Web content management with Lotus Notes

[Quality Witch]

Hello everybody,

I'm new here, so a short introduction: I'm working on the development of an extensive information system for our company. It would include an intranet, extranet, and public web site.
I'm looking for a platform to build all this. Yep, we're ambitious. ;)

Someone suggested using Lotus Notes as a content manager and perhaps even web page editor. So I started investigating.
The Lotus and IBM pages are full of the useless marketing talk, that each web solution provider gives me. Easy integration, no programming skills required, easy authoring... you know the drill.

Can anyone point me to professional information that'll help me decide against or in favour of a Lotus solution? I'm talking about feature comparisons, shortcomings and assets...

I'd really appreciate it!
Thanks a million in advance.


The Quality Witch

[toicontien]

Try doing a search on Google for review "lotus smartsuite 9.8"

I've done a little reading too and the HTML generating capabilities of the software are limited to office document-style pages. If you are serious about building a Web site, don't use this software. At least use Dreamweaver. And by access to reports on the Web, IBM means you've got to run a query to your database, and then "save for the internet/intranet." That creates a static HTML file. Nothing dynamic.

Check out the features of Lotus Approach, their data base system: http://lotus.com/products/product2.nsf/wdocs/approachfact

[Quality Witch]

Hi Greg,

We are serious about building a web site...;)
I agree that Smartsuite is definitely not the way to go.
Thanks!

Quality Witch

[ray326]

Notes is an extremely capable development platform. If you pay attention while browsing IBM's web presence you'll see a large part of it is actually done with Notes. Notes is a pretty expensive server package, though, so you'll want to really use a lot of its features if you decide to go with it.

[Quality Witch]

Hello ray,

Notes is powerful, no doubt about it.
But it looks like you're right about the money issue.

We have some Lotus server(s) already in use, so we could cut some expenses there, but we'd also need a web management tool like Lotus Workplace Web Content Management, that looks like it offers the features we need.
Then I stumbled on the pricing page.
If we were IBM we could afford it...
:(

Thanks for your help.

Quality Witch

[ray326]

It might actually be cheaper to use one of the portal products like Oracle OAS. It all really depends on the scope of your project. OAS is not as sophisticated as Notes but, as I said before, if you don't need what it's missing then it's worth a look.

Other really cheap (license-wise) possibilities would be blogs and wikis or open source CMS software like slashcode. Everything works on the pay me now, pay me later rule. More follow-on labor is required for the the things with cheaper up-front costs.