I've used or evaluated a lot of different CMS systems. CMS is a nebulous
industry and as you climb the ladder from quick and simple to enterprise,
you also go through a lot of different tradeoffs in terms of power and ease
of use.
Something like WordPress makes a really easy lightweight CMS. It's not just
a blog but it can create pages and has plugins for calendars, surveys,
whatever. Theoretically you can do the same in MOSS with a combination of
the blog and basic CEWP pages. Strict CMS people don't think of it as a
"real" CMS because it's still primarily a blog and designed around that. But
it's a great lightweight solution.
PHPNuke/dotNetNuke are certainly much more flexible than WordPress in
letting you create your own site, but there are tradeoffs in scalability,
central management, and enterprise system integration. I think of these as
the free kitchen sink products. Good for a geek on a budget.
Stepping up to a dedicated CMS like Drupal or, oh, CommonSpot gets you into
a more "real" traditional CMS but then also starts getting into more
difficult page design/development and often they're mired in web 1.0. They
might have some capacity to do rss, but they were designed back in the day
of a website just being an isolated repository, not a collection of
shareable/syndicatable content. Good for a business looking to create a
traditional static site with no real need to be integrated with enterprise
systems like LDAP, Oracle or PeopleSoft.
Jumping into the enterprise space you have the big iron like Documentum or
Interwoven. These are so flexible in what they support that they're
basically making you do all the heavy lifting and are a glorified set of
APIs for version control and file transfer. They typically don't dictate
what your DB or code language is, they're so flexible they'll work with
anything. Of course, being so flexible they don't help you at all in terms
of using them. Heck, when I was evaluating Interwoven Teamsite the team I
shadowed did sites by scratch in Dreamweaver and edited the sites with
Dreamweaver. The CMS just managed workflow and deployment.
In my mind, the MOSS CMS features fit right into that nice middle spot. Not
too big to be cumbersome but still with the enterprise hooks that are
lacking in a lot of the smaller, lightweight, often opensource products.
The thing it looks like you're struggling with is that a well managed CMS
based site requires clear business rules, workflows, and other
organizational/political management decisions to be made. I've worked in
.gov and .edu and I know how hard or even impossible that is. But the
biggest point of failure I've experienced with any CMS is the expectation
that you can just install the software, set up a blank site with some web
based editing and expect it to work, which is of course is like pulling
teeth. Any web site requires preplanning and governance, and a CMS with web
based tools to create and edit pages requires even MORE of that.
Our current approach is to use the MOSS CMS for the parts that can be
managed, like official information coming out of the Communications and
Marketing offices. For the smaller, departmental sites that still insist on
posting their own content, we're looking at giving them blogs. In fact, we
just had a meeting to discuss the merits of the fledgling blogging support
in MOSS (even with CKS:EBE) vs WordPress MU.