HCL Digital Experience is based on the former IBM Web Content Manager and IBM WebSphere Portal products, acquired by HCL Technologies from IBM in late 2018. The product allows the user to create, manage and deliver engaging omnichannel digital experiences to audiences with responsive content, targeted offers, seamlessly integrated applications and consistent branding across channels (web, mobile, and hybrid mobile/web applications and more).
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Kentico Xperience
Score 7.1 out of 10
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Kentico is a web content management system for building websites, online stores, intranets, and Web 2.0 community sites. Kentico CMS uses ASP.NET and Microsoft SQL Server for development via its Portal Engine, using Visual Studio, or through Microsoft MVC.
HCL DX does really well at managing and maintaining the site. It allows the business to basically maintain the site while IT spent time developing new and enhanced functions. The main issue I currently have with HCL DX is not directly with the product but it does play a role. It is difficult finding skilled resources to support HCL DX in my experience.
Kentico is a robust and flexible CMS platform that is great for managing multiple websites and multiple environments (dev, stage, and production for instance). It makes content management very easy and makes it easy to keep the environments synced with the same content. However, the Kentico CMS does require a bit more technical understanding to get it set up properly and requires a bit more effort and support than, say, free open-source options.
With Version 8.5, IBM Web Content Manager introduced in place editing capabilities which allow authors to make content edits on sections of the page instead of going to the content itself. This feature allows authors to make changes in context of the page and preview changes within the actual look and feel of a live page.
Projects provide a collaborative atmosphere for the author community so that authors can interact and work as a team to manage inter-dependent content changes under one project and publish all changes at once, instead of working separately on individual content changes. This brings awareness across authors in an organization and easy knowledge share.
IBM Digital Data Connector is a cool feature that allows [users] to integrate external content sources onto the portal using IBM Web Content Manager presentation components. This allows UI/UX designers to present integrated external data in any manner they want, manage UI changes with an underlying approval process and leverage syndication to push changes live immediately.
IBM Web Content Manager offers a targeted content feature that allows business users to deliver personalized content to customers based on customer demographic information, browsing history and other transaction related information. Any rules created follow the publishing process thereby making it just a configurable item resulting in less turn around to turn on the feature on a website.
IBM Web Content Manager offers 'multi lingual solution' out of the box which allows content creation for almost all popular languages.
Syndication feature has improved a lot and it now provides a detailed views comprising of 'failed items', 'items that have syndicated successfully, 'items in queue'. Failed items view provides detailed and clear cut information of what resulted in failure helping IT to troubleshoot problems easily.
I love the intuitive top and left navigation within the content management platform. I can easily find what section, sub-section, and page I'm looking to edit
For creating content, the WYSIWYG editor is so intuitive; it feels like you're working on an MS Word doc!
The tab for adding metadata in simple fields takes away the headache of having to hunt and peck through code to add H1 tag, page description etc.
IBM Web Content Manager should provide some easily usable connectors through a GUI to connect to bring content from custom data sources including connecting to Salesforce and custom databases.
Should further optimize and enhance creation of rich and responsive content driven UIs on various digital channels.
Should further optimize and enhance content personalization features.
Kentico needs to invest in more enterprise class environment management utilities -- example: global CDN support via the CMS is sorely lacking. There are work-arounds, but it should be more elegant.
The Kentico staging module could be improved to support the concept of bundled releases. Current staging module functionality is good, but could be improved.
Kentico ecommerce support is a touch immature. While content management is superb, Kentico lags in this area when compared to many open source ecommerce engines.
Kentico is lacking MVC support. 99% of the time this isn't an issue for the end-user or business user, but can be a hurdle for technology teams depending on the team's makeup.
IBM products always moves forward to adapt to new requirements and technologies. I have used versions 6, 6.1, 7 and 8 of IBM WCM, and I know IBM is ready to revamp the tool based on emerging needs, and still provide the capabilities to migrate your old system to the newer versions.
We are locked into Kentico for the long haul. It provides us with an easy and flexible solution for a very non technical company to create a site and have the features they want, especially with the inclusion of EMS into our license. Now we have a true platform to build and grow our solutions.
It seriously is one of the best interfaces I have ever used. I also love the fact that I can use UI personalization to secure any functionality by user or role that I don't want that role to have access to. The best part is the customization of the UI, I can add in any button, tab, or menu item I want through it, no code required.
Their support staff is friendly, knowledgeable, and will work with you until your issue is fixed. This could take a few phone calls back and forth, but they are very diligent in helping you.
Magento and Prestashop are E-commerce CMS platforms. They are used in a different scale of application than WCM.
Concerning Joomla, it's a useful CMS forsmaller website. Once again this is an other scale of application than WCM Liveray can compete WCM 7 concerning the : ¤ specific development ¤ security ¤ responsive
I've used Sitecore, Ektron, Joomla!, WordPress, and SharePoint (if you want to count that as a competitor for CMS). Kentico 8 blows them all out of the water. Nothing is more intuitive in the way that content is created, the way the site is setup, and how efficient rollouts can be with Content Staging.
Kentico has enabled faster speed to market for SMEs. They are empowered to enter content them selves while still having that content go through editorial review to ensure tone of voice and brand are maintained.
Deploying Kentico has freed up web developer resources from manual content entry enabling them to build more useful solutions to support the business efforts
Tapping into the Kentico event pipelne allows us to trigger external system events when product content is published.
