Intranet Connections vs. RWS Tridion Sites

Intranet Connections is well-suited for organizations looking for one platform to fulfill a variety of needs, from sharing communication and documentation to create "sections" for various department units. If you're looking specifically to create a searchable knowledgebase, Intranet Connections can do that, but other platforms are potentially more appropriate if that is the only need you're trying to fill.

SDL Tridion works well for organizations with a large website with a lot of content to continuously create and manage. The use of page templates and component presentations makes creating new pages fairly straightforward. It can be a little cumbersome when it comes to trying to "break from the norm" and build web pages that are outside of the template-driven format; however, there are ways around this to create pages that break away from the normal page-template format of the website. In this regard, SDL Tridion can be pretty flexible, allowing us to create a lot of custom functionality to keep up with constantly changing web trends.

• Timely Support
• Excellent Customer Service

• 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

• There isn't availablity to help with charity drives. We aren't able to track or even graph information as it becomes available.
• We also have repo vehicles and are not able to have employees bid on these items anonymously. Even though we have the Buy/Sell asset it doesn't allow for any items to be sold this way.
• It would also be nice if we were able to interface with our current internet site. For example, it would be nice to post our Community Outreach Calendar for all of our regions to our webpage, so we don't have to double create work.

Incentivized

• If you are hoping to orbit the planet with a CMS, Tridion is built to leave the solar system. It is a very very powerful solution built for very serious enterprise businesses in hope of robust capabilities, which could be good or bad.
• Supporting business users is a hefty lift and requires significant training and regular retraining, and support.
• It's a niche solution that originally came out of Europe and was largely unknown in America. But today it's growing in popularity across the United States.
• Finding capable support, and developers specializing in Tridion capabilities isn't always easy. And 8 years ago it was nearly impossible, involving finding European developer support shops in order to get the assistance needed. This is changing though and American developer firms are becoming more widely available.

Incentivized

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.

We currently have not evaluated any other intranet services, but we will be looking at the system functionality it doesn't offer vs another provided that does.

Incentivized

Interwoven teamsites, Documentum, Adobe - teamsites and documentum are old and limited. Adobe rocks but I like where I am and Tridion does a lot of the same things. No need to reinvent the wheel or move to a lateral product.

• Personalized information - internal communications sent to the people that really need them.
• No more e-mails with internal communications.
• Everything in one place, literally.

Incentivized

• 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