relief to serve fewer target audiences on our main page, as I talked about here. I wonder, though, if folks would actually use the portal. Would they drink if I led them to water? Plus, there I have same standards queasiness with portals that I have with CMSs.
So what would you do? Any insights to share?
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Commentary
Elaine Nelson writes
Oct 25 at 05:35 AM #
I think I’d go for a CMS, which is sort of what I’m doing implementing Drupal. (I’ve become a big fan of the stealth/gradual project, as opposed to the “enterprise rollout.” I should really write about that somewhere….)
I find that the whole portal thing doesn’t get much more than a shrug from me. Although that may have more to do with how they’ve been hyped (a floor wax and a dessert topping! juliennes fries!) than anything objective.
I have MUCH more standards queasiness with portals than with CMS, too. Some of the open-source CMSs have pretty decent standards support.
Jeff Dillon writes
Oct 25 at 07:38 AM #
I think I would also have to vote for the CMS also.
1.Audience – CMS efforts will probably affect a schools external audience greatly. Pages used for recruitment could stay more fresh. A portal is generally for students, faculty and staff that are already affiliated with the University.
2.Benefits -The benefits of a portal are much more difficult to comprehend for some people and therefore difficult to communicate to key audiences.
3.Adoption rate – Web developers and content managers are a very small sub-set of the portal audience. I think it would be much easier and quicker to get them onboard than the larger portal-user audience that has much different needs.
JC writes
Oct 25 at 08:10 AM #
I would have to go with a CMS. I find it to be so easy for users to comprehend and for updates to be made on the fly. I don’t have any experience with portals, so I can’t compare.
CMS structure was really robust and kept the integrity of the design.
Pat writes
Oct 25 at 09:12 AM #
Well, I would check out what Jeff Veen said about open source CMS systems. But more to the core I don’t I would start with either of those. I would start with something like CAS. Central authentication has been very important here at Chico. The portal and all the other apps that people get to from the portal (except WebCT) make use of CAS.
Our portal is pretty sparse on the inside. People get in, get to where they need to go, and get out. That’s it. We pass them off to other apps and let that app do it’s thing. We don’t try and implement every app inside the portal, because lets face it, an app in an app is LTO (Less Than Optimal).
Back to my idea though, once you got central auth, you never go back because it makes the life of developers on campus so much easier.
Andrea writes
Oct 25 at 09:31 AM #
Some good points.
Elaine: You should write about your stealth approach! Sounds intriguing. Also, any Drupal sites you’ve set up that you’d be willing to show?
Pat: Good point. Our IT folks are working on a central authentication project now, which will be so nice. From looking a the tour of Chico’s portal, it looks just like the kind of thing I would go for. The most important points would be personalized bookmarks, calendars, and single sign-on.
Keep the comments coming! This is very useful. :)
Ed Sharrer writes
Oct 25 at 09:50 AM #
I’d go for a portal, and it’s not even close.
Portals give you tremendous opportunities to communicate with and provide online services to your internal audience. It eliminates the problem of “where do we put this service and how do we authenticate to it?” It also provides nice separation between your public/marketing site and your private/services site.
Considering the size and diversity of a university website, a CMS is trying to make every size and shape of peg to fit through the same hole. It would be attempting to apply a technical solution to a non-technical problem IMO. Not to mention, a problem that will likely never be solved (no matter how much we dream of solving it).
Bottom line: if you want to invest in something that will provide actual solutions to current problems for the most users across campus, then a portal is the only way to go.
Pat writes
Oct 25 at 09:52 AM #
One thing about portals and targeted content…put a lot of time in thinking about how granular you want to go, how granular people will push you to go, and where you are going to get the data to put people into the various content buckets…
David Jaeger writes
Dec 1 at 08:22 AM #
I vote CMS simply because the impact of a CMS is much greater: Standard look and feel, ownership of content, updated content, automated workflow and approval, etc.
Anyone with a my.yahoo.com or similar personal start page can subscribe to any content on your site that is RSS enabled, such as academic calendar, athletic events, press releases, class assignments, etc.
Attending college is just one aspect of a student’s life, and it will only be part of their life for an average of 2 or 4 years. Should we force students to use a second portal (college portal) if most already have personal portals? And for those without a personal portal or knowledge of RSS, podcasting, blogging, etc., is it a better use of institutional resources to educate these students about this technology?
Mike writes
Jan 4 at 07:33 AM #
My answer to “CMS or Portal” is both!! The reality is that they are two different things for two different purposes.
CMS is for managing the content of webpages within a website. If I have a lot of webpages which have content that must be updated frequently, CMS is a great tool. A portal serves quite different needs, some of which have already been mentioned. The simplest way that I can think of positioning the two is this:
If you want to create, approve and publish web pages (content within a website), CMS is the way to go.
If you want to have easy, well organized access to information that is sourced from elsewhere in your enterprise (applications, documents etc) then a portal is the way to go.
I can also easily envision a situation where CMS is used to manage the content of a website that is accessed via a portal.
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