Many leading organizations that have invested substantial time and money building a web content management (WCM) system to run their web site often face a crossroads. Do they continue to support their own customer-built application and extend it to address the needs of the business today, or do they look to purchase a commercial software product to address these requirements? This leads to a delicate standoff between the web site business owners (usually marketing), the development team (usually in IT) and the finance office. Each party has their own perspective.

These differing perspectives make it difficult to agree on a decision. This paper offers an overview on how to assist all those parties in making a decision on keeping the WCM system within the company or going commercial.