25
I have spent literally months looking at different "CMS/Portal/Weblog/Document Mgmt" solutions for my company as well as for web sites of a number of clubs I belong to. I'd love to find a product that would do it all for me, but it seems like that is just not possible with any product out there (including commercial products).
I have installed and started using a bunch of different CMS's, and currently have pilot sites up using slashcode, squishdot, plone, xoops, phpslash, opencms and tiki. At work I have Oracle's commercial product 9iAS as a pilot site. I've tried and discarded a lot of others as well.
I wish there were an un-biased review of the various products and some kind of feature matrix to aid in decision making. I've found some of these, but they are clearly "marketing material", and very biased to a certain product. There are probably white papers available from consultants, but even these are biased in favor of the products they like to install and support.
Each product has a definate "Focus" in it's features, and they support some usages much better than others. For example, XOOPS is a dream to install and admin (nice work guys and gals), but has nothing even approaching the document managment features of Oracle's Application Server or Zope/Plone. For my "club" sites that I run at home, that's a non-issue, so I like XOOPS very much (I like TikiWiki also and am having trouble choosing). However, at work, the lack of good versioning/auditing/rendering makes XOOPS a non-starter for Document Management. It's a shame too, do you know how much we are going to spend for Oracle and Documentum licenses and consultants fees ? Lets' just say it would support the entire XOOPS team in a rather lavish lifestyle for a long time (think "winning the lottery"). We spent about $35k for 2 consultants to have a bunch of meetings and write up a paper telling us the obvious ("You need a Document Management System, yesterday !!").
Anyway, your question about business use is quite hard to answer simply. Fortunately for you, this is a very promising area for consultants, and the more you know about the available solutions, the better you'll be able to serve your clients.
Dennis