Building a homegrown CMS or implementing an "off-the-shelf" variety can easily overwhelm even large development organizations. In a sense, CMS is just classic wish-list, kitchen-sink IT with some syntactic sugar added. Hint: even an "off-the-shelf" CMS often requires multiple man-years of customization requiring hundreds of thousands of investment dollars. That's just for starters.

Conforming to three decades of unhappy IT experience, many top-down CMS projects have stalled out. Yet, you must still meet the needs of real people once the consultants have moved on. What we really need is a raft of Content Management Applications (or CMAs, my trademark pending) that wrap end-user solution frameworks around a CMS platform.

UserLand's Frontier is a full-blown content management system, but it's not nearly so bloated as many of its competitors. Manila and the new Radio UserLand product are content management applications. While this article can't hope to cover any of these products in even minimal detail, the following two points will orient you:

• UserLand enables developers to rapidly deploy content management applications of their own that are layered over Frontier. ZATZ' own ZENPRESS tool, used to produce DominoPower, is one such content management application;

• UserLand enables end-users to publish their own content on the Web, to the Web. As part of this, UserLand was a pioneer of the well-known "weblog" concept, which binds a diarist content model to calendaring.

So, Frontier is the development tool, the IDE, and the application programming environment. Manila can be described as a specialized support application for news publications and journalistic enterprises. It provides serious support for secure, collaborative editing, including check-in-check-out, membership registration, discussion databases with edit-block features, and the like.

However, be sure you abstract Manila appropriately. Philosophically, UserLand argues that much corporate work, both "intra" and "inter," is journalistic in type and benefits from the same feature set as traditional publications. I agree one hundred percent. Corporate teams produce memoranda (drafts), reports (articles), and presentations (features) as frequently, if not more so, than publications deliver content. Just like publications, corporate teams serve targeted "reader" communities, both inside and outside the corporation.

Regrettably, many content management systems are recapitulating the user-unfriendly "feature-creap" path. This is the disease that sunk many desktop applications before the "crudeness" of the Internet threatened to blow them away by freeing users to make a mess--a liberated, creative, profitable, productive mess. For instance, a Notes installation often requires a phalanx of specialists and months of training.

While UserLand's Frontier is quite sophisticated (don't mistake elegance for limitation), its developers communicate a passion for setting users free to do their own jobs without having to turn into computer jockeys. Isn't that IT's real mission?