Adobe Experience Manager is a combined web content management system and digital asset management system. The combined applications of Adobe Experience Manager Sites and Adobe Experience Manager Assets is offered by the vendor as an end-to-end solution for managing and delivering marketing content.
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Kibo eCommerce
Score 6.6 out of 10
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Kibo Software offers Kibo eCommerce (formerly Mozu), designed to support retailers with online offer creation and deployment, content publishing and landing pages, and many tools and widgets out of the box with a retail-oriented ecommerce solution.
Mozu was acquired by Kibo Software from Volusion in October 2016.
I'll answer the second one because I mean, the first one I don't have an issue with. The second scenario is we oftentimes have the need to spin off very small campaign style sites or sites that generate leads but are unbranded and that sort of thing. So that's hard to do in AEM because you have to then create another organization within AEM to do that. And we're talking about sites that are maybe five to 10 pages in size. So we've been investigating Edge, but then that's a different workflow, so we'd have to train people on that. So it would be nice if there was something within the AEM structure that could allow you to do something very similar to Edge, where you make some small micro sites that are not necessarily branded, that you could still host within the platform and not have to retrain everybody on a completely different platform.
The platform has flexibility at its core and we have made full use of that capability. Even if Kibo [eCommerce] hasn't been ready to provide features and functions we need, we have the opportunity to build them ourselves. The platform started as Mozu and while it was relatively well-developed for DTC, it lacked a lot of basic B2B functionality. As a result, when we were ready to move into that arena, we built a lot for ourselves (including a multi-level account system and a tool to manage it). Keep in mind, too, that Kibo eCommerce is part of a larger suite of tools. The company has purchased a mobile Point-of-Sale system, Baynote, Certona, Monetate, and an OMS. If you need a full-scale solution, they can offer a lot. As I mentioned previously, their support and documentation need shoring up. They're not terrible, but they hinder (rather than help) when it comes to fulfilling the platform's promise of letting the customers be self-service in building out their capabilities.
It allows us to scale so that we can make a change on a global footer. And it applies to all of the different property websites. It allows us to set up components and compartmentalize things in a way. The big thing is that it's scalable. And then it also ties into Adobe Analytics and other Adobe products. So we are a complete Adobe shop. Every Adobe product that we can use, we use. I don't think we do it for marketing so much, but for doing target testing and analytics, data scientists are using the same product and so it all speaks.
Can sometimes be difficult to troubleshoot bugs/issues as they arise
Sometimes difficult to set up restrictions on how components can be designed to make sure they fit in with existing content
While the integration with Adobe target works fairly well, the process can be a bit opaque and hard to understand, making it difficult to troubleshoot when issues arise
Prebuilt Integration - There is not currently a large number of preexisting integrations, but custom integrations are fairly quick
Time to Deploy - Don't get me wrong, We have deployed in the timeline we expected, but if you are trying to get something off the ground fast, Kibo might not be right for you. It is a robust platform that take some time to get up and running.
Complicated Shipping - if you have a complicated shipped process, you might want to look for a tool to help, Kibo does not have very robust out of the box shipping capabilities.
We had and still have a fantastic experience using Adobe CQ. Lots of flexibility, great integration with other Adobe products we already use and a powerful technology make it a great fit for our corporate environment. Also as the community grows, it makes it easier to network with other developers and users to get new ideas on how to continue to get the best out of the software.
It depends if it is from an administrator point of view or from a business content author point of view. I think from business author point of view the solution is good and with the GEN AI capabilities coming it is doing better and better, however from an administration point of view there are still a lot of improvements to ease the maintenance of user access management and as well as the integration configuration aspect.
Being part of Adobe Suite means you are already notified when the tool has any outages. However, I have never faced unplanned outages. Whenever you face any issue with the site, it is clearly stated if there were any planned outages and how quickly you will be back to normal. So, I will say that even the outages are planned and managed in a great way like their other services.
With respect to performance, Adobe experience manager is one of the best in the CMS space. We didn't observe frequent slowness on platform, however the systems which are accessing experience manager should be of good specifications without which slowness would be observed. Adobe experience manager works well in integration with other solutions, unless the destination application is designed to trigger frequent calls to AEM.
Adobe Experience Manager, in all its capacity, is a great alternative to any other CMS you are using. It helps in rapid development and makes life easier for maintaining the website for multi-language sites. Technical know-how is eliminated at content authoring. Better documentation in terms of live examples with videos would be appreciated.
One positive note is that I have always been able to get someone on the phone in support whenever I have called, even at 1 AM. Getting someone on the phone is only half the battle though. In the first few months of using Mozu it often seemed that support didn’t know anymore about Mozu than we did. This has slowly started to change, but as a daily user you are likely to be on par with support in terms of knowing what to do when you encounter a problem. The support phone number is really most useful for having them put in a support ticket for you rather than typing it all out yourself and emailing it. It is very rare that the support reps are actually empowered to solve the problem at hand. Unless the issue you are having is user error, they will just take your information and pass it on the proper department. Your request or problem will then be ignored for months on end. Some day, it might actually get fixed but you are unlikely to be notified that this has happened. Most of these issues are assigned an internal ID that they use for tracking. Support is more than happy to pass this ID along, but it is useless. There is no way to actually see where the issue lies in the endless queue of similar issues.
Depending on your individual needs, It is really quite simple to create an authoring experience for a website that looks really good. I have been part of many implementations and many teams and have seen many projects that were super successful and others that were not implemented well. AEM has room for a lot of flexibility in the implementation process compared to other CMS like SharePoint
At the time of our implementation Mozu did not have any processes or procedures set up around going live. We basically were forced to just wing it and hope for the best
Overall, I prefer AEM as an enterprise site management tool. It allows levels of access control and delegation, while leaving the server management and updates to a specialized team. I do miss the flexibility of being able to search and replace that I have in a WordPress site, and I miss the ability to have one file for redirects like I had in percussion
We had a custom, in-house ecommerce website before moving to Kibo. It was brittle, slow, and wasn't going to scale nearly well enough or fast enough to keep up with our requirements
Instead of being directly involved in the tool purchase, I am involved in analysis or what we can use to maximize the tool. Small organizations may find it expensive. However, if the team or organization focuses more on your ROI or the features you will get, then it will definitely be worth it. Pricing is based on a number of factors, including team size or the use of the tool. The user can select the pricing option that best fits their needs based on the number of form submissions they make or the number of pages they wish to publish on their global/multisite sites.
The professional services team within adobe is one of the best in terms of technical and solutioning knowledge. However, considering the billing charges of adobe professional services team, it is always recommended to involve them during platform initial setup or when a complex solution is to be built with platform customizations.
too soon to tell on increased conversion rates based on external marketing factors in play but having increased visibility into customer engagement trends will most likely lead to improvement of our conversion rates.
There have been productivity gains from the perspective of actually migrating all of our externally managed sites to the same in-house Adobe Experience Manager platform and then being able to utilize those universal components.
