Crossbeam vs. Tridion

I would definitely recommend Crossbeam to others, and frequently bring it up early in conversations with potential partners as a first step in evaluating a partnership opportunity. Crossbeam allows you to easily see overlaps for current customers, prospects/target accounts, and open opportunities. Being able to quickly and easily assess the business opportunity with a partner, and find mutual customers that would benefit from a combined offering is a huge value add. The integration with Salesforce makes the tool easy to use and scalable, without needing to constantly update account lists. Being able to view the overlaps within the Crossbeam UI and easily export the lists makes the tool really easy to work with.

Love the product and I really like how we use it for public sites. The only negative aspect is that it is just hard to find Tridion devs that understand the tool, grasp .net, react, and understand the blueprint, etc.

• Frictionless onboarding and easy to get started with new partners
• Intuitive reporting of overlapping accounts - flexibility to export to CSV
• Ability to connect with Salesforce to keep account lists dynamic, while also allowing the option to use CSV uploads

• Makes it easy to spin up a new site quickly
• Allows for numerous users to work on the same site without conflicting with each other's changes
• Allows you to unpublish changes or revert to old versions if you make a mistake
• Allows you to time publishing actions (for example, you can set it to happen overnight)

Incentivized

• Establishing sharing settings for each specific partner could be more intuitive and easy to check.
• Some of the navigation can be slightly confusing as it seems there are multiple ways to view the same information within the platform.

• Tridion is complicated in enough ways that it makes it difficult to train new users. Therefore, we have to limit the number of people with access to the system since we have not yet implemented Workflow.
• When something goes wrong (items fail to publish, or there is unexpected behavior with components), there is little explanation provided that would point us in the right direction to troubleshoot. As a result, content Authors and Editors have to frequently ask for IT assistance.

I am giving this a semi-high rating because we have already got Tridion up and running and we are still in the process of moving the sites over to Tridion. It is unlikely we will be moving things to a new CMS AGAIN in the near future as the cost to get Tridion was high.

The editor user interface is very user friendly and in-site editing makes simple updates fast and easy. The extensibility of Tridion is a big plus and the ability to add our own options into the default Tridion interface helps us integrate with external systems. Finally, the user permissions and security system helps us deploy it within our large organization.

It is a nuclear missile compared to the other handguns and knives on the market today. But it also requires nuclear technicians and expertise that a handgun doesn't require. Do you need to decimate your competition and you have the investment capabilities necessary to put a nuclear missile into the sky? Then definitely do it. Especially if you need a very good multi-lingual blueprint provider like Tridion.

Incentivized

• Crossbeam allows us to quickly assess opportunities with potential partners and feeds directly into prioritization for our integration and partnership strategy.
• It solves the challenge of keeping account data private that you don't want to share and enables us to easily share the information that is beneficial to both parties.

• SDL is a very complex system. Creating custom components by external vendors turned out to be expensive.
• The learning curve is very slow, so training takes a lot of time and cost.
• The revamped corporate site looks clean, modern, and is mobile-friendly.

Incentivized