The Freak Parade - Latest Comments in Content Management Systems (CMS) for the .NET Platform

Re: Content Management Systems (CMS) for the .NET Platform

Metal File Cabinets Used — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 11:41:10 -0000

I wanna
find more info about this, anybody could?

Re: Content Management Systems (CMS) for the .NET Platform

irfankhadrani — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 05:19:35 -0000

Thank you very much. This blog really helped a lot of information regarding CMS for .Net

Re: Content Management Systems (CMS) for the .NET Platform

nstults — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:25:37 -0000

Funny how different peoples experiences with the same company can be. Goes to show companies really are made out of people. My experience with Ektron sales was really top notch, and even after they spent a bunch of time with me and I went with a roll your own approach, there seemed to be no hard feelings, which usually isn't my experience with sales people. But SiteCore had very good sales too - also responsive and professional, and I did like their product better on the whole, it just wasn't licensed quite right for us. I have learned the hard way though that the sales team doesn't always indicate what you'll find on the inside. We chose to host our website on Servepath because the sales guy blew the Rackspace sales guy absolutely out of the water, but in the end I'm certain Rackspace would have been a better option, as the Servepath tech support team is as about as hands off as they can get, a total 180 from the feeling you get from the sales team. In any case I'm glad you found a solution you're happy with!

Re: Content Management Systems (CMS) for the .NET Platform

Sriram Parthasarathy — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 06:58:56 -0000

Hi Nathan,

After heavily researching 20+ products, I stumbled upon your article. Very well written and VERY helpful. My research had important points missing and your article provided them very nicely. May be, I should compile a comparison matrix, put it up on the web, give you due credit, and link back here!!

We had narrowed down to Umbraco in the open source category and to Ektron and SiteCore in the commercial category. I wrote to Ektron on a Friday and promptly got a response saying they'd like to talk to us on Monday. The trail went cold after that. After trying twice to follow up, I had to give up due to time constraints.

On the same Friday, I had sent a mail to SiteCore as well. We received a mail back from their Sales and Marketing Coordinator in Denmark (Lila Carlyle) with concrete timeslots for the following Tuesday. I confirmed my slot and also wrote about our integration-heavy requirements. SiteCore called me on the dot. The sales coordinator made the introductions and said that she had senior techie (Frank McDonald) with her to discuss technical points with me right away.

The impression that the SiteCore team gave me on that call was one of thorough professionalism. They had researched my specific integration needs and were ready with answers when I asked questions. The best thing I liked was their honesty in telling us what was doable (with respect to our case) and what wasn't. And they had the deep knowledge to suggest well-known alternatives that would work well with SiteCore for stuff that wasn't in SiteCore's direct scope. They also provided fair details about Development License and Production License.

As a company that develops products and provides product development services to others, we will not have to think twice now. For non-commercial (or low-budget) projects we are going with Umbraco. For all relevant commercial projects, our clear choice will be SiteCore.

Nathan, thanks again for this gem of an article. Keep up the good work!

Fellow decision-makers, here are two unsolicited recommendations :-)

1) All the above products have great features. SiteCore adds human availability to it. This is VERY important, IMHO.

2) http://cmsmatrix.org/ is worth a look for its feature-by-feature comparison of most CMS tools out there.

Best wishes to all of you with your respective projects!

Cheers,
Sriram

Re: Content Management Systems (CMS) for the .NET Platform

CM — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 09:27:45 -0000

You totally missed mojoPortal

Re: Content Management Systems (CMS) for the .NET Platform

nstults — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 19:54:23 -0000

ASP.NET MVC :)

Re: Content Management Systems (CMS) for the .NET Platform

Adz — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 17:41:09 -0000

So which CMS did you settle on in the end?

Re: Content Management Systems (CMS) for the .NET Platform

Dan Matthews — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 06:31:29 -0000

Nathan - fantastic post. I went through almost exactly the same exercise a couple of years ago when Microsoft pulled the plug on MCMS and the MOSS licensing didn't cut the mustard!

We evaluated most of the ones you listed and drew almost identical conclusions for most - we shortlisted Ektron, Kentico, SiteCore, EPiServer and ADXSTUDIO. We then selected EPiServer for our strategic CMS, and have found it absolutely terrific. Strange that you had such difficulties speaking to them because we've found them very forthcoming (albeit they do have a presence in the UK).

