I’ve been thinking about some alternatives to MOSS when the customer can’t afford the license cost, or simply it is overkill due to the necessities, so I’ve made this list of questions to evaluate a CMS solution aimed at a professional environment (In no particular order):
Scalability
Will the solution escalate to support your expected user base? And your content base?
You must evaluate the size of your expected user base an the document corpus size, and make sure the products supports such figures. You must evaluate the storage mechanism and check that it supports such a size.
Are there any similar sized portals based on that solution available?
I will not try to be the first breaking barriers, if you are obliged to, try to make a test before using such a load.
Is the solution load-balancing friendly, uses lots of session objects and so?
They will usually be, but you might need to configure affinity in the load-balancing, or things so. Remember that you may or not need load balancing.
Caching mechanisms
Does the product provide a caching mechanism?
The pages are usually cached, can it be switched on or off for specific pages? Where are the cached files stored? Does it provide some kind of blob cache mechanism?
Does it work alright when there is some kind of security trimming?
If different elements of a page are shown to different kind of users, does the cache properly handle that?
Search capabilities
Does the product provide good search capabilities?
Not only a simple search box, but a more complex query page, a way to create custom searches, make contents searchable or not.
Can it search in the files hosted?
If it can store files can it search in the contents of the files? is the architecture open to support more kind of files, like the ifilter architecture.
Can you add custom attributes to the pages, files and search for them?
If you need to create categories of file, distinguish between file types, document types, languages, you might need to add custom attributes to the files and pages.
Supports search over a little portion of the data stored?
Can you create search scopes to search only on a portion of the pages? Are the scopes easy integrated in the search page.
Active directory/LDAP integration
Does the solution integrate with your corporative LDAP for editors and non-anonymous users?
Will your editor users log into the application by using their domain accounts, or will log into the cms using another set of user and passwords managed by the product.
Does it provide a way to extend the membership “stuff” used? Membership providers, etc?
Suppose you need to implement a new membership system (imagine an internal/external deployment with users both inside and outside the organization), is it easy/possible to implement? Does it use a standard membership provider?
Integration with another applications & Development
Can it be integrated with another applications? Search engines, external web services, translation services,…
Does it provide out-of-the-box mechanisms to integrate it with standard (or de-facto standard) external applications:
Does it provide a documented API to extend it? Any webservice provider?
If you need to programmatically add features to the product… Can you access the product’s object model? Is it extensible? Has a plug-in architecture?
Is there a good support? Is the source code available? Is there a proper developer base?
This is a must. You need support, documentation, a good developer base. think of your daily work, you get more information from blogs than from the official sources, don’t you? So look for blogs, forums, etc.
Can you extend the administration interface?
You might need not only extending the visual public-facing side but also extending the administration interface to, for example, provide an alternate html editor, or integrating some of the customizations you are going to made.
File Storage capabilities
Does it provide a good file storage mechanism? Libraries, folders or so?
Can you create folders or libraries or the product provides a single location for file storage? Is there a maximum number of files, can you create folders?
Can the folders be security trimmed? Need to be an admin to upload a file?
Can you select which users can access a file or folder? Can you select which users can upload a file or only the admins?
Content deployment between servers
Can you implement an edition farm and a publication farm?
In some/many big customers the typical deployment is a private-facing farm in which the editors edit the content and another, public-facing farm which is used by the visitors. If this layout is necessary… can you implement that?
Can you transfer the contents between servers or environments?
For a layout like the described before, or for transferring the contents, can the product suit your needs? What method does it use to transfer contents? Does it bypass the firewalls between the internal network an the dmz?
Capable of creating accessible sites
Is it easy to implement an accessible site? Have you seen one?
Many institutions require AA level accessibility for their public-facing websites, the product must be able to provide JavaScript-free, clean html at least in anonymous mode.
Does it provide standard master pages or templates?
The learning curve an the design integration process gets better if you can create standard master pages or templates that are easier to create and integrate by designers and developers. If I can avoid products with custom script languages and so on, the better.
Solution deployments between environments
Does the product provide a way to install or deploy solutions? Can you package and upgrade your customizations?
Once you have created your code, customizations, master pages, images, etc… Can you easily package them and deploy on other server? Can you upgrade them once installed?
Does it seem to have been designed for operation in the typical development, QA and production environments?
Many solutions are only thought to be installed on the production server, so implementing it over the three stages is not their natural operation mode.
Installation
Is the installation suitable for your hosting environment?
There are products with near zero installation (database + pages), and other rely on windows services, etc. Be sure you can install it on the target machines before you select one solution.
Multilanguage
Can you easily create Multilanguage sites?
Does it support multilingual sites? Are they easy to implement without programming? Is the editing interface multilingual or only the contents?
Can you tweak the Multilanguage capabilities?
In my MOSS experience variations have been always a problem, replication, drafts, etc. It would be cool if the product you’re choosing lets you configure things such as automatic replication, draft creation, translation webservices and so.
