Ektron ?

Got a random call from Ektron’s UK representatives asking to speak to the Web Development Manager. (That’s a new title for me...) They want to know if my company would be interested in using their CMS. The caller knew naff all about the product and was merely booking phone call slots. Three guys will ring me up a week on Friday and go through a demo. It is somewhat unlikely that we will join up at any level, just from seeing .aspx extensions. Apparently I should ignore the prices on the site - $10k first year (10 user, 1 domain) - but I doubt the pricing will be much lower for partners or whatever they’re interested in me becoming. And fundamentally, I’m not interested in investing time in something for one client that I cannot reuse for another site (even for the same client) without forking out a significant amount of money for each domain.

http://www.ektron.com/

One thing bugged me from a forum announcement:

This release [7.0] comes with great new features that continue to answer the question, "what do you want your web site to do?"

Um, no. CMS features should not answer that question, they should enable the answer to that question to be implemented.

Anyway. A guided demo and chance to speak to some technical people may be interesting. I will probably leave it until the end until I ask the showstopping questions like "is it Open Source?". I am intrigued as to how they sell the system and how they describe the benefits. Are there any questions that anyone would like me to ask?

There is a 4-user product that comes in at $5,250.
Ongoing annual maintenance is 1/6th of the original licence cost.

If you try and cheat and have "users" shared by a whole department, they get upset.

Requires SQL Server or Oracle, runs in .NET 2.0.

Has the ability to edit "on page" a bit like QuickEdit: in Admin mode, hovering over elements puts a black border around them and if you right-click you get a menu that includes Edit, which in turn leads to a pop-up window using their eWebEditPro editor (if you are on Windows).

Other edit facility is called "Work Area"; has tree structure on left, edit area on right.

Has lots of warnings about accessibility compliance.

Every item has meta data etc.

Has versioning.

There are some quick ways of adding forms (Windows only).

Platinum resellers get some sort of seat at the development committee.

On the whole, I wasn’t sufficiently impressed by it to change direction and focus on Microsoft-based websites - the total cost to clients is just far too chunky, and I have no desire to learn how to use Visual Studio etc.

Well, once we get versioning, and Scotty gets his desktop app all fixed up, we’ll make a highly competitive counter offer