We also partnered with ADXSTUDIO for low-cost solutions as their license model at entry level is very attractive. It's a limited product and is BADLY in need of a cosmetic and technical overhaul, but it does a job. The most recent version is a big improvement.

If you ever want any assistance with EPiServer or ADXSTUDIO just shout - the company I work for has offices in the States too. If not, then good luck with wherever your CMS journey takes you!

Dan

Re: Content Management Systems (CMS) for the .NET Platform

Nathan — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 01:05:21 -0000

My pleasure. If you end up trying one or more of these, stop by and let us know how it went :)

Re: Content Management Systems (CMS) for the .NET Platform

Ryan Farley — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 00:42:27 -0000

Wow. Completely great list. Appreciate you taking the time to put this list together.

-Ryan

Re: Content Management Systems (CMS) for the .NET Platform

Mayur Upadhyaya — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 08:42:29 -0000

Hiya Nathan, we are planning to open source them. We are currently just out of prototyping and now into building the module for a couple of clients.

Send me your email address and I'll follow up with details of what we are up to and where we are at.

Cheers,

Mayur

Re: Content Management Systems (CMS) for the .NET Platform

Ryan Roberts — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 06:03:55 -0000

>Have you contributed to the Umbraco source?

You have probably seen my name on a search engine extension for umbraco that handles related pages by metadata and tag cloud type scenarios. You may well have also cursed me had you tried to use it before a colleage of mine pointed at the correct index file.

So I am a Ryan Roberts, but not the Ryan Roberts.

Re: Content Management Systems (CMS) for the .NET Platform

Nathan — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 22:57:07 -0000

Thanks David, I'll tell him you said hi.

Re: Content Management Systems (CMS) for the .NET Platform

Nathan — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 22:56:33 -0000

Ryan, I haven't really even looked at N2, but I will now. We do not need to give schema editing capabilities to end users, that model sounds interesting. Have you contributed to the Umbraco source? I believe I've seen your name around Codeplex in connection with Umbraco before. (It stands out because an old friend of mine is named Ryan Roberts. I presume you are not he :)

Re: Content Management Systems (CMS) for the .NET Platform

Nathan — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 22:50:43 -0000

@ Mayur - I didn't know Cuyahoga had a 2.0 beta - very exciting. Please do let me know how your social networking modules come along, especially if you decide to open source them :)

Re: Content Management Systems (CMS) for the .NET Platform

David Lund — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 16:37:19 -0000

No worries Nathan. I just found it very interesting that we had such similar searches, even if for diff reason, and had to chime in since I knew Maffei. If you can work it out licensing wise, I dont think you would be disappointed with Ektron, but I leave that to you. :-) If you do talk to Maffei, tell him I said Hi!

Take care and good luck.

Re: Content Management Systems (CMS) for the .NET Platform

Ryan Roberts — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 09:26:02 -0000

DNN is a terrible, terrible base as an application platform of any sort. To provide cheap webhosting for starcraft fansites and catteries it does the job. For anything else, just run away; the code smells like a sewer and the community is cliquey and defensive.

I'm a long time Umbraco user who has just started looking at N2 CMS, and from what I can see it is a very nice design, with great code quality and test coverage.

Unlike most CMS's I have seen, it gets its document model from your code, which you decorate with attributes to specifiy editor types. A very elegant model indeed if you do not need to give schema design time abilities to your end users. Like umbraco 4, it uses masterpages and aspx for its templating, so it is all fully source controllable - that was a big problem with umbraco <4.

Re: Content Management Systems (CMS) for the .NET Platform

Mayur Upadhyaya — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 08:57:05 -0000

Hiya Nathan,

We have begun to use Cuyahoga as our chosen framework, and its a real joy. The 2.0 beta has some great features that work for us and our plan to move into SaaS.

We are building some social networking modules at the moment, I'll let you know how we get on.

Mayur

Re: Content Management Systems (CMS) for the .NET Platform

Nathan — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 11:49:01 -0000

@David L. - thanks for the valuable feedback. As I said in my post, if we were a consulting firm creating solutions for clients, I probably would have sighed on the dotted line with Ektron. Our licensing requirements are a bit trickier though. Not so say they don't have a model that can work for us, it is just more complicated.

