That said, Oxite is as far away from being a “real” web cms as you can be, even being a fully feature-rich blogging engine. Claiming that it’ll ever be a CMS is a bit like lookng at a bike and saying that because it has wheels it could turn into a great car. So I don’t even doubt that it’ll ever compete with Umbraco. It might compete with other .NET blogging engines, but using Umbraco as a blogging engine only would also be a bit overkill!

It’s also very much worth to notice how this was released. If MS have real plans to ship something that’ll be supported, they release bits like this as CTP (Community Tech Previews), which is still unsupported, but *might* turn into an alpha, then beta and then release candidate (where the product starts to be supported). This was simply shipped as something that’s completely unsupported and might evolve “if the community decides” (ref: http://www.codeplex.com/oxite/Wiki/View.aspx?title=FAQ&referringTitle=Home).

As I see and read it, it’s more of a sample application to show you can build applications using the new ASP.NET MVC technology (very similar to java struts) using best practices. ASP.NET MVC is one of the focus technologies (along with Silverlight) on Microsofts coming MIX conference, which is why it was released. And as a sample application showing the technical potential of the MVC technology it’s very nice.

But in terms of having potential as a Web CMS it’s not even close and that was why I was surprised to see all this buzz from analysts all over the blogosphere. A year ago the European division of MS launched something called a Website Starter Kit which is closer to being a Web CMS (still quite far away IMHO) than Oxite, but it never got any attention.

CMS Watch has some further interesting details.

Niels Hartvig, with all respect, I think it is worth adding that you head up an open source .NET-based CMS that might end up competing with Oxite