Content management and design. Governance and access control. Reports and data presentation for public and private consumption. Document management for case files, API ecosystem for updating data, live data from multiple sources, and releasing content on a schedule from the CMS programmatically. The CMS allows us to open up content creation to those who really know what they need, while the ability to update templates independently makes a much more effective user experience.
Pros
Seamless deployment.
Separation of concerns.
Schedule jobs.
Asset cleanup.
Upgrade and community.
Cons
Upgrade roadmap.
Mass content management.
Providing features on CMS 11.
Likelihood to Recommend
Great CMS for large organizations to quickly get concepts to implement and test in the real world. Wouldn't use it for small projects that don't often change. Don't use a hammer when a screwdriver would work. Make sure Opti is the tool that will work best for your organization. But if it is right, it really will be right.
We are system integrators, previously integrating Ektron and Episerver, now Optimizely Content Cloud. We have done implementations for the California Employment Development Department and currently for the California Highway Patrol. The main issue we solve with these implementations is to empower organizations to quickly and effectively publish web content with an easy-to-use interface with workflows for content governance and compliance.
Pros
Very effective content management interface, with drag-and-drop capabilities.
Great ability to customize workflows to fit an organizations web content lifecycle.
Effective mechanisms for multi-site implementations allow multiple sites to be hosted in a single solution.
Cons
Integrations with personalization products at Optimizely (on the roadmap with Optimizely One).
Likelihood to Recommend
Very well suited for organizations that want an enterprise solution for web content management, as opposed to open-source products (such as WordPress or Drupal). These primarily include marketing websites, where content must be published frequently with appropriate content governance. Also, it is a great platform for multi-site, allowing content to be controlled in a centralized place for multiple websites. Content authoring interfaces are intuitive and allow for quick publishing by business users as opposed to technical teams.
Implement CMS for Companies to quickly author and publish the content. This product helps our clients to quickly create content and publish it via workflow approval.
Pros
Content Authoring, Provisioning access for content authors.
Easy way to manage, upload media in Content directory.
Seamless On page and component editing interface.
Provide ability for authors to validate(preview) the content prior publish.
Cons
Validation of Pages for accessibility standards prior publishing the page.
Likelihood to Recommend
CMS well suited: any employee can do content authoring with little knowledge of the system.
We use Optimizely Content Cloud as the CMS for the public website for the Supreme Court of Michigan, Michigan Court of Appeals, Michigan Judicial Institute, and various other divisions in our organization. We have data integrations with our local databases and other external databases that are updated daily, and facilitate live communication between the site and the courts database system. As a customer of the headless CMS, there have certainly been challenges but overall it has been a high quality improvement for the state. Customer support always seems to respond in a reasonable timeframe, and they typically have an idea of troubleshooting issues quickly.
Pros
Fast to respond to support tickets
Full featured CMS that can handle massive amounts of data
Data integrations that are easy to set up and maintain
Cons
The editor experience takes time to get used to. And it takes a long time sometimes.
File management can become a pain with large amounts of files. Could be solved with process improvement but its still a little rough
The documentation is good for regular use, but the recent split between the v11 and v12 docs make it take a lot longer to find the articles for my specific product type
Likelihood to Recommend
Content Management is well suited to manage and present content both from the CMS database and from external sources and presents it well through the Headless CMS. Handles authentication and errors in a well fashioned manner. Most of the plugins are useful additions to the system. One thing that I have experienced difficulty with using Optimizely Content Cloud, is the caching of files and updating of files. We have some files that are updated regularly, but for some reason we'll have two users working together, looking at the same url, and working from different versions of the file. Maybe this is an implementation issue, but it is very hard to diagnose and it provides an inconsistent User Experience for users trying to do work.
We use Episerver CMS for all our web platforms. It helps us to reach out with information to the citizens of Stockholm. It is easy to build available pages with Episerver CMS.
Pros
Building structures
Manage images
It makes the content intuitive for the user
Easy for an editor to work with
Cons
Would be nice if we were able to insert our own help texts into the Administration interface (to help our editors)
Users should be able to comment on pages
Would be nice with a built-in feature for managing maps
Likelihood to Recommend
Quickly set up sites and get powerful pages using Episerver CMS.
Episerver Web Content Management System is used by our organization to manage content on our public facing website. It is used across the whole organization, with users in each department that has a public facing web page trained on updating content in the system. It assures that the public is aware of relevant information on the website.
Pros
Easy-to-use interface
Permissions setup
Back-end website map
Cons
Internal link mapping
Mobile editing
Email notifications
Likelihood to Recommend
The Episerver Web Content Management System is a solid, relatively easy-to-use web content management system for users who are both advanced users and non-experienced users. It is a good system for making daily content updates to web pages across a large website with multiple pages. Permissions are easy to set up so necessary approvals always occur.
We're currently using Ektron for both our internal, and external site. Over the last 7 or so years, I've noticed a pretty massive change with the company and its proven to be beneficial. From a technical perspective, I handle the implementation, administration and development for roughly 175 content editors, and just over 5000 publicly viewable pages. I've been very happy that it's been a steady workhorse these past few years, and we're looking at utilizing more of the cms with our next re-write.
Pros
The performance of the database as well as the cms itself has improved greatly.
Not tied to the CMS in particular, but the dev community on Ektron sites as well as Twitter is great.
Cons
The editor is great, but its still missing some of the functionality of the previous WYSIWYG editor.
I'd like to see some expanded html forms or custom content types used as forms. As is, you can do basic surveys and forms but anything beyond that essentially requires a custom page / app.
Likelihood to Recommend
I think its very well suited for what we're doing. We have over 100 editors, and thousands of pieces of content. Since implementation there have really been very few 'big' issues.
VU
Verified User
Analyst in Information Technology (Government Administration company, 1001-5000 employees)
