[Zope-CMF] 'Interwoven' Content Management and Zope CMF

[Heimo Laukkanen]

>by Norman Khine other posts by this author
>Nov 28 2002 9:19PM messages near this date
>
>Has anyone had experience of using 'Interwoven' Content Management 
>application, can you provide me with differences between the two, 
>and why should an establishment want to use Zope CMF instead of 
>'Interwoven' Content Management.

Why would anyone want to use any software?

 1) Because they can solve their problems with it

 2) Because someone has paid a great deal of money for it and want it to be used
to solve every problem, to justify their spendings

 3) Because you can later on pay for someone else to continue solving new
problems with that same software

I'm not going to go into comparing apples and oranges wit CMF and Interwoven,
since afterall they are different software and have different purposes and
scopes. However I will ask, what is the problem you need to solve or the need
you want to fullfill? And how much of resources you have to be put on the
project - now, tomorrow and two years from now? Will you manage applications /
solutions yourself - or will you have a third party building solutions on top of
the CMS?

After those - and many other questions - it is more reasonable to ask why would
anyone use CMF over Interwoven, or even better - why would anyone use Interwoven
over Zope + CMF + Plone?

If your problem is just to solve the content management problem of a website,
intranet, extanet or even a virtual collaboration over the net - up to even 20
thousand users ( or even more ), then it is hard to beat Zope + CMF + Plone.
>From simple to even more and more complex solutions have been built on top of
Plone and the costs of doing the projects are similar to compared to some of the
licence fees of closed source solutions. ( The whole project <> just software ) 

And even if the open source does not matter to you, the fact that Plone is good
should. 

Here is an idea.

A client has a 50,000 Euros budget ( or dollars ) for their intranet. They send
RFP ( request for proposals ) to different companies offering CMS solutions -
and get back a very nice range of proposals, describing in detail about how the
money would be used in different scenarios.

Basicly the proposals go into following pieces:

 - licence fees, just for the software
 - consultation, for how to solve the problem with this software
 - customization, for the software to fit the problem profile
 - development, for additional new modules / parts
 - training, for using the solution
 - maintenance, for running and updating the system

What if you could, in the proposal drop the licence fee off.

What if you could invest your own time to understand how to use the software to
solve the problem - or buy an independent consultant to do the job in a week and
teach you along the way.

What if you would have examples and instructions on how to customize the
software - or could once again buy it from independent consultant to do the job.
Or get free help from the community.

What if you could build on top of this solution your own additional programs,
which you could then share with others - so that you would not need to worry
about maintaining the code, fixing bugs and developing new features only by
yourself. It should mean a lot to you, since software can very easily become
from an asset to a big pile of garbage you have to carry along...

What if you could get free online books, tutorials and even videos about how to
use the solution. 

What if you could use part of the saved money to guarantee the maintenance and
smooth running of all the mission critical parts of your solution. Possibly send
the admin and key editors to a nice restaurant to eat and drink on the project
tab ,-) Or just buy them extra teaching session from an experienced consultant -
or buy helpdesk and emergency time from the same consultant / company. Just in case.

So in conclusion:

  a) you could save money
  b) you could get a lot of good new knowledge for the future
  c) you could be in almost total control of your system, also in the future
  d) you could use your control to either do it yourself or buy services
  e) you could sleep like a child, knowing you made a good choise

And since you can do that, with a solution built on top of Zope + CMF + Plone -
why would you like to use Interwoven or anything else, over Zope + CMF + Plone? ,--)


-huima