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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Image Relay
Score 9.5 out of 10
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Image Relay Marketing Delivery keeps digital assets and product information in one place with the goal of supporting fast, seamless creation and delivery.
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?
Image Relay is intelligently designed for any marketer, especially if your products require a library of images and video and especially if you feel like your team could use some quality onboarding to make sure everything is set up right and to make sure your team is equipped to use the software effectively. Specifically speaking, since we have so many products and we're building a bigger direct relationship with customers, it was important that we have an easy way to store and access assets that can represent those products and resonate with potential customers. Image Relay also made it really easy to group assets for sharing with influencers and other marketing partners. Dropbox and Google Drive may have their place and their functionalities that set them apart, so it's important to not look at Image Relay like one of those older document services storage spaces — though those companies could learn a lot from how Image Relay helps marketers enrich their assets and store them smartly.
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.
Enables us to organize a large number of files in an easy-to-use format
Keeps our files safe. Much of the work we do is private until our partners approve of our marketing going public so file security is critical to our operation.
Image Relay makes it easy for our team to track and access a wide range of files - especially photos and contracts.
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.
The AI tagging terms are too generic to really be helpful to us.
When we did our initial upload the system couldn't pull in old dates, so everything has a date of the day it was uploaded. It will be a while before searching by "most recent" works properly.
I believe once all of our staff see how efficient Image Relay is in managing our digital assets, there will be no question that the cost vs. value will mandate continued use moving forward. It literally will pay for itself in saved staff time, I believe.
Image Relay is very straightforward. The experience and interface mimic things were all used to using so it makes it very easy to learn and use. They didn't try to reinvent the wheel by making a fancy tool, they just made something that works and does exactly what you need it to do. They also have an awesome team that is quick to help and answer any questions along the way.
Amazing. We are having a quick call once a week to be sure we are right on track. They answer all our questions right away and if they are missing something they will just find the answer and get back to us as fast as possible. There is no need to look elsewhere!
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.
We were using our in-house storage NAS system and Backup on DVD and hard drive. The issue is that we lost a lot of data by it either crashing or becoming unreadable. And it's very difficult to organize and share data. To share data we were using WeTransfer, but the issue is that the link expired in 7 days.
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.
Image Relay has only offered positive impacts for me. The search function is great when used properly — our photographers can input tons of metadata that is later used to find certain teams or players within the website.
I don't mind having duplicates in the system as long as they are in places they need to be, but Image Relay does tell you when you've uploaded something multiple times which could be helpful to others.
