I have no CMS for our corporate intranet, but am looking closely at Adobe's Contribute. Anyone else using this?

When I started with my previous employer back in the dark ages of 2000 we were rebuilding the corporate site from the ground up. We were a multi-national organization with close to 40,000 employees dispersed across the globe.

Content prior to this point in time was handled at the business unit level, sans any corporate level watch dogs for style or consistency. Each part of the site (in the hands of pure marketers) looked like they each belonged to separate companies. And every time they wanted to update the site it involved sending a word doc to IT to have the update pushed “live”.

The formation of my team signified two paradigm shifts for the organization: workflows would need to be established so a team of communicators at the corporate level with no allegiance to one business unit could have the final say on live content and a technology platform that could manage these new workflows.

If I told you some of the disparaging nicknames we came up with for this product (they usually involved the product name combined with a body part or vile bodily function) it would give away not only the name, but I would open myself up for libel. Let’s just say it was anything but “Out of the Box”. It required an entire team of IT professionals just to muddle through the workflows.

From the writers’ perspective WYSIWIG stood for What You See Is Why I Groan. The stylesheets were anything but. Code would dance to new parts of the page like Paris Hilton after 2 lines of coke and a cosmo. Without rhyme or reason whole blocks of text would appear in different fonts or with different margins. Image upload was like a game of whack-a-mole, sometimes they would go to one folder other times to another. Publishing worked when the server didn’t time out, and if it did we were back to square one.

Fortunately this was my first job out of college so I couldn’t compare just how awful this position was compared to other writing gigs. However, our people that came from the print world were far less forgiving.

I jumped right in and taught myself HTML. If the style sheets would not relent their fun house mirror placement for content, I would make them fall in line by manually manipulating the code. If the folder structure wouldn’t behave properly I would make my own folder structure by taking the power admin out to lunch and crying like a three year old with a skinned knee.

Flash forward to 2003 and the same company was looking to place the same processes on the intranet. Realizing the last product was less than stellar they went with the 800 pound gorilla SharePoint. This went much smoother. Unfortunately SharePoint while being a content management system is far better suited for developing portal communities.

My recommendation: If you are going to work in a CMS system teach yourself basic HTML. It will save you a lot of headaches and give you a firm foundation in how the web works (especially for those of you that have spent a majority of your career in the print world).

Also forgot one other important piece of advice.

NEVER NEVER NEVER pull text in directly from a word processor. All of the style information in the word doc will come over to your new web page.

You need to place the content in some kind of plain text editor like word pad or note pad.

I use Contribute to update our Intranet.

It's a good stable product and has controls in place to keep non-coders the hell out of the code.

Plan carefully.

Once your styles are locked in, changing them is not an easy task for IT and they will let you know it.

Thanks for all this sharing!
I have to say, I always feel grateful to learn from others' misfortune!

As a newbie webmaster/content editor, I'm seeking an improved CMS for our site. Does Contribute function well for web as well as Intranets?

Currently we're using a proprietary software as our CMS - it's made by our web hoster and is many years out of date (as is our site!).

I can totally backup your comment about the huge benefits of grounding oneself in HTML. I came into this position thinking HTML was a way of the past, and might "come in handy"...but it's been the single most important skill I've used (and been forced to develop further) while trying to work with a CMS.

Keep these posts coming - they're very helpful.

Thanks.

We have been researching a site management tool and the conclusion is to find the one that is the best fit. There are open source (Joomla or Drupal) or expensive (siteforum, centralpoint, or MOSS 2007) or build your own. We started with our own, but have out grown it. So, the search started for an 'off the shelf' product.

Results:

I'm not ready to put a business into an open source product so I took these out of the list. (On a side note, i've started using Joomla for personal sites. It is really good). We don't have any programmers on staff so I need to be able to call a vendor for support. MOSS or Sharepoint requires a lot of setup. It also requires a lot of custom programming for our purposes. So, its down to siteforum or centralpoint and I since centralpoint is ASP based, it has an edge.

Conclusion:
An 'off the shelf' product exists with some customization. But it's really what fits you and your company.

Thanks.