What are the right questions that I need to ask myself when choosing a vender and technology platform for my CMS, Social Community, LMS or CRM portal?

When you engage in a new web portal project you have a lot of options to consider and you have to ask a lot of “What do I need” questions. They usually fall in to the following four question categories. 

Goals: The first area to review is the end results and goals you are trying to achieve.

•     What am I going to build?
•     Whom am I building it for?
•     How will it be used?
•     How will I drive traffic to the sites?
•     What kind of experience do I want to create for the end users?
•     How do users benefit from this resource?

Logistics: The next area is about how it will all come together.

•    Who is going to build it?
•     How will collaborators contribute effectively?
•     What are the criteria I use for evaluating the vendor?
•     Where does cost vs. value impact the project?
•     What is the life cycle of this initiative?
•     How much time is available to plan and execute?
•     What are the key milestones?
•     What content is available and what has to be created or acquired?

Platform: The third area is the technologies and features that will be utilized.

•     Open Source vs. Commercial software?
•     Where will this be hosted?
•     What integrations are required?
•     What design elements need to be considered?
•     What will be the highest priorities for evaluation process?
•     What is the scale of the deployment?

Budget: Finally another key element that impacts each of the answers to these questions is budget.

•     What are the potential revenue streams and expectations from the site?
•     How much money and time resources do I have for development?
•     How much money and time do I have available for ongoing maintenance?
•     How much money and time can I allocate to ongoing marketing and traffic building?

How much you have to spend often determines many of the decisions in the design, coding and logistical processes. It is also important to consider the time you and others in your  organization may be required to invest.  Time is the most crucial element required for a successfully execute of your goals with this type of  initiative.

For example; if you have the budget to create unique graphics with well thought out branding strategies you will go one direction vs picking an existing template and tweaking the CSS and incorporating stock images from a library. The same is true with code. Often clients have very elaborate feature sets that they want to implement and there is a big difference in time required to just getting it to work and structuring the code in a way that is easy to upgrade or modular (installable extension to a platform). Another big area folks over look is training and documentation. Extracting the logic implemented into understandable terms for an end user is often skipped in the development process and the more features you implement the further in the weeds you will go towards confusing your users and the more training is required.

There are four ways to implement a solution that bridges humans with technology.

•     Configuration
•     Programming
•     Work flow process
•     Training

These become significant factors you must incorporate into your decision making process.

This article would be more of a novel if I dissect all of what is above and review the years of research and experience that has gone in to the technology and methodologies we have chosen for our success programs. However, in a nutshell I can summarize by telling you what we have found as the most  effective and embraced  technology platform for implementing customer relationship business management (CRBM - ERP- Social CRM), social publishing and content management systems (CMS), or learning management systems (LMS).

Based on what we have learned from the marketplace (our customers and industry trends), combined with our collective expertise and what we feel is the best long term value for our customers, we have chosen to focus on a fully integrated platform built on top of open source that can deliver any of these tools in a beautiful user interface at a fraction of the cost.

Pretty simple combination if you want to do some surfing.

There are many more but you can start by a quick visit the following sites:

•     Joomla! CMS: www.joomla.org Content Management System – with over 7000 extensions
•     Rocket Themes: http://demo.rockettheme.com World class template deigns and the Gantry framework
•     JomSocial: www.jomsocial.com Social Community Building framework
•     Joomla LMS: www.joomlalms.com Full featured learning management solutions
•     info@hand CRBM: www.infoathand.com Customer Relationship Business Management system

So here are some key  sites and sure you can go download most of this for free or minimal expense and have at it yourself.  With that said, I am confident, after a while of trying to map your vision and features with the technologies into a meaningful human experience this will lead you back to a company like ours. We are the folks that bring it all together and help you and your visitors make sense of it all.

What we have done to fill the need of small businesses, social communities and learning centric organizations is develop a proven success strategy based on lessons learned, best practices and our unique Value Builder Methodology to offer managed service bundles supported by our global network. This allows us to engage your customers with meaningful experiences, guarantee 99.99% up time, deliver with a rapid deployment process as well as provide technical expertise and training in the most cost effective means possible.

Simply put we will make your vision come to life in a meaningful way and that your users will appreciate and tell their friends about.

Concluding questions you should ask even before you begin: What do you not want or cannot afford?

What is often the right thing to do is ask the questions related to what you and your customers do not want before asking the questions to find out what you and others will appreciate the most.

•     What are our customer’s biggest concerns or complaints?
•     How will our team balance their current responsibilities with contributing to this project?
•     What obstacles are there for achieving the anticipated goals?
•     How much is too much to spend?
•     Are there licensing and legal implications involved?
•     How mission critical will this resource be once implemented?
•     What would be the worst case & best case scenarios…?

What I mean is know what you cannot accept, do not like and know well what you do not want before asking the four “What do I need” category questions above. In my book it is all about asking the right questions at the beginning of every project to make sure you can set your compass and navigate in a targeted direction that will keep you in perspective and allow you to manage realistic expectations related to your specific goals, ambitions and means to achieve them.

I hope you can see the value of planning a project with the right people, perspective and expectations. This could save you tons of time, treasure and aggravation or disappointing results.

Make sure your vendors or customers for that matter are the right fit for your needs or offerings and that you can create a harmonious synergy. I hope you start with asking the right questions then develop a good plan with the right participants.

“To the right customers with the right vision and perspective we want to be the right company with the right blend of service and support and right community of talent to meet or exceed your expectations.”

CN

Related articles can be found on blogs by the same author at: www.joomladesignservices.com, www.cnpintegrations.com and www.givetoed.org .