Kentico - Content Management for the Corporate World
April 11, 2014

Kentico - Content Management for the Corporate World

Tim Gluth | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

7.0

Overall Satisfaction

We are using Kentico in an organization-wide capacity. It powers our public-facing website for two of our brands. It allows us to easily and effectively provide product and service information to our customers and prospective customers along with the ability to quickly communicate news items and updates. We utilize many Web Parts within our site(s) and continue to find new uses for this content management system.
  • Content management - This is the bread-and-butter of what Kentico does and it does it very well. We can set up new pages with ease, modify them, assign access to departments to manage content and tie in ways to broadcast and make that content discoverable.
  • Blog publication and moderation - We have multiple instances of blog modules set up and in use on our sites. These have allowed us to create highlights of product offers, disclosure updates, as well as news and press release hubs.
  • Content distribution across a website - Making the content that we create and publish easy to discover is one of our main goals. Kentico provides a few ways to accomplish this and it has helped us bring some information to the surface as well as tie that information to other pages that have similar categories.
  • Automated content sharing - Most of the content sharing that we do (site-wide) is set up through a manual process. The ability (or knowledge on how to do this) in an automated fashion would be ideal, and is something that we've been researching since launching our Kentico-powered site.
  • A wider library of first party modules/easier module discovery - I've used a number of content management systems in the past and have become accustomed to having a large pool of plugins/modules to help build features and functionality into my sites. Kentico doesn't have a module library that is a robust as others, at least from a first party standpoint.
  • Cleaner, more streamlined admin interfaces - While Kentico's administrative interface is easy to use and navigate, there are many instances of inconsistency and potential confusion depending on what segment of page creation/editing you are in. I have lost more than a few pages in work because of on-page miscues which caused me to recreate work that was already complete.
  • Decreased content publication time - With Kentico, we are able to take content that has been internally created and reviewed and quickly create a home for it that our customers and potential customers can find and utilize.
  • Through a streamlined form creation process, we are able to quickly gather data on what products and services potential customers are interested in learning more about and can quickly get them in touch with the information that they need as well as the experts that can help guide them to their solutions.
  • Increased site-wide product promotion - We've been able to spotlight products, features, and services, making them easier to customers to find and research. This has resulted in lifts in enrollment and adoption across the board.
  • WordPress,Ektron Web Content Management System
We had used WordPress.com for our company blog over the past years, however we didn't consider it for our full-fledged CMS solution as it's not compatible with our Microsoft server environment. The other CMS that we looked at was Ektron, however the features and pricing weren't in line with what we were able to achive with Kentico.
We're extremely happy with what Kentico has provided us, from built-in features to an overall publishing platform. We've spent time customizing it to fit our needs and have further plans to push forward with customized development in the next year. Between the initial investment, the ongoing time investment, and the fact that nothing that was encountered seemed to match up (feature-wise) we'll be sticking with Kentico for the foreseeable future.
If an organization is looking for a Microsoft-hosted CMS solution, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend Kentico. It has many features that others in the CMS-realm have but handles them in a straightforward way, making it easy to implement and manage. Business and organizations with many departments can easily create workflows that would assist in content creation by the departments that have intimate knowledge about the information they're writing about, yet final editing and publishing can be left to others in the company for proper review and editing.

Evaluation and Selection

  • Price
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
  • Product Reputation
The Product Features and Usability were the two largest factors that we looked at when selecting a content management system. The fact that Kentico comes packaged with a number of modules and plugins that allow us to tap into social networks, web services, and other third-party vendors that we had already been using was a huge benefit. Secondly, the mostly-straightforward nature of the administrative interface was beneficial as it allows us to grant content creation and maintenance access to employees with varying technical experience.
Taking another look at what solutions are available, I would like to have a greater level of hands-on testing and trial with potential content management systems during a future evaluation and selection process. That might highlight possible issues (UX, workflow, etc) that may create problems after implementation. A better understanding of licensing minutiae would also be beneficial.