The challenge with producing a website, whether internet or intranet based, is not the look and feel but all of the changes that need to be made.  Traditional web development involves either hiring a graphics artist or web developer and paying them an hourly rate everytime you need to post something or change some aspect of your website.  You may spend $10,000 on your initial website but then get hit with another $10,000 annually to cover all the changes you want to communicate over the course of a year.

• Easy to Learn
• Simple to Change
• Extensible for add-on features (i.e. social networking, customer portal, etc.)

Ambit evaluated Drupal, Alfresco, Joomla, and WordPress.  At the outset let us say that each of these platforms are extremely solid.  But, Ambit needed a platform that it could replicate, train on, support, and met the needs of small organizations that can't afford internal marketing resources.  After months of research Ambit chose Joomla.

Joomla is a powerful Content Management Systems (CMS) built on LAMP(Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP)/WAMP(Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP) technology.  Here was our final assessment:

• Drupal was the most powerful but geared towards pure PHP developers.
• Alfresco was too complicated and geared towards Sharepoint replacement.
• Wordpress was very simple but designed primarily for blogging.
• Joomla provided a good balance to all areas.

Ambit has now deployed over 40 websites utilizing Joomla.