ezPlatform, formerly ezPublish is a content management solution from eZ Systems. The vendor says their solution provides organizations with the technology and framework to build a suite of digital experiences including news and media sites, brand sites, multichannel apps and the Internet of Things, intranets and web portals. This solution is multichannel, multilingual and multisite ready.
ezPlatform features user defined content and classes, version control, templates, workflow…
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Monetate
Score 7.0 out of 10
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Monetate (formerly Kibo Personalization, powered by Monetate and Certona) is an ecommerce personalization software for consumer-facing brands. Monetate enables brands to create individualized experiences for site visitors, with the goal of improving engagement and business performance. Founded in 2008, Monetate services Adidas, Lufthansa, Office Depot, Reebok, Wolseley, and other companies.
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?
Monetate is a fully functional space to generate multiple marketing campaigns for your company on the web, many of the functions found in this program are a contribution to manage your content correctly and give it the space you are looking for, we We recommend it one hundred percent. We feel very comfortable with everything we have been able to achieve thanks to this program.
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.
Audience segmentation is relatively painless. They provide a robust way to granularly target visitors by device type, location, weather, demographics, etc.
Our CSM has been very engaged and detailed in supporting our partnership. She provides very prompt responses and clearly works hard to push the Kibo team when possible.
The User Interface to develop new actions is not terrible.
Supports Single Sign On, which is the preferred method of managing users at my organization.
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.
We'd like to be able to use the Monetate resources to help us set up tests that require web dev (to get it out of our backlog), but they also have wait times similar to our internal ones. I realize resources are hard to come by, but this is an area we'd love to be able to utilize more if the turnaround were quicker.
IE is always a problem. I know it's not Monetate-specific though, and many tools struggle with IE.
We have a large percentage of our users who use IE, and I'd like to provide more experiences in IE without and additional hassle.
I had never worked within a company that had a tool like this. It made my life as a designer and a creative manager much easier with it's easy to use interface and limitless possibilities in terms of creative. I would highly recommend taking Monetate for a test drive, you will not be disappointed.
Part of what I love about Monetate is how intuitive the tool is. Very very easy to use - based on the basics - Who/What/When/Where concept. Anyone can jump right in and start using the tool. And very easy to copy campaigns and tweak to continue to build experiences. We recently added Monetate on mobile and similar experience - easy to jump back and forth between platforms. Also love the analytics dashboard...easily quantifiable and easy to get tidbits that are digestible for others not as familiar with tool.
Monetate support team meets with use weekly, answers emails daily and promptly. They are proactive about getting answers for us when we need it and offering suggestions based on observations they have or learnings they want to share from other partners. Monetate's support is top notch.
Monetate installs easily and sets up personalization with just a few clicks. We never used the recommendation engine but the multivariant testing was great.
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.
At the time of selection, it was the best tool to fit our business needs. The day-to-day users were able to create some experiences on their own and did not require much oversight. We also had developer support built into our contract along with internal developer support so most experiences were achievable. We believed it was as good and in some ways better than the other comparable tools on the market.
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.
We are really starting to understand our audience and what they prefer on our website. One example is on our product display pages, we learned that our visitors convert about 35% more when content is laid out in one fashion versus another. Another example is our promotional banners perform better when it takes up the width of the page versus the margins pulled in more.
At first, Monetate was a negative ROI - we were paying for a service we weren't getting, and not understanding the full power of the program. With the new optimization firm however, we are now really able to churn out more tests, have a clean and direct test plan, and finally seeing tangible results.
As an aside, Monetate has helped us just save time and money on creating our promotional banners now so we don't have to get with our development team each time we want to put one up. Even without running a test, it has let us add content to our site when we need to (as we already have the experiments set up as we need it to and we can quickly duplicate it) without our developers getting in there to make those short-lived changes.
