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HCL Digital Experience

Score9 out of 10

36 Reviews and Ratings

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What is HCL Digital Experience?

HCL Digital Experience is based on the former IBM Web Content Manager and IBM WebSphere Portal products, acquired by HCL Technologies from IBM in late 2018. The product allows the user to create, manage and deliver engaging omnichannel digital experiences to audiences with responsive content, targeted offers, seamlessly integrated applications and consistent branding across channels (web, mobile, and hybrid mobile/web applications and more).

Categories & Use Cases

Key Features

Learn about the best (and worst!) features HCL Digital Experience has to offer, as determined by TrustRadius' reviewers.
Based on 36 ratings of HCL Digital Experience's features
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Top Performing Features

  • WYSIWYG editor

    What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get editing tool allows users to build pages without writing code.

    Category average: 8.1

  • Role-based user permissions

    Permissions to perform actions or access or modify data are assigned to roles, which are then assigned to users, reducing complexity of administration.

    Category average: 8.2

  • API

    An API (application programming interface) provides a standard programming interface for connecting third-party systems to the software for data creation, access, updating and/or deletion.

    Category average: 8.2

Areas for Improvement

  • Library of website themes

    A library of website frameworks or themes is available as a starting point for building a website.

    Category average: 7.6

  • Publishing workflow

    The software allows users to set up a custom workflow for updating the website, including approval processes.

    Category average: 7.8

  • Content taxonomy

    Users can create multiple levels and types of content categories including tags.

    Category average: 7.9

Reviews

What users are saying about HCL Digital Experience.
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Use HCL DX to bridge the gap from employee to customer

Incentivized
Verified User
Strategist in Information Technology (10,001+ employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use it to drive the corporate customer website. We use HCL DX to merge the marketing site and the eCommerce site and give users a consolidated experience. We are moving forward with plans to use DX to drive customer self-help functions on the site and to unify this experience with the tools the inside sales support team uses. The idea is to break down siloed applications and refactor them as components that will allow the various component pieces to be shared using the DX framework to compile experiences appropriate for the customer and employee.

Pros

  • Content Management
  • Personalization
  • Site aggregation

Cons

  • SEO management
  • Documentation of functions
  • Education

Most Important Features

  • Ease of use for the business users.
  • Ease of maintenance.
  • Flexibility and options with deply.

Return on Investment

  • It allowed the Avnet Marketing team to take control of the site and maintain and update it without involving the IT team in the day-to-day operation. This opened up opportunities to speed up enhancements from IT but also opened possibilities to offer special services and functions to core customers and suppliers.

Alternatives Considered

Adobe Experience Manager, Four51 OrderCloud, from Sitecore and Bloomreach Commerce Experience Cloud

Other Software Used

HCL Commerce, Brightcove Video, Adobe Analytics

Facilitate and unify the integration of IBM products for packaging, deploying , and also sailing a package

Incentivized
Jean-Luc TaillandierView profile
Responsable Technique IT in Research & Development at PIXELIXIR (201-500 employees employees)

Pros

  • IBM Wepshere Portal is a good approach to federation as it contains with multi-channel capabilities, with internal proxy
  • Integration with Domino and Tivoli augment productivity for some integrated tasks (notification, awareness, etc.)
  • Form eXperience Builder is a great product to construct basic application to integrate workflows, forms and surveys
  • Most Products must be integrated with the FileNet, Case, Connections suite

Cons

  • Reduce time to required to assemble each product . It's quite difficult and we wast a lost of prototyping time trying to find a good configuration
  • Some products with a level for assembly are not compatible if installed together
  • It takes too long to install WPS / Case Manager / Digital Data Connector / Connections and Domino. I would like to see a basic architecture to expose service mail, blog, share file, share mail, meeting etc. I am waiting your Connections Pink solution impatiently!
  • I would like to see a more out-of-the-box solution so that we do not have to focus our energy in installing clusters or configuring the platform
  • Most of our customers are not ready to share data in the cloud, and there is a need for a real store and secure solution for administration and banking users who prefer on-premise solution. I am a big fan of your ECM /Portal /Social/ collaborative on-premise solutions. I would like to see better packaging to reduce costs and promote real use cases for administration and banking
  • Please integrate E-commerce elements in your suite.
  • Please make practice and certification easier (It should be free). Do not expire certifications.
  • Please facilitate contacts with support experts, specialists, and not just PMR contacts who are not qualified to help us. I would like engagement with support to be much more efficient and the support team to me more responsive.

