Hi, We have an intranet written in asp.net which basically displays product information (prices, pictures etc) for our sales staff.
One of the problems we are beginning to encounter is that we pride ourselves on our technical knowledge of the products we sell, but business is picking up and we are having to hire more staff to take calls. We have realised we need to build some sort of knowledge base to help the new staff. We came up with an idea for range guides (showing the history of a particular manufacturers range) and tech notes (which is where staff can put all the known problems with a product and how to fix it etc.) I originally set these up as static html documents that got searched via index services - It was fine until I realised I (being the only web designer) just didn't have time to do this as well as take the sales calls and run the warehouse. (We are a small family business) I saw the anacronym 'cms' being bandied about on my .net lists and finally took a look - I still only have a fairly vague idea of just what a cms is (if anyone can point to a cms for dummies guide I'd be grateful) but in my travels I came across Ektron and their $500 CMS100. http://www.ektron.com/cms100.cfm <http://www.ektron.com/support/cms100_support.cfm> Having taken the 'test drive' it seems to be pretty much what we want - basically a way to allow our other staff to add or correct information to these guides with no knowledge of html. I want something that can be accessed from our intranet but that isn't a collection of word documents (which was one suggestion in the office) A lot of our products link together so these guides need to show those links as well (hence the desire for html) It also needs to be searchable. The price is the crutial factor - $500 we can afford but not much more. We run on pure MS systems Small Business Server, and are about to move over to SQL server from Corel Paradox. What I'm basically asking is 1) Does anyone have any experience of Ektron? 2) Is there anything else that will work in the dotnet environment at an affordable price 3) Am I barking up the wrong tree completely or is a cms our ideal solution? I thought about making our own and have ordered 'Real-World ASP.NET: Building a CMS' but a not sure if it's worth the effort so to speak. For what Ektron offer is that a good price or should it be fairly easy to roll something similar myself? Hope I'm making some sense, I feel like I'm opening doors in the dark here :) Thanks in advance Morkai --- StripMime Report -- processed MIME parts --- multipart/alternative text/plain (text body -- kept) text/html --- -- http://cms-list.org/ trim your replies for good karma.
