Having recently attended the first OpenCms conference in Köln, I thought I would outline our reasons for choosing it for the University’s content management solution.

Approximately four years ago, the search for a suitable CMS for the University began. We investigated commercial products including RedDot, ShadoMX and Kitsite and open source solutions such as Lenya, Zope / Plone and Bitflux. At the time we had quite a large list of criteria that needed to be met in order for a candidate to be considered, including the ability to have pages based on custom XML schemas. Most of the candidates failed to meet some of these criteria and were discounted. After much discussion we decided to go with an open source solution, as the amount of money needed would be about the same (what was gained in software costs would be spent on developer time) but it would allow for a much better integration into our existing systems. Open source would also allow us to develop the system should it fail to meet a particular requirement.

Given this new decision we opted for Apache Lenya (a CMS based on Cocoon) as our CMS. However, despite the promises by the Lenya community that a stable release of their newer (and more feature-rich) version of the software would soon be available, it was not to be. Our CMS project was put on hold and focus moved to other team projects.

Just over 18 months ago, the CMS project was revived, after the University had re-evaluated its web strategy. Four members of the team were tasked with re-assessing the criteria for a candidate system and choosing a CMS. After much discussion and discounting all but the most important criteria we settled on 2 finalists: Typo3 (a PHP based system) and OpenCms (a Java based system). We opted for OpenCms on the grounds that the majority of our team are Java developers and it appeared to have a less cluttered user interface for normal everyday users.