Ok, we have chosen Matrix as our CMS of choice for our College's website, and as everyone here knows, it is absolutely amazing. Everything I could have ever wanted in a CMS. But, unfortunately, there are departments on campus which feel that we could have built the same thing in Drupal, saying that other College's have done it. With each point I have about Matrix, and what it can do, they question our choice of the CMS.
Does anyone have any tips on what things I can point out, in order to hammer this into some people heads? I am sure everyone here has run into people that just "don't get it", I am in this situation. We're not in jeopardy of not being able to use Matrix, (as that was our decision, and is already a year into Dev.) but helping some people to see that we made the best decision for ALL departments and that something like Drupal would not have been a good idea.
Avi and Griffith University guys, any help on this? Did you run into these issues?
The biggest differentiators I find between Matrix and Drupal:
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[*]With MySource Matrix, I would guess that over 95% of the HTML generated by the CMS is customisable via the provided interfaces. With Drupal, in order to change the HTML, you would need PHP programming skills and you would need to edit the code. This then makes future upgrades even more difficult.
There are a number of other reasons why you may not want to use Drupal for your site, but these are probably the two biggest. I suspect the questions come from the lack of exposure MySource Matrix has in the USA compared with a product like Drupal. If you gave us more of their questions, we could probably provide more specific answers.
Yes, I agree that this is probably where these questions are coming from. We are having a meeting with this said department next week, so I will post some questions after that. Anyone else feel free to give me your thoughts as well.
Yeah, you could, and what happens when the builder of the system leaves? You have a big liability.
If you have core resources in your organisation to support a custom solution on an on-going basis then go for it.
For Matrix, the same paradigms are used right through the system, so it is simple to learn and extend. You only need to know basic HTML, mostly.
One of my staff, after 12 weeks in the job, set up a page with multiple nested asset lists to do a past/current/future style listing. He can maintain and change it himself. His replacement will be able to maintain it too, after being trained.
I don't have to maintain an expensive programming resource just to create content pages.
Sounds like "Not Invented Here" syndrome to me.
cheers,
Richard
Yes, this is quite prevalent we find, particularly in larger organisations like education or government. A lot of times we have to explain how most functionality people required doesn't actually require development with MySource Matrix. Users are used to having to hack into Drupal/Joomla/etc to make it look/act the way they want, and usually our interface allows you to configure that without development.
I didn't want there to be any confusion about this: We ARE using Matrix for our entire website, and we are extremely happy with that decision. We are just having a department question us on that, because we will be moving THEIR department site over to Matrix, and they brought up the Drupal question.
I personally wish that more people in the US knew about Matrix. Right now, there are two organizations that I know of. We basically had our own Matrix user conference in Arkansas, and we even got Avi to attend, wow! I would love to start a campaign to educate the US about Matrix. I am hoping to add a "built with Matrix" part of our site, to get the word out there.
But it is frustrating when people are in the mindset of Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress, etc. Which to me are no more than glorified blogging softwares. We wanted something with power, a CMS that would wow people, making our website wow people with its functionality ease of setup. Richard made a good point about who will maintain a site after a content creator has gone. This has been a major problem for our organization in the past. We are fixing this problem now with our new website, allowing users to update their content without having additional software, or knowing how to FTP into our server with Dreamweaver, which is what they have done in the past.
How can we educate people that have no idea or concept of what Matrix is or how it works? I am sure there in AU it is much easier, as everyone in the market has heard of it, and sees it as a top contending choice for CMS's. But here, I am not sure what CMS's are on the top of people lists. We are just lucky that we were one of the few organizations here in the states to get the chance to use Matrix. I think, and I hope, as more people here hear about MySource Matrix, we can feel good for being one of the early adopters of this great, great CMS.
No confusion, btw – I know what your goals are and I'm sure that together we can convince the world. 
Usually, we replace products like Vignette or Documentum, not Drupal or Joomla. MySource Matrix is designed to sit and operate in the same level as very expensive commercial CMS products.
You should check out some of the Case Studies on the Squiz website for more information on the benefits of Matrix for commercial and educational institutions. Might also be worth getting a copy of the whitebranding case study as a third-party developed report.
We have a "policy" at Griffith, where any new information system has to have commercial support available. Therefore, we did not evaluate other open source CMSs like drupal. We basically only looked at Matrix and Vignette.
Although there are rogue installations of drupal around at Griffith, they're not large implementations or used as heavy public facing systems. Matrix's asset based framework is real ass kicker that seriously splits the marketplace.
I'll second that! Just using the assetid numbers instead of the urls is a lifesaver for me! As another US Government worker at a bureaucratic filled workplace, the ease of moving pages around saves me loads of time just by itself.
Let alone that Matrix really only takes an analytical mind to operate and relies on almost no web experience or PHP. Which is good for me since I had no web experience before this job.
I've used Joomla since I've been with Matrix and I've learned really quickly that other CMS's like Drupal and Joomla fight in the lightweight division compared to Matrix's heavyweight division. Basically anything they can do, Matrix can do better and faster. :ph34r: