Hi,

We are thinking of implementing a new .NET complient CMS. We have a budget of between $5,000 - $10,000 and Iwas wondering if anyone has any possible recommendations ?

I have had a look at Ektron CMS300 and it looks quite impressive for the price of $5,500. Has anyone tried the product, and got any feedback ?

Thanks in advance

I don't know what your internal resources are, but you could consider building your own.

I second jeffyjones's suggestion. If you have the developers on staff you should build it yourself; that way it's tailor-made for your company. If you still want something out of the box, look at DotNetNuke (free), or if you need more of a document management/intranet solution, take a look at SharePoint from Microsoft ($4000 I think).

Thanks - the CMS is basically for running our website not intranet (We already have sharepoint). Unfortunately at the we don't have any inhouse .NET developers, and I was really looking for a good base CMS that could be added onto. I'm the only real programmer in the office (a php hack basically) and I've tried nuke's before, and was not really impressed. I was looking for a good base framework, (which is why we are prepared to pay a decent amount), which could then be extended usinging custom code. One of the main reasons I liked Ektron CMS300 was that although it it is done on .NET platform, you can still integrate php (and other language) apps etc

In an increasingly service-oriented architecture world, the platform almost doesn't matter so much as the data is saved or can be retrieved as XML. Transforming that data into almost anything is a piece of cake (well, it is for XSLT experts, which I am not)!

One of the greatest struggles in software developement is to decide whether to build something yourself or buy something off the shelf. It seems every project I'm on involves a little of both and it's a real pain.

Quite true - we were thinking of going the .NET route because all our inhouse systems are going towards .NET - to facilitate integration with parts of our website it would seem logical to get a .NET based CMS. The reason I liked the idea of Ektron CMS300 is that you can use pretty much every language with it (including php which I know). In the near future we will also probably get in a full time developer, who will take over from my 'hacking' - allthings considered I feel we would probably be best looking for someone who knows .NET as they will then be better placed to look after our inhouse systems, as well as a .NET based CMS.