Ok I have been faced with a beast that for now, I can not best. My hospital uses a Microsoft's Content Management Server for their intranet pages. Now if I did not know how to do web pages this would be a wonderful quick and easy way to get something up on the intranet.

The problem....I know too much. I have designed a large medical library intranet and internet site. I have done javascripting, css, and such. By no means am I am the ultimate web designing guru, but I know more than the average bear.

Try as I (politely) might the intranet gatekeepers will not allow me to do my own intranet page independent of the content managment server. I even explained how libraries are unique and sometimes require a lot different types of pages compared to regular hospital departments. They understood this and said that in these unique cases they OUTSOURCE the design and then they (the gatekeepers) make updates if they are needed according to their time table.

I feel naked. All control of an intranet library page is stripped from me. This hits very hard. However, I decided to at least put something up on their system for the library. Some sort of web presence was better than none.

The nice lady on the phone said, "It is easy it is just like using Microsoft Word." I wanted to cry and scream at the same time. Microsoft Word is great for word processing, but hideous for trying to web pages! Heck, FrontPage isn't much better! ...sigh....

I can't express how frustrating it is for me to not be able to go into the code and change something that doesn't do what I want it to. For example, the stupid content management system kept linking a word that I didn't want it to. In my mind I knew I was accidently typing on the wrong side of the slash a, but I couldn't go into the code and move things around. Even more frustrating I could resolve the issue within the manager. As hard as I tried it just kept linking everything. I had to scrap the page.

Ah which brings me to my next point. I CAN'T DELETE my own pages!!!! Zool...I mean the intranet gatekeepers are afraid people might delete their whole site so they disabled this option to all contributors. We are only allowed to make the page inactive.

So my questions for all those out there....
How many libraries (medical or any other types) are forced to suffer with web content management systems?
How have you justified not using the content management system?