Educational institutions are confronted with a gigantic task of providing real-time information to their clientele amidst budgetary and human resource constraints. A simple html based static website could no longer provide this kind of service considering the demands. Gladly, the birth of Content Management System (CMS) provides a great deal of alleviation to this problem.  In fact, there is already what we call Educational CMS.

Educational CMS provides a dynamic flat-form to showcase the institution. It may include functionalities like online enrollment system, grading system and even course management systems. So, by CMS here, we do not limit it to the course management systems. Instead, we are talking about the system that provides venue for collaborative presentations.

As we have mentioned, the primary use of the Educational CMS is to provide all stakeholders with a venue to contribute their intellectual resources and materials to the school’s online presence. Many companies would like to claim that they have the capabilities to provide Educational CMS. Looking into Google’s directory alone will give you a list of more that four hundred sites for CMS. The task of choosing the right CMS to fit the need of the institution could already mean hours of hard labor.

Our hope is to provide guidelines for educational instructions in their struggle to land the right Educational CMS. We shall include in the series issues like hosting, costing, learning curve, security, after sales, content life cycle, functionalities and security. The discussion however will not provide boxed in answers; only guides. The mention of some companies in the article does mean that we are promoting them. The inclusion is random. The whole idea is to provide a comparison of existing providers.

Finally, this article will not delve into the politics of choosing. We understand very well that individual institutions have their own criteria in choosing the direction they want to take.