Endeca (discontinued)

It provides powerful search functionality.

It adds functionality for navigation which makes it much easier for customers to use our commerce site and find what they are looking for.

More documentation for the product would be very useful.

The product almost requires training in order to be able to use it effectively. Knowledge of HTML is a must.

Possibly the best tool for a basic/simple search platform implementation

XQuery works well

Rule Manager is a very useful tool

Endeca's page builder is not fit to be an enterprise product - it is just BAD!

It is not easy for a non-user to understand Endeca quickly

Multi-index search (or any complex search implementation) is not easy to setup in Endeca

Simplifying our cross-channel selling strategy.

Improving search for customers.

Increasing sales from our multiple selling channels.

Steep learning curve.

Difficult to set up.

Landing page creation with Experience Manager

Operational performance and stability

Feature set

Business tool set

Product roadmap (Oracle Commerce V11)

No well defined commuity

Sizable learning curve

Feature set managed without involving the customer base

Speed

Accuracy

Relevance

Setup can be time consuming. Which can lead to project overruns.

Requires specialized knowledge and training

Can be costly for small organizations.

Does catalog search much better than any other ATG product.

Can't think of any.

High performance search platform for structured and unstructured data

Contextual navigation

Business tooling to support experience management for web platforms

Improved information access layer (i.e. assembler), currently perceived as a bottleneck to the high performance mdex engine

High performance search and navigation queries compared to normal database systems. One of the key factors contributing to that is the Endeca flat record structure stored in a data graph format that allows for faceted navigation of records. What is called "Guided Navigation".

Fully interactive customer experience through Endeca Experience Manager tool. This tool provides merchandising capabilities which allow for the development of customized experiences based on the current web page being visited, search keywords, user segment, date time (start and/or end) faceted navigation state or a combination of all of these. Experience Manager also allows for content - or product - spotlighting as well as other capabilities of boosting certain search results to the top of the list or bury them at the end. And many other features.

The Oracle Endeca Assembler API allows for the ability to centralize all business logic and connecting to third party systems to consolidate search results, navigation options, CMS content, RSS feeds and pretty much anything you can think of into one unified response (JSON or XML) to any system or channel in the platform.

Auto-correct and "Did you mean" features are fabulous. Oracle Endeca provides a sophisticated configuration model that enables the team to tune the various thresholds for these features which allows for a tailored behavior to each industry or context.

One of the very competitive features of Oracle Endeca is that it enables business teams to choose the appropriate relevance of the search results being displayed. The team can tweak - resort or reorder - search results to show the desired list for the users. This is also possible for faceted navigation options!

The unique "Guided Navigation" feature in Oracle Endeca ONLY shows relevant/applicable refinement options to the user at any given context or navigation state. Which minimizes - a lot of times eliminates - the likelihood of 'no results'.

Handling no results scenarios through Search tuning capabilities in Oracle Endeca.

Preview capabilities for content within Experience Manager without affecting the live production environment.

Type-ahead suggestions is a very strong feature of Endeca as it provides light-weight responses with relevant options to users as they type.

Ability to connect to almost any data source with minimal effort. Documents, file systems, databases, text files, delimited files, web site crawling etc.

The workbench business tool may have it's glitches at times when trying to open content or save content. A refresh or login/logout usually fixes it.

Effort is required to integrate Endeca into any web application or platform since it provides XML or JSON that would still need to be consumed and worked with. Generally it is best to create object models in your application to read in these responses and work with them.

It is not possible to update records or taxonomy in Oracle Endeca Commerce on the fly. A baseline update process - or partial update process - has to run to update records before any changes can appear on the web application or front-end. The time it takes for this update to finish is highly dependent on the number of records in your data set (thousands vs. millions) and the amount/nature of ETL transformations you have setup in Endeca's Pipeline.

Although Endeca provides the partial update process - which allows for incremental updates to the data through out the day - the frequency of these partial updates is highly dependent on how long that update takes. The main reason is because it is not possible to run more than one update simultaneously.

Filtering

Fast reads and data extraction from large data sets

Good user interface and tools to support the technology.

Better documentation that can be accessed easily

Simplify the product and its dependencies

Provides exact, correct counts of items in its dimensions.

Allows for flexible, out-of-the-box boosting of content (based on combo of any/all of: user profile, date, dimension being browsed and search keyword).

It has a reasonably good admin interface for the administration of boosting/promotion rules for the business user.

Dynamically-generated dimension values can be messy, hard to control.

Pipelines can get quite complicated very quickly unless the data is carefully organized beforehand.

Scalability may be an issue since I don't believe there's support for more than two MDEX servers for a particular index (I could be wrong about this, but this is what the config file implies).

There's no easy way to search multiple indices at once.

Does what you tell it to do

Its logical in its execution

IT needs extensive training to understand it

It is moderately flexible

Define the search experience. For example, we were able to select which products or type of products should display when certain search terms were entered.

Create commercial web pages without IT. For example, we could create new product departments or categories by combining basic HTML and CSS.

Dynamically display the best products. For example, when we created a rule to display products less than $100, it triggered those type of products all the time and excluded products without image or out of stock.

For the most part, it is quite intuitive, however, you need to have an intermediate knowledge of HTML to be able to construct unique promotional web pages. Nowadays, with WordPress and other content management systems that have WYSIWYG interfaces, Endeca may prove to be challenging to HTML beginners.

Basic search function, performance is good.

Rule manager is a rich feature that others do not offer.

XQuery is a powerful tool. Which allows you to exercise more logic one the server side.

Page builder. Adobe CQ5 is taking a better lead in this area with a simpler, much more intuitive offering.

Endeca's page builder is disappointing, hard to use. We used it to build the site, but the the client rarely uses it. It is just too complicated.

Partial update is a pain. The earlier version actually kills the application. We have to stop the partial update, which is very inconvenient.

Steep learning curve.

User friendliness

Ecommerce merchandising

Highlighting sales, top products, etc...

Complex back end

Long update time

Guided Search ("mega-menu")

MDEX engine indexing

Configurability

Workbench functionality

Scalability

Licensing fees

Tools for initial data setup of dimensions/properties is somewhat lacking

Documentation is severely lacking and or too vast - courses are somewhat limited in scope and expensive