[thelist] Microsoft CMS

[Howard Cheng]

At 11:30 AM 4/4/2002 +0300, ashok at magicalkenya.com wrote:
>Has anyone  used / deployed microsoft content management server  ?
>I would really be grateful for any positive / negative experiences that
>anyone has had ....

I've programmed for it and I think it's a lousy product. Well, more
specifically, it really wasn't suited to the site we deployed, so it caused
a lot of headaches trying to build around it. On the other hand, I'm pretty
sure we didn't use it to the best of its capabilities.

When using MSCMS, you're not building a dynamic site. You're building a
static site that can be easily updated by people who don't know any HTML.
For example, for most dynamic sites, you usually have a template page and
you pass a parameter (for example, the content ID), such as
'product.asp?id=25'. In the MSCMS model, you would create one page for each
product.

The other annoying aspect is that all resources (images, PDFs, etc) are
stored as blobs in the database. It has its pros, but more cons. The two
worst things are, you can't search for a resource by name, and visitors to
your site have no access to the resource galleries -- in the site we built,
it meant that you could not have a gallery of PDFs and write a script that
would loop through the gallery and display links to those PDFs.

Our MSCMS site is: http://www.reebok.com/

::::::::::::::::::::::
Howard Cheng
howcheng at ix.netcom.com
AIM: bennyphoebe
ICQ: 47319315