Recently I have been asked to chose a CMS platform. We have listed our business requirements as you would imagine and have weighed the options out there. Umbraco is at the top of my list, but I have some challenges I am not entirely sure how to conquer. Management has been given advice by some to consider Drupal as a CMS built on a LAMP stack. Truth is that Drupal does fit many of the business requirements, but I feel Umbraco is better in certain aspects.
Does anyone have experience selling Umbraco to clients and or management? Perhaps some example presentations.
Two business requirements that I am trying to win management approval on are surrounding developer base and community size. Drupal's community is very large and trying to compare any other CMS to it seems pretty difficult. I am impressed though with the speed here of responses, makes me feel like I am headed in the right direction with Umbraco. Now just to get the Boss to say yes.
Due Diligence is important! If anyone could help or has any information would be fantastic.
Also I dont think you should be thinking about the business requirements mainly but the clients. Everytime I pitch to client Umbraco, Sitecore, Modx and Drupal alot of the clients dislike Drupal just because of its backend navigation and the confusion on how to create new pages and what the tree structure is going to look like where as Umbraco clients say it very intuitive and easy to understand the IA of the site is followed by Umbraco content tree structure.
Plus its not just about the community of the CMS but it is the community of the development language eg .NET fooking huge!! and as you can develop plugins using C#, VB.NET, Python (I believe I also heard Ruby somewhere) that just makes it even more huger!!!
Umbraco Can run on MSSQL or MySQL or the local VistaDB - so for small sites there is no need for a database server :)
Just to throw this in aswell - the clever guys at Umbraco HQ are going to be releasing 4.6 soon which has an API for the new Windows 7 mobile. Dont think any other CMS have that.
Thank you Tom. Much of this we have considered. Thanks for the URL. If anyone else out there in Umbraco land has anything else to contribute, I would be forever grateful. :)
We've just created an Umbraco site for a MASSIVE company (I can't name drop for security - so you'll just have to trust me). They were happy that we were developing using something open source, which gave us maximum flexibility, and offered value for money compared to developing something from scratch. You're going to struggle to sell Umbraco compared to Drupal if there is a level playing field because Drupal is so much bigger in everyway. However, ASP.net Vs PHP is a battle that can be one. Try to find another free open source ASP.net CMS and you're left with DNN - which is just too much like hard work.
Selling Umbraco and DotNet as a Platform
Recently I have been asked to chose a CMS platform. We have listed our business requirements as you would imagine and have weighed the options out there. Umbraco is at the top of my list, but I have some challenges I am not entirely sure how to conquer. Management has been given advice by some to consider Drupal as a CMS built on a LAMP stack. Truth is that Drupal does fit many of the business requirements, but I feel Umbraco is better in certain aspects.
Does anyone have experience selling Umbraco to clients and or management? Perhaps some example presentations.
Two business requirements that I am trying to win management approval on are surrounding developer base and community size. Drupal's community is very large and trying to compare any other CMS to it seems pretty difficult. I am impressed though with the speed here of responses, makes me feel like I am headed in the right direction with Umbraco. Now just to get the Boss to say yes.
Due Diligence is important! If anyone could help or has any information would be fantastic.
These may give you something to compare:
http://blue-and-orange.net/umbraco-vs-drupal.html?utm_source=mailoutinteractive&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=November+2010
Also I dont think you should be thinking about the business requirements mainly but the clients. Everytime I pitch to client Umbraco, Sitecore, Modx and Drupal alot of the clients dislike Drupal just because of its backend navigation and the confusion on how to create new pages and what the tree structure is going to look like where as Umbraco clients say it very intuitive and easy to understand the IA of the site is followed by Umbraco content tree structure.
Plus its not just about the community of the CMS but it is the community of the development language eg .NET fooking huge!! and as you can develop plugins using C#, VB.NET, Python (I believe I also heard Ruby somewhere) that just makes it even more huger!!!
Umbraco Can run on MSSQL or MySQL or the local VistaDB - so for small sites there is no need for a database server :)
Just to throw this in aswell - the clever guys at Umbraco HQ are going to be releasing 4.6 soon which has an API for the new Windows 7 mobile. Dont think any other CMS have that.
Hope that helps?
Tom
Thank you Tom. Much of this we have considered. Thanks for the URL. If anyone else out there in Umbraco land has anything else to contribute, I would be forever grateful. :)
Rob
We've just created an Umbraco site for a MASSIVE company (I can't name drop for security - so you'll just have to trust me). They were happy that we were developing using something open source, which gave us maximum flexibility, and offered value for money compared to developing something from scratch. You're going to struggle to sell Umbraco compared to Drupal if there is a level playing field because Drupal is so much bigger in everyway. However, ASP.net Vs PHP is a battle that can be one. Try to find another free open source ASP.net CMS and you're left with DNN - which is just too much like hard work.
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