I suspect that this story or variations of this story have been played out at just about every Web development company in the world. Some have understood the undertaking of creating a product and have been highly successful. My guess is that many would not have understood the real size and scale of the task.

Thinking of building a content management system from scratch?
I may be a cynic, but if you're thinking of building a content management system from scratch, don't bother.

Even if you have a funky new concept, a new technical approach, or a user interface that is easier than ever before, I still wouldn't bother.

The market for content management systems is seriously overcrowded and overheated. Pretty much every Web development company in the world (and there's an awful lot of them out there) has developed its own content management system. Building a content management system is the logical next step after building many customized Web sites--it just makes sense to build something generic and full featured instead of re-inventing the wheel over and over. There are more content management systems on the market than it's possible to count.

Rather than build a content management system from scratch, it makes far more sense to review those on the market and choose one best suited to your requirements. This goes equally for organizations planning to implement a content management system in house and for Web development companies looking for a solution to re-sell to their clients.

There is far less risk, time, and cost involved in licensing an existing product rather than building yet-another-content-management-system.

The other thing to bear in mind is that the technology within a content management system is pretty much unrelated to commercial success in the market. Commercial success is driven not by technology but rather by a company's ability to sell and market the product. These days, most content management systems have most of the technology features needed to get the job done, so entering the market with a new product on the strength of some new technical innovation may lead to critical acclaim for your product but may not lead to commercial success. It's easier to create a technically innovative product than to build a commercially successful sales and marketing team--at least for us propeller heads anyway.

Heading on…
In this article I was planning to cover the views, forms, and agents of the content administration system, but I've decided that the content administration system was covered sufficiently in last month's article. This month we'll move straight on to wrapping up this series of articles.

Content management is something that almost all organizations need at some level, whether it's to manage one Web site or a series of a hundred Internet and intranet sites. There are a million and one content management systems out there, and as a Lotus Domino programmer there is every chance that sooner or later you will be asked to implement some sort of content management solution. You'll need to decide whether to "buy or build," and hopefully these articles will help you to understand the issues in making such decisions.