Magnolia vs. Oracle WebCenter Content

Magnolia is a very capable DXP, that provides client with lots of flexibility in composing its own stack. While the core of the platform is a content management system, the open architecture of Magnolia DXP allows it to connect to any platform, allowing client to extend the capabilities. One scenario would be a centralized content hub - where through a single platform, content authors can choose which channel to distribute what content. For example, long form content for consumers viewing on a laptop, short form content for those using a mobile browser. This allow the client to personalized the experience based on channels. Another scenarios would be leveraging on GenAI - using Magnolia's built-in connector to ChatGPT. If that is not the service that one desire, you can always connect to another AI service such as Google Gemini. With GenAI, connected, content author can use AI as co-pilot to help them scale up their content production.

WebCenter Content is suitable for payables invoice processing for companies with a huge volume of paper invoices. 80% of data entry effort can be reduced. For small companies with less volume, WebCenter may not make sense. WebCenter is not perfect. It has some issues. We raised enhancement requests with Oracle, hopefully, Oracle will resolve them soon.

Incentivized

• Speed of development - time to delivery from zero to MVP was excellent
• Ease of use - the authoring experience is very easy to build and train
• PAAS/SAAS - the managed service platform removed the traditional overhead of running in-house technologies, meaning we could focus on value add, with less time spent keeping the lights on.

• It provided one single repository with a URL link to access each AP invoice.
• It gives a life cycle to each invoice where a business user can perform some additional indexing as per their needs.
• It also provides a reporting feature and a front-end for users to view invoices with ease and very helpful for auditing purpose.
• It uses the BPEL engine to customize the life cycle and also it can automate the auto entry of supplier invoices in your EBS system.
• Reduce a lot of manual efforts, manual errors and workforce.

Incentivized

• The documentation provides samples that are often out of context, and difficult to know where the provided example code should be implemented. More tutorials providing the full project or step-by-step instructions on how to implement subject material would help greatly. Baeldung is a resource I would consider the gold standard in how this is done in other spaces.
• The use of JCR and Nodes makes object serialization/deserialization painful. Jackson compatibility or similar would be a welcome enhancement to the developer experience. Maybe leveraging code-gen from light modules to build model classes when possible could help accomplish this.
• Modifying the home layout from light modules is frustrating. It seems that any configuration overrides made merge with the default rather than overwriting, which makes for a difficult combination of guess-and-check while referencing the documentation to see what should be in each row/column when making changes.
• Including "mark all as read" or "delete all" in the notifications app would be a great quality of life improvement. It seems that by default, users have to individually select messages and operate them.

Incentivized

• Some functionality you would expect to be built-in (such as reporting for compliance) is not and requires other Oracle products to be integrated.
• Separating an invoice with multiple lines for different departments is not an easy task.

Incentivized

We have invested a lot of time and energy into tailoring a solution that works for the company.

We think the new features in v6.2 will help us get to the next level

We also don't have the resources to rebuild a website platform from scratch even if we wanted to

Incentivized

The challenges with converting to a completely new system create quite a barrier to switching to anything else. If we find another system that offers guaranteed improvements to the user interface -- as well as as a more coherent set of options for data interchanges with current and future enterprise data sources -- we would be more interested in swithing to that new product. Of course, the expense in purchasing competitor system, along with the costs of migrating all current content, along with retooling all existing workflows in place, would be carefully weighed against the benefits incurred from a switch-over.

We've shown it to a number of users both clients and our own team and despite initial apprehensions, they "get it" very quickly. It's intuitive and friendly and quick to perform daily tasks. We once had a client tell us "Using Magnolia makes me smile" which says it all for us.

Incentivized

It meets all required functionality requirements -- but handles none of them in an exceptional manner

I gave [it] 7/10 only because of the loading time of pages. Otherwise, I think it deserves an 8. Normally this is not an issue per [se] but considering the rating matrix and as I have been asked to honestly write about it. Yes, the page loading times could be improved.

You always get an answer based on your SLA. But you always get a solution. That's the successfactor in this case. To often i was frustrated about people in a company without even a clue what there product is about or how to solve a problem. Magnolia's Support Team does a very good job and try to help you in most of the cases

I've used several CMSs like AEM and EpiServer, and comparatively, they all excel at different things. Magnolia is the best to develop for/against. Episerver has the best/most fluid UI in terms of content editing, and the overall admin experience AEM is just all around sucks.

Incentivized

I can't really provide an answer for this question because I think the basic premise is flawed. Which system an organization selects is based (or should be based) on their unique business and organizational requirements, not the features of the system. We do not recommend a particular solution to a client based on subjective preference for one system over another but rather for its appropriateness to achieve a particular goal or collection of goals.

• Magnolia has brought about positive impacts. For instance, we need not outsource web design and marketing services because thanks to this software, we can handle most work inhouse
• The software is affordable with no compromises on capabilities and therefore it is gives us value for money.
• The templates makes the whole process easy

Incentivized

• We were looking for a scalable solution for invoice processing needs. WebCenter did fit the bill. It reduced manual data entry effort by 80%.
• WebCenter saved our storage costs. We do not need to store the physical paper copies anymore in our expensive offices.
• WebCenter increased the employee engagement and reduced monotonous data entry work. Employees now have time to spend on value-added work rather than data entry.
• Auditors were happy with the tool, as they can retrieve any document with the click of a button as opposed to search and find a physical document.

Incentivized