Cascade Server vs Optimizely Content Cloud

• Cascade CMS makes no assumptions about your content. Templates control how the content gets displayed.
• Workflows are intuitive and allow for one or more people to review content before it is published.
• The published site is static (no database connection) which allows for faster page loads and reduced risk of attack.

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• It's easy and fun to use. You can take someone with no experience in content management and they pick it up very quickly.
• It is capable of managing multiple sites in multiple languages.
• It has good uptime. Deployments are easy and with hot-swapping, you would never know the site was being updated in the background.
• The searching capabilities are excellent. Not only can it index your own site but other content as well.

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• Cascade CMS is not an out-of-the-box pre-built system that you can install, turn on and expect to be serving sites and pages on day one. It's not a blogging system like WordPress, or a drag-and-drop system like SquareSpace (both of which I've used for their own purposes). You need to have someone tasked with management and system administration – and if you implement the on-premise self-hosted version, you ought to have several people. We have the university's IT shop handling infrastructure (server hardware, containers, clustering, operating systems, load-balancing, DNS, database servers, NAS/SAN drives), our Web & Design team managing Cascade CMS (system settings, sites, templates, permissions) and managers coordinating each respective academic unit (A&S, business, education, law, marine science).

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• Product Line vs Brand vs Manufacturer delineation, the website is built mainly to support brands and doesn't really differentiate when it comes to features (such as brand supplier pages) which is challenging especially when it comes to brand vs manufacturer. You might want to have both a manufacturer page and a brand page for a product which isn't really supported.
• With a very large database (over 1.5 million products), there can be some unique bugs, such as slowness or freezing when searching for products. There are workarounds such as by using the filter button instead.
• Could really use a "Product List" feature, so that products can be added to a list and then a customer landing page can be built for that list and email campaigns targeting that list can be used.

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• Initially, ROI was positive - because we completely redesigned the website when we implemented Cascade.
• Over time, the inability to keep up with the latest interactive tools has reduced visitors time on site.
• Also over time, the difficulty of use has led to less buy-in by backend users, leading to outdated pages, little timely information, and lower visitors.

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• Ektron has cost our non-profit huge sums of money with little to no return. Most of our web initiatives have been put on complete hold as we have begun to outsource most of our work to third parties as our website is a mishmash of technologies and patchwork fixes.
• Ektron has slowed down workflows considerably and all of our content editors refuse to produce content they do not absolutely have to, resulting in the web content manager (me) taking on most tasks or retraining people on a continuous basis.

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