Modern Campus CMS vs. Optimizely Content Management System

This website works well in an academic setting. It's easy to add pages as your site expands/grows. It's really easy to use and modify pages once you know what you're doing, but it can be a little tricky to get the hang of it at first. It is definitely useful to have in-person or virtual training before you dive in.

Incentivized

Very much if a business is doing a rebrand, for example, or a digital transformation, the DXP product is super competitive. The managed services that provided around the infrastructure and all of the moving parts really, really works well. It just makes life as a developer very easy when ultimately you just have to do the code and deploy it out and don't worry about the environment infrastructure. I think it's really, really well and fits in really well with that. Areas where it's not so great in my experience, I would say, well, I've already mentioned kind of the CMS to SaaS product, but also just in general it feels like we're going through a bit of a transition period with the documentation at the moment. So when new features are rolled out or the product catalog expands, the documentation isn't always the best or streamlined. That can make life as a developer a little bit work at the times.

Incentivized

• Assets are easily managed and can be edited independently of the page they exist on.
• Version history is handled well. Allows for a comment section to note what changes have been made.
• Dependency tags are perfect for media that is used in several places. Upload a photo once, use it in multiple places, edit the photo or its description in one place.

Incentivized

• Folder structure - I was on Magento 1.x & 2.x for 10 years, which had no folder structure for blocks or images - it was very difficult to find things. We couldn't keep anything straight without it.
• The fact that it knows what block or image is being used and links to where it's being used is pure gold. It prevents deletion of needed elements.
• I like that I can drag a block or image somewhere new and it doesn't break anything.
• Our search of blocks and images is now working, that's very helpful.

Incentivized

• OU Campus could use some improving on their upload changes as far as naming the document because when you are trying to upload the same document with minor revisions, OU Campus requires you to change the name of the document within OU Campus which creates multiple documents in the workfolder.
• When naming documents to upload into OU Campus, it would be nice if we could name out documents the way we would instead of having to put an underscore to indicate a space in the document. Most users of OU Campus has not had proper training to know that you need to do that.

• promo types, several have been released that do not work as they are advertised/labeled which has caused us to make custom promos for just about all of them where we've actually fixed the functionality. The OOB types are completely unreliable
• promo exclusions/sorting -- this is very buggy, and some of this would normally be "out of the box" like no two order discounts should ever be able to stack. This gets incredibly difficult to manage when you have 75 active promos at a time.
• asset management - replacement files with same name aren't recognized even when the first version is deleted, this creates a mess in asset folders - nothing can be successfully deleted from epi asset library
• html automatic edits -- issues when typing in either content page links or asset links, epi always adds random characters to the end (?"Epieditmode=false,6789" for example, which doesn't break content, but does make it more difficult for the team to use non-epi html tools to build or edit
• auto dimensions on images -- when adding an image in the html, you have the address exactly, but any other way causes the editor to put width and height dims on the code, making the image warp in mobile, this is adding steps to undo the automatic edits, they are completely unhelpful
• blogs - we are running a blog in Opti that is compeltely manual, every "related article" and every "articles about x topic" block is hard coded, there is nothing dynamic in the content library which is frustrating, and creates a huge time suck for articles across the site, every time there is a new one, that's 10+ manual page updates

Incentivized

I don't work at the college any longer, but I believe they will renew the license for the OU Campus Content Management System because of all the great benefits they have had since they initially deployed it. The system is very intuitive and easy to use. Department leads love it. The IT department also loves it because it saves them a lot of time and resources.

Since I work on the implementation side of things, and do not directly own licensing for Ektron CMS, I have to base this rating off of how I think it will be received or presented to customers looking to start a new site deployment. I try to remain CMS agnostic, though my specialty is with the .NET and Microsoft stack. Because of the experience I have working with Ektron, I tend to be more forgiving with the shortcomings as I am familiar with how to work around them or past them from experience. Being familiar with the community available also helps, as you become familiar with the best approaches to find solutions to your issues. Each product has it's ups and downs and all of them are only going to be as good as the company or development team implementing them can make them. This is EXTREMELY important to remember when choosing a CMS, as it can make or break your expensive investment.

Once you've been training how to use it, it's really easy to use it on a daily basis

Incentivized

From our editors perspective they find the CMS system easy and to clear to use. Our developers find it very easy to design on and appreciate the level of service support available. It's also always evolving and getting better every year. We find this investment reassuring and encourages us to try keep pace and see how we can continue to push the envelope and continue to improve all aspect of our websites and online touch points.

Incentivized

Unplanned outages or errors are fairly rare in our instance. And when there are issues, they're usually fixed fairly quickly

The support at OmniUpdate is one of the reasons we continued with the company when time for renewal of contract.

I attended multiple trainings/tutorials early in the process. The vendor-supplied content about Optimizely was engaging for users/attendees (I often analyze training content, compliance programs, governance plans), which helps our OCM people by having good "word of mouth" about the product long before a rollout ever happens. I actually when the user-focused portion of the Optimizely Academy twice in 2022 to ensure I had a grasp on operability and to be able to support the training and OCM efforts

Incentivized

Ektron is one of the best solution for .Net platform. Over the years have improved the performance issues that the previous versions had. My only complain is right now you can't do Page builder pages if you choose to have a MVC architecture

The support team at OmniUpdate is available to assisting campuses with implementation

I was not fully involved.

Incentivized

I think the visual editing and version control. If the CMS server is down the website is still live because of content independent of the server.

Optimizely Content Management System takes the best bit of previous platforms and simplifies them without removing the more advanced features but not making the necessary to get things going. allowing for any user to jump in and start working is a massive help but empowering power users to take advantage of all its features.

Incentivized

• Increased satisfaction with user experience. OU Campus has made it easier for us to address problems when they arise, making our website more efficient.
• Role-based control. Our old CMS made it very easy for users to change fonts and colors on their sections, which was very detrimental to the overall brand. That's not a problem anymore.
• Reduced training times. OU Campus is so easy to use, I've been able to cut training times down by half.

Incentivized

• Flexibility with design that allows us to work towards our mission of 'Tennis Opened Up'
• Speed of deploying content, meaning users can really on us for the most up-to-date content on tennis in Britain
• Ability to have different logged-in areas for different user groups, allowing us to create more bespoke and personalised experiences

Incentivized