The other day somebody emailed me asking why I did not like Microsoft CMS. I thought I should give my reasons why I don't like the product, so that others who make decisions to purchase these types of products will know why one user does not like this one.

Things to keep in mind. I know HTML and CSS, I have designed many sites using various editors such as Dreamweaver (my favorite) and FrontPage. I use Photoshop and Fireworks to help create a lot of the web page aesthetics. I know some JavaScript and I have had the pleasure (sarcastic tone) of designing and branding an OPAC's (online library catalog, for you non-librarians) web pages. I do not claim to know everything about web programming and design, but I would like to think I know more than the average person.

I do not like Microsoft CMS from an end user designer. I do not work in IT and I have no experience setting it up and working with it from an IT perspective. My experience is from the point of view of a fairly savvy web designing librarian who is trying to create dynamic usable web pages for her library on her company's intranet. The company uses Microsoft CMS so that their whole intranet has the same look and feel.

Each smaller site within the larger site is called a channel. For example the library home page is is a channel to the institution's intranet page.

My frustrations with designing in Microsoft CMS:

It is very similar to a Microsoft Word. In fact somebody in my IT department described it as MS Word for web design (that should have been my first warning). The tool bar is a strip down version of Word. For anybody who is used to using Dreamweaver or even FrontPage, the tool bar is woefully inadequate and doesn't have nearly as many features as one wants/needs when designing web pages. What is VERY frustrating is that the tool bar does not stay permanently at the top or bottom of your page while you are designing. It stays at the top and if you design anything with any length the tool bar disappears and you must scroll up to get to it. This is very poor planning. For example: Every time you want to add a hyperlink you must highlight the word, scroll up to the tool bar, click on the add url button, add the link, then scroll back to where you were and continue where you left off. Just imagine typing in MS Word and the top tool bar disappears as you begin the second page and you must scroll up to bold a word in your document. Now you see how frustrating that can get with web page design.

There is no global search and replace function for channels. It can get extremely frustrating if a link you feature extensively through your site changes and you must update it. If you need to change some text or a URL that appears on multiple pages (channel pages) you must go to each page scroll to find every occurrence and manually change each one. You can easily forget or an occurrence, leading to dead links on the page.

No search box within channels. You can have a search box for the whole site, but you can not have a search box just to search your channel's pages. What good is having a online library web site listing various databases, resources, and electronic collections unless you can search them? Why can't a library have a search box on the library pages to search for books instead of a link bringing them to the library's online catalog.

Blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, IM, and flash tutorials can not be incorporated into channel pages. Wouldn't library users like to know about the latest medical news or perhaps classes? How about a nice easy flash tutorial on how to download and upload citations into your citation manager?

Administration must set the hierarchy and delete pages. I cannot delete any of my pages! I can inactive them and make them unavailable, but I cannot delete them. Of course I am still not sure if inactive pages show up in the institutions overall search box. You must get admin. to create your site hierarchy. For example: I create a library resource page which links to two other pages 1. ejournals, 2.ebooks. If I do not contact admin. those pages will be displayed equally on the site map. You can not show that the ejournals page and ebooks page are merely branches of the resources page, admin must set that up each time. (This is kind of hard to explain without seeing, I hope I didn't confuse anybody)

The biggest problem. There is no way to toggle back and forth between the GUI editor and the HTML code. I have yet to use a web editing program that you did not need to jump between the graphic interface and the code every once and a while. There are just times when the graphical interface is not doing what it should or what you want it to. I other programs when that happens you hit a button and jump into the code and fix the problem. Designing users cannot do that in Microsoft CMS. Unfortunately, Microsoft CMS has about as many quirks and bugs in its GUI editor as FrontPage, perhaps more. I can't tell you how many times I have changed the font color for a word (for a heading or something similar) and then correctly change it back to black to continue typing yet the program still continues on in the other color. This is also very problematic when you cut and paste something from another website or within your website. For some reason it treats the pasted selection differently from what you have already typed and you must constantly try and fix the formatting so it doesn't look like you created it with two different styles. You can try and use the Format Stripper button, but it doesn't always help and sometimes it makes things worse.

CSS Styles are interesting if not frustrating. As far I can determine, the only CSS styles allow are font styles. Things like headings, comments, etc. However, I can not say whether this is a flaw within CMS or whether those are the only styles my institution allows me to use.

There you have it, the reasons why I hate using Microsoft CMS. Since I only use this product as an end user designer I can only speak from that perspective. I also do not know how many of these criticism are of the product itself or if there was some customization on my institution's part that created or exacerbated these problems.

I see the need for these types of programs to be used company wide, particularly on an institution's Internet. On the Internet, having the same look and feel for the entire site can be very beneficial and is ideal in web design. However, one design does not always fit every site, and you must make exceptions to the rule. In my humble opinion, if your company wants to have the same design on the Internet and intranet site and if they decide to use a product like Microsoft CMS they should have adequate procedures and protocols when that design/program will not work for a department within that site. Perhaps that department can design their own site to look and feel very similar to the institution's site without using the content management program.