Item: Optimizely Content Management System
Rating: 9
Author: Kyle Roy

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Optimizely Content Cloud as the CMS for the public website for the Supreme Court of Michigan, Michigan Court of Appeals, Michigan Judicial Institute, and various other divisions in our organization. We have data integrations with our local databases and other external databases that are updated daily, and facilitate live communication between the site and the courts database system. As a customer of the headless CMS, there have certainly been challenges but overall it has been a high quality improvement for the state. Customer support always seems to respond in a reasonable timeframe, and they typically have an idea of troubleshooting issues quickly.

Pros and Cons

Fast to respond to support tickets
Full featured CMS that can handle massive amounts of data
Data integrations that are easy to set up and maintain

The editor experience takes time to get used to. And it takes a long time sometimes.
File management can become a pain with large amounts of files. Could be solved with process improvement but its still a little rough
The documentation is good for regular use, but the recent split between the v11 and v12 docs make it take a lot longer to find the articles for my specific product type

Return on Investment

Got us off our old system
High cost - Product licensing, Implementation partner, developer training
Data integration provides live data in then system quickly
Scheduled jobs provide good options for content management

Usability

The experience for users has been mostly positive. AD integration logins mean that our editors don't need to authenticate every time they are stale, and we are even able to keep certain sections of the site restricted from public viewing pretty easily. Creating projects and working with others collaboratively works very well, and the overall governance of the site is easily well kept.

Time to Value

We worked with an implementation partner and it took about 9 months to get up and running with the platform. Some of the hardest challenges we encountered were the proper formatting of time zone information, and making sure its consistent, and keeping in sync the models from an external API to ensure sub types were populating properly.

Alternatives Considered

Microsoft SharePoint, Boxever and from Sitecore

I was not involved in the evaluation process for any of these systems. We chose Episerver CMS because it met the highest number of features for our use cases, and seemed to have great support and a good team running it. We were able to find an implementation partner and transfer multiple sites into one contained project.

Key Insights

Do you think Optimizely Content Management System delivers good value for the price?

Not sure

Are you happy with Optimizely Content Management System's feature set?

Yes

Did Optimizely Content Management System live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Optimizely Content Management System go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Optimizely Content Management System again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Visual Studio IDE, Postman, Discord

Likelihood to Recommend

Content Management is well suited to manage and present content both from the CMS database and from external sources and presents it well through the Headless CMS. Handles authentication and errors in a well fashioned manner. Most of the plugins are useful additions to the system. One thing that I have experienced difficulty with using Optimizely Content Cloud, is the caching of files and updating of files. We have some files that are updated regularly, but for some reason we'll have two users working together, looking at the same url, and working from different versions of the file. Maybe this is an implementation issue, but it is very hard to diagnose and it provides an inconsistent User Experience for users trying to do work.

It's a pretty good CMS

Software Version

Overall Satisfaction with Optimizely Content Management