IBM Web Content Manager - Innovative, Robust and Evolving with market trends
November 23, 2016

IBM Web Content Manager - Innovative, Robust and Evolving with market trends

Sowmyamaruthi Lattala | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with IBM Web Content Manager

Our client was using Oracle CMS and FatWire to host content across the organization. There were lot of challenges with respect to customizing workflows to incorporate business processes, serving customers with personalized content, providing interactive and collaborative features to the author community etc. The recommendation was to use IBM web content manager 8.5 which is aimed to address most of the problems the business and author community had with other CMS products. Business authors were able to leverage in place editing capabilities, personalization features, renditions to serve mobile/desktop/tablet friendly images, an intuitive rich text editor, projects for a collaborative authoring process and most importantly syndication of libraries.
  • With Version 8.5, IBM Web Content Manager introduced in place editing capabilities which allow authors to make content edits on sections of the page instead of going to the content itself. This feature allows authors to make changes in context of the page and preview changes within the actual look and feel of a live page.
  • Projects provide a collaborative atmosphere for the author community so that authors can interact and work as a team to manage inter-dependent content changes under one project and publish all changes at once, instead of working separately on individual content changes. This brings awareness across authors in an organization and easy knowledge share.
  • IBM Digital Data Connector is a cool feature that allows [users] to integrate external content sources onto the portal using IBM Web Content Manager presentation components. This allows UI/UX designers to present integrated external data in any manner they want, manage UI changes with an underlying approval process and leverage syndication to push changes live immediately.
  • IBM Web Content Manager offers a targeted content feature that allows business users to deliver personalized content to customers based on customer demographic information, browsing history and other transaction related information. Any rules created follow the publishing process thereby making it just a configurable item resulting in less turn around to turn on the feature on a website.
  • IBM Web Content Manager offers 'multi lingual solution' out of the box which allows content creation for almost all popular languages.
  • Syndication feature has improved a lot and it now provides a detailed views comprising of 'failed items', 'items that have syndicated successfully, 'items in queue'. Failed items view provides detailed and clear cut information of what resulted in failure helping IT to troubleshoot problems easily.
  • Projects provide a collaborative way of managing content changes on a website. However projects cannot be used with a workflow as such. Though different phases in a project can be tied to workflow actions, the real benefits of a workflow on the project are missing.
  • IBM WCM is a bit of a heavy weight component because of the DOJO framework it comes with. Though IBM has improved this over the years, it is still unable to come out of the DOJO framework and leverage some of the best-used frameworks like jQuery.
  • Somehow IBM WCM is best suited with a portal, as a standalone WCM server. IBM Web Content Manager is not that robust providing data to external websites.
  • IBM Web Content Manager has always been great considering the ability for a business to drive information to market in a short span of time.
  • Strong customer support has always been IBM Web Content Manager's strength, this ensures that deliverables on demand are always met.
When compared with CMS products like Adobe Day CQ, Fatwire, Interwoven:
        • IBM Web Content manager is reliable and scalable
        • Better customer service and IBM is keen on helping customers fix any issues with quick turnaround
        • Best suited for big enterprise level organizations
        • Author friendly user interface with in line and in place editing capabilities
        • Better WYSIWYG editor
        • Wide variety of out of the box tools and components
IBM Web Content Manager is well suited for intranet employee portals, websites which drive extensive marketing content, and e-commerce sites to provide product images and details. It cannot be used a document management system to store large volumes of data as it's purely a web content management system.

HCL Digital Experience Feature Ratings

WYSIWYG editor
8
Code quality / cleanliness
8
Admin section
8
Page templates
10
Library of website themes
10
Mobile optimization / responsive design
8
Publishing workflow
10
Content taxonomy
8
SEO support
7
Bulk management
7
Availability / breadth of extensions
7
Community / comment management
8
API
8
Internationalization / multi-language
8
Role-based user permissions
8