MangoApps vs. RWS Tridion Sites

MangoApps is well suited to enable interactions between colleagues located in distant places, if the people have the right culture, and are already demanding this type of feature. If the whole company is not ready to embrace this culture, MangoApps is missing a little something to encourage the refractory to join the party. And with this type of tool, we only really benefit from the tool's value when a large number of users participate.

Incentivized

SDL Tridion works well for organizations with a large website with a lot of content to continuously create and manage. The use of page templates and component presentations makes creating new pages fairly straightforward. It can be a little cumbersome when it comes to trying to "break from the norm" and build web pages that are outside of the template-driven format; however, there are ways around this to create pages that break away from the normal page-template format of the website. In this regard, SDL Tridion can be pretty flexible, allowing us to create a lot of custom functionality to keep up with constantly changing web trends.

• MangoApps provide a large number of options to interact within a community. People can post updates, ask questions, create polls, quizzes, wiki, surveys, chats, or forms.
• The Web interface is a modern application (Facebook inspired). The navigation (although not the most efficient) is overall quite intuitive.
• MangoApps has a web interface, and apps for desktop (Windows, Mac), and mobile.
• MangoApps features a centralized notification system. Unread messages are notified from the Web app, the mobile, or the desktop app. The synchronization status is synchronized.
• MangoApps integrates with Active Directory.

Incentivized

• Makes it easy to spin up a new site quickly
• Allows for numerous users to work on the same site without conflicting with each other's changes
• Allows you to unpublish changes or revert to old versions if you make a mistake
• Allows you to time publishing actions (for example, you can set it to happen overnight)

Incentivized

• The messaging system is quite new and doesn't always clear down when read
• The mentions tab can get very busy if you're added to groups
• Lots of customisation can make it overwhelming when editing

Incentivized

• If you are hoping to orbit the planet with a CMS, Tridion is built to leave the solar system. It is a very very powerful solution built for very serious enterprise businesses in hope of robust capabilities, which could be good or bad.
• Supporting business users is a hefty lift and requires significant training and regular retraining, and support.
• It's a niche solution that originally came out of Europe and was largely unknown in America. But today it's growing in popularity across the United States.
• Finding capable support, and developers specializing in Tridion capabilities isn't always easy. And 8 years ago it was nearly impossible, involving finding European developer support shops in order to get the assistance needed. This is changing though and American developer firms are becoming more widely available.

Incentivized

I am giving this a semi-high rating because we have already got Tridion up and running and we are still in the process of moving the sites over to Tridion. It is unlikely we will be moving things to a new CMS AGAIN in the near future as the cost to get Tridion was high.

The editor user interface is very user friendly and in-site editing makes simple updates fast and easy. The extensibility of Tridion is a big plus and the ability to add our own options into the default Tridion interface helps us integrate with external systems. Finally, the user permissions and security system helps us deploy it within our large organization.

I was not involved in the buying process but have working with Moodle in previous workplaces which had some similar functionality, lots of options, but wasn't quite as slick looking. MangoApps can be customised to looks like clean and easy to read for users and the mobile app is useful as many of the staff are in store or travelling around a lot, so a mobile first build is helpful!

Incentivized

Interwoven teamsites, Documentum, Adobe - teamsites and documentum are old and limited. Adobe rocks but I like where I am and Tridion does a lot of the same things. No need to reinvent the wheel or move to a lateral product.

• Users can connect from all over the business, especially useful when working from home
• A friendly informal communication method outside of teams/slack/emails
• A way to communicate events to the whole business

Incentivized

• SDL is a very complex system. Creating custom components by external vendors turned out to be expensive.
• The learning curve is very slow, so training takes a lot of time and cost.
• The revamped corporate site looks clean, modern, and is mobile-friendly.

Incentivized