Adobe acquired Neolane in July 2013 and later re-named the product Adobe Campaign. Adobe Campaign provides both marketing automation and marketing resource management functionality such as spend & financial management, workflow, and asset management.
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Drupal
Score 8.2 out of 10
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Drupal is a free, open-source content management system written in PHP that competes primarily with Joomla and Plone. The standard release of Drupal, known as Drupal core, contains basic features such as account and menu management, RSS feeds, page layout customization, and system administration.
Multi-Channel Campaign Management: I have found Adobe Campaign to be excellent for managing campaigns across multiple channels, including email, mobile, social media, and web. Its centralized platform allows me to plan, execute, and track campaigns effectively, making it ideal for organizations with diverse marketing channels. For example, when I was running a campaign to promote a new product launch across email, SMS, and social media channels, Adobe Campaign provided me with the tools to orchestrate and track the campaign seamlessly. I could ensure consistent messaging and a cohesive customer experience across different channels.
Well, I'm definitely biased, I've been working with Drupal for 12+ years, and I can say it's appropriate for any size/scale of a project, whether it's a small catalog website or a huge corporation. If I want to dial it down to a specific use case, Drupal is best what most customers/clients that have high-security standards, and need to have extensive editorial experience and control over their website's architecture. Due to its core design, Drupal can connect with each part of its own and any external third-party resources quite easily. For a less-suited scenario, I might say that if you don't have enough budget to get proper work done, sometimes just using WordPress with a pre-designed theme might sound better to you, but if you have the budget and the time, always go with Drupal
It allows me to capture leads through various sources, such as website forms or landing pages.
It offers a centralized repository where I can securely store and manage customer data, encompassing contact information, preferences, transaction records, and additional relevant data.
It provides robust analytics and reporting capabilities.
Content Types... these are amazing. Whereas a more simplistic CMS like Wordpress will basically allow you to make posts and build pages, Drupal 8 gives you the ability to define different types of content that behave differently, and are served up differently in different areas of the website.
Extensibility... it scales, ohhhh does it scale. They've really figured out server-side caching, and it makes all the difference. Once a page has been cached, it's available instantly to all users worldwide; and when coupled with AWS, global redundancy and localization mean that no matter where you're accessing the site, it always loads fast and crisp.
Workflows... you have the ability to define very specific roles and/or user-based editorial workflows, allowing for as many touchpoints and reviews between content creation and publication as you'll require.
Adobe Campaign does not have a high enough sales intelligence to let us know which landing page format would be the most optimal for the proper development of our mass marketing operations, which in the long run would also help with customer collection.
Does not directly track the number of people who enter our website, beyond sending them automated messages depending on whether they entered a certain section of the site. This problem is important, because it does not allow us to get complete tracking results in that area.
The platform does not do social media marketing extensively enough to let us create dynamic evaluations on the results of interactions that are obtained within social networks, which creates a huge margin of error in our analytical results messages, and so we have stopped applying social marketing.
Security and new release notifications are a hassle as they happen too often
Allowing them to write PHP modules is a big advantage, but sometimes integrating them is a small challenge due to the version the developer is working on.
Once you go for Neolane you are a bit stuck with it, so we will most likely stay with Neolane. Cost of investment and training are the main factors at work here. We havesimply have invested too much in the product to stop using it after 2 years. That said, my score of 8 does not imply that the product is worthy of getting an 8 but reflects our willingness to renew. Given that upgrading to a new version will cost again a substantial sum, we most likely will keep using the current version we are on which is 6X.
The time and money invested into this platform were too great to discontinue it at this point. I'm sure it will be in use for a while. We have also spent time training many employees how to use it. All of these things add up to quite an investment in the product. Lastly, it basically fulfills what we need our intranet site to do.
Thanks to this tool we are taking more internal control of the creation and deployment of campaigns with less dependency on an ESP. We can pre-program marketing publications, being able to concentrate on the target audience. It helps me manage email campaigns with real-time tracking.
It's a great CMS platform and there are a ton of plugins to add some serious functionality, but the security updates are too complex to implement and considering the complexity of the platform, security updates are a must. I don't want my site breached because they make it too difficult to keep it up to date.
Drupal itself does not tend to have bugs that cause sporadic outages. When deployed on a well-configured LAMP stack, deployment and maintenance problems are minimal, and in general no exotic tuning or configuration is required. For highest uptime, putting a caching proxy like Varnish in front of Drupal (or a CDN that supports dynamic applications).
Drupal page loads can be slow, as a great many database calls may be required to generate a page. It is highly recommended to use caching systems, both built-in and external to lessen such database loads and improve performance. I haven't had any problems with behind-the-scenes integrations with external systems.
Although there is a lot of material available on the internet to answer questions, I still feel a lack of commitment and delay in the responses of the support, but as a whole, it leaves nothing to be desired. I believe that, in the great majority, companies sin in the desired support, but we cannot generalize. But this one, in particular, has a wide range of specialists and well-qualified management, but I believe that it is not so bad.
As noted earlier, the support of the community can be rather variable, with some modules attracting more attraction and action in their issue queues, but overall, the development community for Drupal is second to none. It probably the single greatest aspect of being involved in this open-source project.
I was part of the team that conducted the training. Our training was fine, but we could have been better informed on Drupal before we started providing it. If we did not have answers to tough questions, we had more technical staff we could consult with. We did provide hands-on practice time for the learners, which I would always recommend. That is where the best learning occurred.
The on-line training was not as ideal as the face-to-face training. It was done remotely and only allowed for the trainers to present information to the learners and demonstrate the platform online. There was not a good way to allow for the learners to practice, ask questions and have them answered all in the same session.
Plan ahead as much you can. You really need to know how to build what you want with the modules available to you, or that you might need to code yourself, in order to make the best use of Drupal. I recommend you analyze the most technically difficult workflows and other aspects of your implementation, and try building some test versions of those first. Get feedback from stakeholders early and often, because you can easily find yourself in a situation where your implementation does 90% of what you want, but, due to something you didn't plan for, foresee, or know about, there's no feasible way to get past the last 10%
As we tried to centralise the marketing automation platform within the enterprise, Adobe Campaign can plug into several instances of Salesforce.com for lead management queues. All other marketing automation platforms can only plug into one instance of Salesforce.com. Adobe Campaign was also able to handle the complexity and challenges of our enterprise data which are a result of years of legacy, mergers and acquisitions and data aggregation.
Drupal is community-backed making it more accessible and growing at a faster rate than Sitefinity which is a proprietary product built on .NET. Drupal is PHP-based using some but not all Symphony codebase. Updates for Drupal are frequent and so are feature adds.
Not everything was great at all times. It was handled accordingly, pricing was reasonable for what was purchased. It was the best value on the market at the time of purchase.
Drupal is well known to be scalable, although it requires solid knowledge of MySQL best practices, caching mechanisms, and other server-level best practices. I have never personally dealt with an especially large site, so I can speak well to the issues associated with Drupal scaling.
Talking about profits can be subjective if you don't take into account the periodic variations between net and gross profit margins, but fortunately with Adobe Campaign, it is easy to notice these differences quickly.
Results have always seemed relative to us, as they vary greatly depending on how much is invested.
Drupal has allowed us to build up a library of code and base sites we can reuse to save time which has increased our efficiency and thus had a positive financial impact.
Drupal has allowed us to take on projects we otherwise would not have been able to, having a further impact.
Drupal has allowed us to build great solutions for our clients which give them an excellent ROI.
