eHive - Odd name for a Collections Management System

Last night I went to a Culture Geeks talk about eHive, a collections management system (CMS) which the makers say is the first web based system of its kind. It was designed with small museums and galleries in mind as they often find themselves unable to use other CMSs because they're too expensive and/or they don't have the resources to manage and maintain it.

I can see the potential of this service for small museums and galleries but I'm not sure if eHive has got it right just yet. It's got a reduced set of the features that would be available in a full blown CMS, and this is a deliberate move to make the product more easy to use, but it still seems quite complex to me and this puts it somewhere in between being easy to use and being a good CMS.

Perhaps more CMS features could be sacrificed for the benefit of usability but I know how much importance museums give to correctly cataloguing their objects so I think I can understand eHive's predicament.

I would certainly recommend giving eHive a try out if you have a collection of objects that you want to catalogue and make available on the web. It's free for the first 200 objects.

 

I'm not sure I would have called it 'eHive' though.