Item: Optimizely Content Management System
Rating: 3
Author: Jared Bird

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Ektron for our corporate website with roughly 70 users accessing the system globally. When we upgraded to 9.0 they touted a large list of functionality, but sadly, most of these are half-baked, poorly integrated solution with a UX that is not intuitive and changes drastically from one function to the next. If you want a simple CMS with only a few power users, Ektron is great, but if you're looking for a stable system with complex workflows, look elsewhere.

Pros and Cons

Basic page creation
Simple Workflows

Aloha WYSIWYG editor has large UX gaps. Tech-savvy users can learn workarounds, but base users will have trouble.
Sync'ing from one environment to another is a crap-shoot. (There are options for bi-directional sync's but Support has said never to use them because of stability issues)
Ektron 9.0 is much more resource intensive than 8.5 was. We needed to double our allocated memory.

Return on Investment

Consistent system crashing causing site downtime

Alternatives Considered

EPiServer,Adobe CQ,MS SharePoint,Sitecore Web Content Management

Ektron was cheaper than the rest and at the time of implementation was reared well by Gartner.

Likelihood to Recommend

Choosing Ektron really depends on a few main questions: How complex is your website going to be? Will you need to integrate Ektron with other systems? How skilled are your in-house developers?

Likelihood to Renew

We are currently very entrenched in the Ektron system and would require an entire site overhaul if we switched.

An "OK" product, but not ready for the big leagues

Software Version

Overall Satisfaction with Ektron Web Content Management System (Discontinued)