CMSs with Multi-Site support for commercial use?

Sharp101

Hello H/A! I've come for your suggestions yet again.

We're looking to upgrade our system at work to better serve our clients. We sell templated websites to Insurance brokers and currently have 180+ clients across Canada. Right now they are all basic HTML sites deployed on a Windows Server through IIS. Not really a problem as it's nice and easy, but we're looking to add CMS capabilities to speed up the development and deployment process as well as provide a simple interface for our clients to do simple updates on their body copy.

So I've been doing some research to try and get the first initial list of CMS candidates, but I'm having trouble coming up with that list. So I turn to you for some suggestions!

Some required features

• ASP Based would be ideal, as our servers don't support PHP right now
• Able to deploy multiple, standalone websites from a list of custom templates
• Able to create users who can only access their own site. Multiple 'access levels' would be nice (to be able to control what they can change on a user by user basis)
• obviously need an admin account to mange all sites and have full access to everything
• Auto menu generation with drop down menus
• Very easy to use on the client's side. They should only be updating copy and maybe banners, but the majority of our clients are old Insurance Brokers who don't know 'the internet' well

Suggestions? Even if you guys can just drop some names my way, I can look for more information on them.

Jimmy King

Being a Linux guy, the only Windows/ASP.Net based CMS I know of is .NetNuke. I have no idea if it will do what you need or not or if that was even very help since it may even be a completely obvious suggestion to you.

CroakerBC

Vignette is an enterprise level CMS system with serious multi-site support. It's also extremely easy to use from the editorial end, and matches all of your requirements above. *However*, as it's designed for use by large corporations, licensing can (I believe) be very expensive, though my experience was mostly QA related, so I couldn't give you a quote. However, if it is within your budget, it's probably the best option. I'm struggling to remember if it's .asp based, but I think so.

Magnolia is an open-source alternative to Vignette. It has the benefit of being free-as-in-beer, and also matches all your requirements above (again, having said this, I don't remember if it's .asp based, and don't have an installation in front of me atm to check). However, as a counterpoint ot the price, I found that the learning curve was a lot steeper than Vignette's, and setting up a new install can be a bit of a hassle.