Return on Investment

  • Negative: Very complex architecture for on-premise deployments (too many servers to installed)
  • Positive: Easy customization
  • Negative: Architecture limited to cloud solutions
  • WCM is an old product and needs an update
  • Blog, and community are not integrated in Digital Manager for discussion
  • Templates are not available to integrate basic services (FileNet, more complex BPM , e-commerce)

Other Software Used

IBM Case Manager, IBM FileNet Content Manager, IBM Connections, IBM Sametime, IBM Tivoli Federated Identity Manager, DB2

IBM Web Content Manager - Innovative, Robust and Evolving with market trends

Incentivized
Sowmyamaruthi LattalaView profile
Technology Specialist in Information Technology at Cognizant (10,001+ employees employees)

Pros

  • With Version 8.5, IBM Web Content Manager introduced in place editing capabilities which allow authors to make content edits on sections of the page instead of going to the content itself. This feature allows authors to make changes in context of the page and preview changes within the actual look and feel of a live page.
  • Projects provide a collaborative atmosphere for the author community so that authors can interact and work as a team to manage inter-dependent content changes under one project and publish all changes at once, instead of working separately on individual content changes. This brings awareness across authors in an organization and easy knowledge share.
  • IBM Digital Data Connector is a cool feature that allows [users] to integrate external content sources onto the portal using IBM Web Content Manager presentation components. This allows UI/UX designers to present integrated external data in any manner they want, manage UI changes with an underlying approval process and leverage syndication to push changes live immediately.
  • IBM Web Content Manager offers a targeted content feature that allows business users to deliver personalized content to customers based on customer demographic information, browsing history and other transaction related information. Any rules created follow the publishing process thereby making it just a configurable item resulting in less turn around to turn on the feature on a website.
  • IBM Web Content Manager offers 'multi lingual solution' out of the box which allows content creation for almost all popular languages.
  • Syndication feature has improved a lot and it now provides a detailed views comprising of 'failed items', 'items that have syndicated successfully, 'items in queue'. Failed items view provides detailed and clear cut information of what resulted in failure helping IT to troubleshoot problems easily.

Cons

  • Projects provide a collaborative way of managing content changes on a website. However projects cannot be used with a workflow as such. Though different phases in a project can be tied to workflow actions, the real benefits of a workflow on the project are missing.
  • IBM WCM is a bit of a heavy weight component because of the DOJO framework it comes with. Though IBM has improved this over the years, it is still unable to come out of the DOJO framework and leverage some of the best-used frameworks like jQuery.
  • Somehow IBM WCM is best suited with a portal, as a standalone WCM server. IBM Web Content Manager is not that robust providing data to external websites.

Return on Investment

  • IBM Web Content Manager has always been great considering the ability for a business to drive information to market in a short span of time.
  • Strong customer support has always been IBM Web Content Manager's strength, this ensures that deliverables on demand are always met.

Other Software Used

WebSphere Portal, IBM Tealeaf, Google Analytics, WordPress

Best product to work with.

Incentivized
Shan AlamView profile
Senior Developer Analyst in Information Technology at HHSC (10,001+ employees employees)

Pros

  • We can implement better user interface using websphere portal.
  • We can separate our module in separate portlets.
  • We can integrate all types of technology with webphere portal.

Cons

  • It has so many inter application running. Reducing applications will help for performance.

Return on Investment

  • I am not sure about this.

Other Software Used

Apache Maven, GitHub, Microsoft Exchange

IBM WCM from authoring system designer perspective

Arwa Nababteh
IBM WCM Developer/ team Leader in Professional Services at Inspire Jordan (11-50 employees employees)

Pros

  • Blending workflow perfectly with every component, item or content in system, thus maintaining accuracy of content
  • Keeping versions and history of all changes made, while providing details on when, and by whom it was changed. In this way, restore is easy and straightforward
  • Large set of components provided out of the box to ease building the authoring environment

Cons

  • Integration between portal pages and WCM is still not optimal, although the introduction of managed pages is a huge improvement. But adding all the changes on page and WCM in one project and one workflow is still not easy
  • Linking portal pages to site area only, and requiring a site area for each content isn't liked by customers
  • Some features like, number of views, adding comments, etc. should be out of the box
  • Some features that depend a lot on theme libraries, especially Dojo libraries, like tagging and ratting should be enhanced

Return on Investment

  • Being a system designer, not user, I try to design a system as efficiently as possible to increase employee efficiency by using the skill set effectively

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