Nconnect vs. RWS Tridion Sites

OnSemble is solving a lot of problems that our organization had prior to its implementation:

• We can track communication readership.
• We can engage with our fellow teammates through chats and recognition.
• We have a central location for all job-related links.
• We are just now delving into adding departmental pages so folks can communicate within their teams.

I'm not sure of a scenario where OnSemble wouldn't be appropriate - if you have a company that needs to centralize communication, documentation, and share ideas, it's an excellent choice.

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.

• Ease of Use - with limited html or design experience, I was able to pick up building and updating in our OnSemble portal with minimal struggles.
• Customer Service and Support - Passageways employees are hands down the best, always willing to take extra time to dig in, troubleshoot, and resolve any issues in an extremely timely manner. They are always pleasant and super helpful.
• Customization - the available site of modules offered allow for a "site" that is suited for the differing needs of each business OnSemble is being used by. From calendars, to document repository, to creating content pages for staff, the possibilities for customization are almost limitless.

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

• Now that we're customers, the support function is not as strong. If we have a question, we are pointed towards articles so we can "self serve". Sometimes it is important to pick up the phone and talk to someone, which is a service that they've eliminated. Everything is self-help or email ticketing.
• When creating the portal, we didn't know what we didn't know. There were some instances that if we hadn't asked a question, we never would have been told about a product/feature that we didn't know we had access to. Our banner almost wasn't implemented in time because the person in charge of it left the company and we didn't know that we needed to follow up on that.
• While being able to completely customize the portal is a HUGE strength and not a problem since our implementation team consisted of marketing professionals with design experience, it is also a weakness. If you are tasked with creating the portal but don't have design capabilities, I highly recommend looping in someone who does.

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.

Easy to navigate, easy to build pages in, easy to update. Harvester's OnSemble portal makes our days so much easier

Incentivized

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 have always been pleased with my experiences with OnSemble's Support team. First, they have a great library of articles to help me study and guide for many of my questions. But when I cannot quite comprehend, or I "run into the wall", I can be assured that I'll be contacted quickly with a pleasant voice to work through whatever my question/issue may be. Kudos to OnSemble Support!

Incentivized

The software is easy to use, customizable, and intuitive to its users

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.

• Having the proper, current form readily available is paramount since many are guided by regulatory dictates.
• The corporate directory provides a pix, hire anniversary date, and birthdate (sans year), along with the usual location and contact information. So besides being a tremendous convenience when needing to contact someone, we can meet new people and celebrate life events with one another.
• Having "controlled" and "guided" help desks helps manage the extreme variety of information [that] may come in. It helps translate the user's interpretation of the issue into something more understandable.

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