CMS selection goes beyond the top right hand corner

At this year's Plone Conference in Bristol, I was invited to present at the conference's 'suits day' on the topic of 'Comparing Plone to other Content Management Systems'.
However, when I was putting the content together, I was faced with two main challenges:

• Compare what? The CMS market is enormous (anything between 10 and more than 150 different commercial and open source options are available, depending on how you define the term CMS)
• For what purpose? There are a huge range of potential requirements for a CMS, and some big decisions you need to make before you decide on a shortlist, including:
• which scenarios it is going to serve (intranet/internet/extranet)
• who your users are going to be (technical / non technical) and what they will expect to be able to do with the solution
• what your support / maintenance / enhancement model is going to look like
  (in-house, outsourced, hybrid)

So, before you open up your favourite magic quadrant, fold it in 4 and pick your CMS from the top right hand corner, make sure you have a structured selection process that clearly shows your requirements and how you arrived at a decision. If you take your stakeholders through this process then it's a lot more likely they're going to agree with the choice at the end.