Hello everyone.

I am the campus Web master at St. Philip’s College and we have completed a redesign of our Web site as recently as last year. We are in the first phase of further improving our Web site from the ground up. It has become necessary for us to look at potential content management systems for easy updating for our 70+ Web authors, workflow and other benefits. Our Web site is based strongly on ASP.NET using Master pages, content pages and user controls.

I started off my research looking for CMS options that are based on ASP.NET. Almost every one of my selections (Ektron CMS400, Sitefinity, etc.) were shot down. I don’t care what we select since I trust my teammates. What I am concerned about is if we are shoving the most critical part of our Web site needs- ASP.NET.

If there are any other .NET Web developers and masters out there, should I be worried about this? Would I be able to still make use of my ASP.NET setup even if we don’t select a CMS that is based on .NET technology? I certainly don’t want to be “stuck out” if we select a tool that will not be of benefit to the foundation of our Web site scheme.

This is a very interesting post. We've been having similar problems in finding a decent CMS and Wiki based in .NET for Simple-Talk. The .NET Wikis are nothing like the quality of MediaWiki, and we ended up having to use a CMS that really isn't of reasonable quality. Community server is OK for Forums and Blogs but it has limitations and I really don't like the what I've seen of design of the SQL Server database they use. Basically, the .NET software for websites isn't up to the ones on the LAMP platform.

We've stuck with .NET technology on Simple-Talk  but I'm a bit pushed to come up with any real benefits from doing so. After all we have SOAP and Web Services which are platform independent, so why do we need to worry any more?