Business Catalyst CMS

Adobe Business Catalyst is a hosted application for building and managing online businesses. Without any knowledge of  back-end coding, Business catalyst partners can build a variety of websites from basic brochure style websites to online stores and even powerful membership sites.

With Adobe behind it, the Business Catalyst CMS is set to become the largest commercial system available in the world. Adobe is also integrating it with other products like  Adobe Dreamweaver, so their existing clients using this tool  can easily upload changes they make in that software.

Adobe Business Catalyst is available to anybody, with two different levels of licensing, a standard version with support, which allows you to build client's websites and earn a subscription on hosting and a 'premium' version that has the features of the standard version, but can also be re-branded.

Who does it suit?

1. Companies & Individuals wishing to sell websites who want to be able to create them easily without any back end code.
2. Artists wishing to turn their designs into websites without having to pay a developer.
3. Companies & Individuals with clients that require a powerful online solution, without a high degree of customization.
4. Companies & Individuals who's clients are internet savvy and have time to learn the system.

The Drawbacks of the Adobe Business Catalyst CMS

1. You must learn to use the system before you can start building websites in it. This can take weeks or even a month.
2. A lot of functionality clients expect is not standard in the system and requires a knowledge of Jquery and Ajax to be able to do.
3. Updates to the system affect all websites and while it gives everybody the latest version, custom functionality can cease to work if core components are updated, rendering some websites unusable.
4. The user interface, though advanced is often too complex for small business owners unless they havd time to spend on learning it. End users can break their websites.

Summary:

The Adobe Business Catalyst is an advanced CMS that features a tightly integrated CRM. The dashboard with statistics and the promise of looking after all your website functionality from one interface, makes it easy to sell to clients While it will suit some web developers and end users, it is not for everybody.

If your clients have a lot of custom functionality or are not terribly computer literate, it may not be suitable for you. You should also find a Business Catalyst developer who is experienced in working on the Business Catalyst CMS before committing yourself to use it.

Over the next few weeks, we will be doing an in-depth analysis of different CMS systems and showing how they compare with the Adobe Business Catalyst CMS