James Robertson is starting what should be an interesting series of postings on Content Management System myths. This particular article, CMS Myth #1: Installing a CMS must be hard, highlights what a client or CMS user should expect when setting up a new system.
Nowadays, however, many organisations have pretty simple needs. They want to publish a website, containing mostly static content with a handful of extra features (such as secure login, online events calendar).
If you fall into this category, then you can reasonably expect CMS products to install out-of-the-box. That's not to say you won't need some vendor assistance during the initial project, you will. What you won't have to do, though, is customise the product.
While we can't claim that Syntax CMS is super easy to install out-of-the box, once it is up and running, I think we hit the majority of the do's and don'ts he highlights. Out-of-the box you get the authoring interface, publishing system and can start creating your own pages and putting content on them. You would still have to update the templates to give your site its own particular design.
