Item: Clickability (discontinued)
Rating: 6
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I worked for the only authorized re-seller for Clickability. We did mainly websites for tv and radio stations but there were a mix of other customers in there as well. For many years it was our main cms platform which we managed 100+ different websites on it. I know we were the edge case for this type of usage as other customers 10+ sites was a huge number. Clickability main selling point is you do not have to waste IT resources and time maintaining a CMS platform because Clickability hosts the platform themselves and uses their own CDN and servers. Lets break down the pros and cons of this approach.

Pros and Cons

Easy to get going for a business that has tons of content they need to manage.
Clickability offers development and design services so you don't really even need IT.
No need to worry about server uptime, storage, bandwidth, etc you have all the reports at your fingers for what you are using.
Simple template and content design system, easy to expand and add.
Powerful CMS and settings with a design and programming guide provided.
AkAMAI and Limelight CDN's can be used for powerful and fast loading in many regions.
Debugging tools to see how long specific templates and content load is exceptional. One can narrow down that this specific template ran X number of times and took this look and had to be stopped at X number of time due to exceeding set limits.
Having a built in Dev, Staging, Production environments for testing makes seeing new features and how they will integrate into your site seamless.

If you are not constantly updating content then maybe this isn't the best CMS for you.
Turn around time on development can be lackluster and most find it easier to have 1-2 developers on staff for larger projects.
Over the years outages have happened but slowness is more common to due the shared platform and logic programming errors. This has improved greatly but still can happen.
The programming language behind clickability that is exposed is Apache Velocity. https://velocity.apache.org/engine/releases/velocity-1.5/user-guide.html While basic it is not as powerful as other web developers are used to.
The guide can be simplistic and more examples could be useful. Also cryptic special case features that are not widely can be troublesome.
Costs for storage, transfer and bandwidth can be costly because of limited options for where to store such content.
Development and Staging does not load on the normal servers so performance testing can be difficult to compare to production before launching a new template or code.
Extensive performance tools are in place because it is extremely easy to have non scaling, badly performing code as sites get bigger.
Most of the support team is based in CA, so support hours are geared towards US which could be a deterrent for European customers.

Return on Investment

Faster turn around time for adding new features.
Cost savings on IT personal.
Ability to work from anywhere built in is a huge plus.

Alternatives Considered

Worldnow and IBSYS were the two biggest competitors for the markets we were in. Cost was a huge factor because Clickability is by far cheaper then the other two in most use cases. Each varies depending on the contract you can negotiate. Really it just comes down to what are you doing with the platform. Ad's and revenue can be a huge factor and Worldnow and IBSYS provide extensive support in those areas Clickability does not; however clickability is so flexable that you can use Google or other plug and play ad networks with ease. If you already have ad software you are used to you may not be allowed to use it with Worldnow and IBSYS and before forced to use their systems.

Likelihood to Renew

Unable to provide feedback on this since no longer work for company.

Likelihood to Recommend

Overall this works well for media and newspaper websites that get less than 100 million pageviews a month. Also if you have your own developer and artist on staff you can really create exceptional websites, however it isn't required. There is a steep learning curve due to lack of published examples like other programming languages such as ruby, php etc. For most of your data entry and content editors the learning curve is minimal and can be taught in hours. Price is going to be a huge factor in determining does this make sense for your organization because you have to take how much traffic you have into account. If you stay within your limits great, if you exceed them media and bandwidth costs can begin to bloat your budget and make this a less attractive solution.

Users and Roles

40 - When we were using Clickability everyone from Ad Revenue team, content publishers, to developers used Clickability to build and support our customers.

Support Headcount Required

10 - We had a range of people, at the height we had a full support team and full development team which consisted of 10 people.

Business Processes Supported

Rapid website development.
Content management for us and our customers.
Metrics and traffic information.

Innovative Uses

We pioneered using templates to help rapidly develop and customize websites for our customers.
Use Clickability metrics along with Google Analytics along with other tracking tools to provide a in depth perspective of what content was generating traffic.
Provide ways to share our content with other sites, via feeds or api. Getting the content out there makes it more valuable.

Implementation Rating

Have a developer on staff to work with them, even if you are not designing your site yourself.

Implementation Details / Implementation Partner

Implemented in-house

Implementation Phases

Change Management Lessons

Change management was a minor issue with the implementation

Implementation Issues

Content Migration takes an extensive amount of time because you don't have access to those tools to migrate content.
Performance issues with written code not working as expected.

Support Rating

I found that some agents were better then others, usually you have an account representative and that I would consider level 1 support. To get really complex answers you need to talk with an engineer.

Clickability (discontinued) Customer Support Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Good followup Knowledgeable team Kept well informed Immediate help available Support understands my problem Support cares about my success Quick Initial Response	Slow Resolution Escalation required

Pros	Cons
Like to use Easy to use Well integrated Consistent Quick to learn Convenient Feel confident using Familiar	None

Easy Tasks

Publishing Content, you create it and select where you want to be published. Depending on your workflow or permissions you might need to wait for it to be reviewed before it goes live.

Difficult Tasks

Setting up permission roles for first time users, this can be cumbersome and time consuming. Also when you make new areas of content depending on how you have your permissions setup you will have to add or redo some of them.
Building sections have to be done a section at a time, fortunately templates make this go faster but depending on how complicated your sections are it can be time consuming.
Exporting content, there is no customer facing way to do this in an efficient manner due to code and content limits.

Mobile Interface Availability and Impressions

Yes, but I don't use it

Clickability CMS is it for you?

Overall Satisfaction with Clickability