How Much Publishing Power Can You Handle?

We are near the point where very sophisticated content management systems are going to put “enterprise publishing” (e.g. the technology behind NYTimes.com) within reach of nearly everyone, and business bloggers are catching on.

Steve Rubel points to InfoWorld report suggesting that the information management power of blogs could easily replace expensive corporate content management systems. Steve also hypes his client simplehuman, which built its press room using TypePad.

I love the idea, but I’m surprised that so many public relations and marketing bloggers hype TypePad and MoveableType. These certainly are not the tools that spring to mind when I think of a sophisticated content management system.

I’m much more interested in the opensource offerings that are becoming increasingly powerful and userfriendly, like Mambo and Drupal for content management, and WordPress for blogging. The pace of innovation in the open source community is staggering and it makes expensive proprietary systems look clunky by comparison.

Within the next year we should see an easy-to-use, opensource, publishing platform that combines standard CMS features with blogging, wiki, and bulletin board functionality. Right now an experienced network admin could cobble together a system like this by using various applications in tandem. Soon this publishing power will be available to everyone. Will it revolutionize personal publishing like the blog did? Can we handle this much power? It waits to be seen.

To take any available opensource CMS software for a spin, check out opensourceCMS.com.