When we decided to replace our ageing CMS, Wirenet, we had three options:
We'd narrowed down the possible third party solutions to DotNetNuke and Kentico quite quickly. Everything we build is based on Microsoft technologies; Windows Server, SQL Server, C# and ASP.Net. Kentico and DotNetNuke were the outstanding candidates that fitted our technical profile, so they were the products we spent most time getting to grips with.
We've got around 50 customers using our old content management system. This system evolved between 2002 and 2005 but has remained fairly static since. The evolutionary process has meant that Wirenet was exactly what our customers wanted it to be - easy to use.
When we looked at our options we scored them as follows:
We gave Wirenet V2 a very high score because it would be built specifically for our customers, whose behaviour we understand very well.
In developing our own CMS, we have made conscious decisions to exclude functions where we thought customers would struggle to understand the concept or where we thought developing a new module wouldn't give us a return on our development effort.
A good example is event booking. In seven years only one customer has asked for event booking but wasn't prepared to pay for the full development cost of the module. We didn't build it because didn't think many of our other customers would use it.
Of course, the flip-side of this is that we may have lost business because our CMS didn't include event booking!
Functionality was scored as follows:
DotNetNuke scored very well on this. The OpenSource nature of the product has meant that a very large group of users are creating modules and bolt-ons all of the time.
Kentico still scores well because it is feature rich. However, one team of developers can only achieve so much.
Of course there is an issue of quality here. All of the Kentico functions/modules are built in the same way and have the same look and feel and robustness. DotNetNuke on the other hand is a bit hit and miss. Some modules fit in well and others don't. We felt that there is an absence of quality control in the process.
As much as it has to be easy for the end-user to manage their content it also has to be easy for the web developer to put sites together.
When a CMS is easy to develop with, it deskills the process. You don't need a software engineer to build the site, you simply need somebody with HTML and CSS skills. This makes the development process cheaper and more profitable.
One of the core differences between Kentico and DNN is that with Kentico, there is a separation of the front-end website templates from the administration function. With DNN they are tied together.
I appreciate that it's nice to skin the admin area of a website the way you want it, but if like me, you simply forget to add the menu to your templates, then DNN just stops working. I had to do a complete reinstall and try again when I did that!
Development was scored like this:
So Kentico stands out on this front. I can now recruit HTML/CSS staff to build sites and let my C#/ASP.NET developers get on with something more exciting.
Assuming that we don't need support on our own software, it's a straight fight between DNN and Kentico.
DNN has forums, books and blogs to support the product. There's even paid for support (which we thought was a bit expensive).
Kentico on the other hand has no Dummy's Guide and very few external websites talking about it.
What Kentico do have though, is a commitment to providing email and telephone support. We made a point of trying it out and Wayne, who we spoke to on several occassions, was great. Despite being based in the Czech Republic his English is better than mine. He understood the product and helped us with a number of issues during our evaluation.
Scores for Support
The last factor was cost. On the face of it DNN is free (actually I think there is a paid-for version now!) but if you're a commercial organisation building lots of websites for customers then you're going to need support.
The cost of a year's professional support for DNN was surprisingly high and we did wonder if we would need it because the DNN community is so large. Surely we wouldn't come across any problems that haven't already solved?
A Kentico license cost around £4,000 when we bought our Social Networking version license. The price is considerably higher now and I can see why. A huge effort has gone into producing version 4.0. I just hope that the price isn't too high as I would like to see the customer base increasing so that stability of the product and indeed Kentico as a business is assured.
The cost of producing version 2 of our own CMS is a great imponderable. Just planning it and costing it all up would cost a big chunk of money.
Initially our decision was to build our own. If we did that we could tick all of the boxes that were really important to us and we could limit functionality so that customer support wouldn't become too onerous.
We made that decision and then two months later, after absolutely no progress, we made the decision we should have made in the first place; Kentico
We're still coming to terms with it but as each day goes by the possibilities of what we can achieve and indeed sell to our customers is growing.
Support has continued to be fantastic in both quality of response and timeliness.
We're working on our second site now with the next one likely to be an eCommerce site. We're getting quicker as we understand more but it is a steep learning curve. This I think, is made worse, from the experience of building a CMS for ourselves and us having lots of bad habits.
The elves are back...