Re: Content Management Systems (CMS) for the .NET Platform

Nathan — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 11:44:24 -0000

@Fredrik - thanks for the offer, but if I am unable to contact anyone in the company directly (and I tried pretty hard), then it isn't for us. I shudder to think about what support will be like if I can't even get a salesperson to talk to me!

Re: Content Management Systems (CMS) for the .NET Platform

Fredrik Haglund, INEXOR — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 04:01:41 -0000

Nathan,
I think EPiServer CMS is an excellent framework for developing web sites. Easy to use and very well integrated in ASP.NET. EPiServer is based in Europe and they started their global expansion programme last year, so I'm sorry you did not find so many partners i US yet.

I work for a company specialised in EPiServer, let me know if you need help with evaluation and licenses.

/Fredrik

Re: Content Management Systems (CMS) for the .NET Platform

David Lund — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 20:10:56 -0000

Nathan -- I usually just read blogs and don't comment much but couldnt help myself since I know David Maffei and I have used Ektron (and I like to engage in open source vs commercial discussions).

That being said, you have a tough decision it seems. Some time back we were engaged by a client to do a similar review of CMS packages (.net was a requirement) and despite the time lapse between our projects, we found many of the same options. You’re right, the UI hasn’t changed much in design but then again they keep adding new features. The reason I wanted to post was that you noted how helpful they are and that is my main reason for choosing Ektron on an ongoing basis. It is not just sales that is helpful, their support team is also and that is a huge requirement for me. From a commercial standpoint, pound for pound, I like Ektron.

But in open source land, now that is a harder choice to make. I have used DNN, Rainbow and Umbraco. I liked Umbraco the most and have used it for projects. However, when going through the risk-benefit analysis with the client, it was always with that discussion on the differences between open source and commercial support (or open source with commercial support features) which is not always an apples-to-apples comparison. As a developer it might of note that with Umbraco you load the templates through the CMS admin itself where in many other systems you build the templates in VS and cms api’s and push them to the server. As many things in development, each has their own benefits, so the development process for each product needs to be considered. PHP offers an even broader range of open source CMS products with vary styles of support and for the right company/project might be good options as well.

Wow, more long winded than I thought, but these things may be of interest to you, if not, well, I tried. I will be interested to see where you head going forward. It may be that the at the end of the day, you choose as I do, a commercial product (like Ektron) for those instances where you wish the security of knowing that you can call a live person and open source when the client/project is more suited toward community based support. Don’t get me wrong, there are some fantastic community supported projects, but I have had occasion that ‘my particular issue’ was of little interest to the community as a whole but of large interest to me so I keep that in mind too.

Thanks for putting this out there,

David

Re: Content Management Systems (CMS) for the .NET Platform

Tamas Biro — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 12:38:56 -0000

Hi Nathan!
I am the product manager of Sense/Net Portal Engine TNG. I am more that happy to see your post, and many thanks for writing good things about us. :)
TNg will be available for download in September. We are working on a 1st release, that is good enough for a public download. As of now, we are working on the portal of one of our big customers, so we do not have time for managing a public beta program. Keep checking back to our blog.

Re: Content Management Systems (CMS) for the .NET Platform

David Maffei — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 09:57:06 -0000

Nathan,

I enjoyed reading your assesment of both our product and our competitors. I would be glad to chat with you about a pricing model that we offer that you may not be aware of. based on your comment, "I like this company a lot - BUT - you need to buy a server license for each URL" it would seem that you have a slight mis-interpertation of the Ektron pricing model. Again, I would be glad to clarify.

Best,

David T. Maffei
Director of Sales
Ektron, Inc.

Re: Content Management Systems (CMS) for the .NET Platform

Nathan — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 22:56:21 -0000

Yes, I know - the VB thing is really a pretty petty bias on my part, but I like to study the code of the open source tools I use, and I just really don't like to read VB.NET. That isn't the main reason we passed over DNN though, I've looked at it pretty closely several times over the years and ultimately decided against it (although is has been more than a year now so maybe it deserves another look).