Ask Tony Archive -- CMSWatch: "I have been analyzing [Vendor 1], [Vendor 2], [Vendor 3], and [Vendor 4] -- all XML-based vendors -- as content management solutions for our university. We also have a university portal we would like the systems to publish to.
From my interaction I am starting to feel that [Vendor 1] the best solution for our university given that we have under $100k to spend and the fact that we do not need a lot of the features that an "ECM" solution offers currently. Do you think this is the correct choice?"
Tony says assemble a team. Good. Then he says "have them prioritize selection criteria". Sounds good, but the danger is the selection criteria will be a list of features and some requirements about the vendor. Not good. The best approach I heard of came from DonnaM: they had that team come up with a set of practical scenarios, and then used those scenarios to select a CMS. That feels like a winning approach.