We use it for our website and I'm the webmaster for the college, so I'm on there almost every day. We use it to speak to multiple audiences, primarily prospective students, but we also use it for other audience groups, external and internal. They're secondary. I also oversee the department web authors. There are people just within other departments that need to edit their page for this or that. That's pretty much the extent of it.
Pros
Managing permissions
The ability to easily edit main body content
The ability to be mobile responsive
Cons
I think depending on the version, I assume is where some of the functionality may be more robust or not. I've seen some functionality recently where it's more like drag and drop functionality and the version I'm using right now has that to some extent, but I think it can be developed even further at the lower versions and without having to purchase the entire suite. I think some of the functionality I don't have on my version, and so I'd like to see that just implemented across the board.
Likelihood to Recommend
It's definitely well suited for a large organization where you need to have multiple users paying attention to the content on specific pages, especially pages that are buried in a robust site. It's great for that, for the non-techie to be able to edit the information on their page, so to speak. Where I think it could be more robust is in the ability to kind of support more multimedia content and maybe make it a little bit easier to do forms because it has a capability obviously, but to some extent that is too complex for the non-techie to be able to create their own form as well as just some of the content blocks. I mean, I'm sure that a lot of time has been spent studying the complexity of that and whether the non-techie can manage something like a block. But I've found in my experience that even just basic group content block that's like the accordion, if you will, is too difficult for the non-techie person to be able to edit.
VU
Verified User
Employee in Information Technology (Higher Education company, 5001-10,000 employees)
We host our university web site for prospective students and there families, alumni, and other audiences. This helps us to recruit students and raise awareness of our brand and offerings.
We need a platform that empowers our editors to compose and manage a wide variety of content for varied audiences. Support for smart search, personalization, and languages are also key.
Pros
Flexibility / extensibility.
Content governance
Performance
Cons
Better out of the box Admin for graph
I struggle sometimes to find documentation and code examples.
Likelihood to Recommend
Once implemented, if done well, it's really easy to compose and manage content. As a developer and the person primarily responsible for the platform, CMS has been so reliable that I rarely have any sort of issues to deal with other than helping some of our editors with user errors .
I just have very little to worry about once we’re out of our initial stabilization period.
We need to create segmented content for our users and this allows us to bring in personalized content for each user especially when building out the user journey
Pros
Organized layout
Easy to use block system
Easy page management system
Cons
Why are RFI submissions so hard to view? It’s a lot of weird clicks to get to the view form submissions button
Likelihood to Recommend
I know a lot of improvements have come out and it’s pretty simple to use
VU
Verified User
Employee in Marketing (Education Management company, 1001-5000 employees)
We manage our college website and market our programs to prospective students using Optimizely CMS to ensure that all information is up-to-date. Optimizely CMS makes it easy to manage multiple web users that update content on their respective web pages. We use the CMS on a daily basis to push out marketable information and awareness about our college and the different programs we have available to our constituents.
Pros
Scheduling content on to display or be removed from the website
Easy to use
Setting up permissions and accounts is simple
Cons
A better way to capture analytics
Reporting broken links
Notifications of activity within the CMS
Likelihood to Recommend
It is well suited for managing or updating a website with hundreds of web pages and tracking accountability for quality insurance.
VU
Verified User
Manager in Marketing (Education Management company, 5001-10,000 employees)
Stream lining content management for customers websites that allow marketers to make changes to websites without always needing the help of a developer.
Pros
WYSIWYG Editor
Search Functionality
Openness to integrations
Cons
There is a large development lift for an initial site build.
The time to launch is fairly long, but worth it if done right.
Not all products are integrated into the CMS interface.
Likelihood to Recommend
Mid market and enterprise organizations where there is some development team that can help support the site. Also, if the company has a lot of content and a robust content calendar, Optimizely Content Management System is a good fit. If the site can be static because updates are not being made often, Optimizely CMS is not the right fit.
VU
Verified User
Employee in Sales (Professional Training & Coaching company, 51-200 employees)
We are replacing our legacy website which is hand coded .NET with Optimizely DXP + Commerce. It handles our whitelabeling for our educational partners with minimal custom config.
Pros
Centralized web management functions
access control and permissions
Built in Commerce system
Cons
Integration with acquired companies is rough
Explaination of product capability map to purchaseable items (intentially?) unclear
Likelihood to Recommend
Commerce
VU
Verified User
Employee in Information Technology (E-Learning company, 1001-5000 employees)
We use Optimizely Content Management System to host our external website for the university. It helps us market and sell the university. It allows us to effectively tell the unique story of our university and convert site users to applicants.
Pros
Allow for many users with different workflows and permissions
Store content and data an an organized manner
Allow for effective taxonomy and information sharing across a wide range of pages
Cons
Spelling and grammar check integrated into the system
More clear and robust reporting mechanisms for things like data sync and automated jobs
Better monitoring and alert functions of potential issues out of the box
Likelihood to Recommend
I appreciate how customizable Optimizely Content Management System is to our specific company. It allowed us to effectively manage and capture a wide range of aspects of a very large and complicated university.
VU
Verified User
Director in Marketing (Higher Education company, 1001-5000 employees)
The primary usage is in managing content for our main website, with approximately 3000 individual pages. Optimizely (Or EpiServer in our case) provides a fast and easy solution to replicate blocks and templates to make our daily tasks in creating and managing these pages more efficient and seemless. Our product pages require frequent updates and we really appreciate how much customisation can be provided. We provide a wide range of products along with news content, upcoming events, forms and a comprehensive search function has made navigating all these a breeze.
Pros
Customisation
Scripting support
Customer support is vert fast and helpful
Cons
Forms had trouble with high traffic
Occassional disconnections while working
Likelihood to Recommend
Many product pages have repeated layouts and themes which the built in templates and blocks can handle with ease. Asset management is much more intuitive than some other CMS solutions I have had experience with which makes it very satisfying to use. There are some features such as automatic archiving that we are looking to implement further for events to help tidy up our workflow. Something that I would like to see implemented to better suit our needs would be an separate mobile layout to help with responsiveness.
We use it as the CMS for our main website, it is great for modifying front end content and is it great for hot fixing front end problems on the website due to its flexibly and scripts
Pros
The customizable block and page types
The script block is really handy for doing front end fixes, something I missed when using other CMSs
Being able to apply styles and scripts globally or by page via the CMS itself is really handy
Cons
The search bar for blocks you've created doesn't work on my version of the CMS but this may have been fixed in an update
the WSIYG block removes/scraps any CSS in it which for me can be pretty annoying
If you're inactive for like 10 minutes then you will have to refresh, this can be annoying for me sometimes
Likelihood to Recommend
I would recommend this CMS to anyone wanting to do a lot of front end hot fixes on their website. The CMS has great flexibility and allows you to do a lot within the CMS itself without going into the back end which is really helpful for our team.
VU
Verified User
Employee in Marketing (Education Management company, 501-1000 employees)
