eZ Platform vs. OpenText Web CMS

For a new site: 1. Are there any hosting requirements? eZ Publish works best on a traditional LAMP stack. 2. What is the expertise of the development and systems administrations individuals? There should be some PHP development experience and a solid level of Apache and MySQL hosting. 3. Who will be managing the content of the site? What is their bandwidth for training? For ongoing content changes?

Incentivized

OpenText TeamSite is well-suited to large, enterprise-wide implementations where customization, content governance, and dynamic content distribution is needed or prioritized. It is probably not ideal for smaller sites with simple architecture and few resources to manage custom implementation.

Incentivized

• Content Taxonomy: Content is managed in a tree. Though taxonomy vs folksonomy is a near-religious debate among professionals, clients seeing the system for the first time just seem to "get it" more often.
• Content Flexibility: Common content types such as blog posts and articles are available out of the box. However, customizing these and creating new content types is very easy.
• Developer Friendly: Developers need only a little PHP experience to get started. Of course being an expert doesn't hurt and opens the door for the development of custom modules.

Incentivized

• Offering compelling experiences to customers, which help in improving satisfaction
• Information is delivered across multiple channels
• Testing relevant result sets to improve the rate of website conversion

Incentivized

• The template language: Outputting content or doing something special with it requires use of the templating language. Myself along with other developers I have trained, found this to be one of the biggest hurdles.
• Layout of physical files: The system decides what settings files and templates to use based on a hierarchy of modules. The same file can exist in multiple modules and you can find yourself deep within very similar looking folder structures, causing confusion during debugging.
• Community: eZ has a solid set of community contributors but the gap between it and Drupal or Wordpress is pretty large.

Incentivized

• I have recommendation for improvements.
• It is easy to work with all the features.
• All necessary content management tools are included.

Incentivized

Overall, it's a solid package with the potential to offer much functionality with appropriate resources applied. There are a few issues with the authoring interface that OpenText should address before its a top shelf authoring experience.

Incentivized

Our technical resources engage with OpenText TeamSite so I don't have direct experience. However, critical issues that we need help with seem to get the attention they deserve without issue. However, training and user resources for business owner roles are a bit lacking and some annoying issues with the authoring interface should be addressed sooner.

Incentivized

eZ Publish isn't as large in community size and number of installations as other content management systems. However, it's just as capable and met our needs:

• Developers, system administrators, and project manager can all speak the same language during the development and maintenance cycles of a site.
• End-user training is very straight-forward.
• Vendor support is available.
• Client IT departments can access if need (developers/designers/sysadmins).
• The community is there (forums) and there are solid contributions (extensions) from both the vendor and the community.

Incentivized

It offers more content editing features at a relatively low cost thus overall deployment is lower in cost. It has great customer support who are always there to support and answer to our needs thus making the process of deployment seamless at every stage and offering training for working with their product.

Incentivized

• Common knowledge: By making eZ a core offering, developers, system administrators, and project managers were able to communicate with each other effectively.
• Training: Due to its content taxonomy, end-user training often went well.
• Support: In our case, we had Gold support from eZ Publish which saved time and helped with customizations.

Incentivized

• We integrated with google analytics, now we have the proper comprehension of our audience data reception and behaviors - we've greatly improved on personalized marketing.
• Quick publication of content across the main digital channels.
• We run our digital campaigns swiftly.
• We've maintained our brand consistency for three years.

Incentivized