Great product, would recommend highly
March 30, 2024
Great product, would recommend highly
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Magnolia
Good Things Foundation delivers the National Digital Inclusion Network - a set of hubs and services that support people excluded from the digital world. We needed a modern web platform to build our corporate web site and to build a "members area" for members of the Good Things Network. This needed to have all the essential capabilities of a web site plus a signup/login area for content supporting our network. We were also after a single unified platform, a PAAS/SAAS solution, migrating from legacy inhouse built technology.
- Speed of development - time to delivery from zero to MVP was excellent
- Ease of use - the authoring experience is very easy to build and train
- PAAS/SAAS - the managed service platform removed the traditional overhead of running in-house technologies, meaning we could focus on value add, with less time spent keeping the lights on.
- Online documentation was out of date in some rare but critical instances
- There are relatively few people who know the in-depth detail, responsiveness was generally good from support tickets but occasionally it can take a while to get the right answer.
- The use of Freemarker and time to MVP was resoundingly good, but we were slowed down a little by needing to go to Java to manage what felt like basic requirements to manage the pipeline into web services and this environment seemed to be difficult to setup and manage with dependencies on very specific Java versions ...etc. Room for improvement there.
- We have placed web content management in the hands of the organisation than retained it within the technology team.
- We were able to quickly move to MVP and release and we are now focussed on moving the platform forward at some pace whilst not being burdened with BAU work inside the technology team as so much as self-service to trained organisational users
- The use of the SAAS/PASS has inbuilt business resiliency as specialist work and aspects such as underlying security is done by Magnolia and we are able to focus internal effort on building out the platform.
I need to specific and say I've had experiences of these platform from previous roles, they were not considered by Good Things Foundation.
My experience is that Magnolia delivers the power of these high end platforms but is generally more accessible to get going and develop faster. All of these platforms have a place in high end web site development, they provide the highest level of capability and flexibility. I found Magnolia just allowed us to get to the end result faster.
I believe these other platforms/organisations score higher than Magnolia on the ability to deliver in the Gartner quadrants and my previous comments on making some improvements to support and easing the accessibility to using Java would go a long way to resolving this.
My experience is that Magnolia delivers the power of these high end platforms but is generally more accessible to get going and develop faster. All of these platforms have a place in high end web site development, they provide the highest level of capability and flexibility. I found Magnolia just allowed us to get to the end result faster.
I believe these other platforms/organisations score higher than Magnolia on the ability to deliver in the Gartner quadrants and my previous comments on making some improvements to support and easing the accessibility to using Java would go a long way to resolving this.
Do you think Magnolia delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with Magnolia's feature set?
Yes
Did Magnolia live up to sales and marketing promises?
Yes
Did implementation of Magnolia go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy Magnolia again?
Yes