Item: Optimizely Content Management System
Rating: 6
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Optimizely Content Management System

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Optimizely Content Management System to manage all of our site content for a QA and prod environment, as well as managing all dynamic promotions. Our site is made for ecommerce sales but we also provide a lot of value to customers doing research before visiting one of our many stores as well as being a resource to our store employees. We recently switched to a different site search provider (that uses AI, which for the breadth of what we sell is very helpful) and brought in reviews platform.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Asset and block organization (using same folder structure)
Page type options (html, css options)
Search within CMS
Commerce editing UI

Cons

promo types, several have been released that do not work as they are advertised/labeled which has caused us to make custom promos for just about all of them where we've actually fixed the functionality. The OOB types are completely unreliable
promo exclusions/sorting -- this is very buggy, and some of this would normally be "out of the box" like no two order discounts should ever be able to stack. This gets incredibly difficult to manage when you have 75 active promos at a time.
asset management - replacement files with same name aren't recognized even when the first version is deleted, this creates a mess in asset folders - nothing can be successfully deleted from epi asset library
html automatic edits -- issues when typing in either content page links or asset links, epi always adds random characters to the end (?"Epieditmode=false,6789" for example, which doesn't break content, but does make it more difficult for the team to use non-epi html tools to build or edit
auto dimensions on images -- when adding an image in the html, you have the address exactly, but any other way causes the editor to put width and height dims on the code, making the image warp in mobile, this is adding steps to undo the automatic edits, they are completely unhelpful
blogs - we are running a blog in Opti that is compeltely manual, every "related article" and every "articles about x topic" block is hard coded, there is nothing dynamic in the content library which is frustrating, and creates a huge time suck for articles across the site, every time there is a new one, that's 10+ manual page updates

Return on Investment

The ability to create content block libraries has helped cut the time spent on coding.
The page types have helped us have unique looking pages without having to build multiple from scratch.
The promotion engine has been incredibly time consuming, with the amount we have at any given moment, this requires about an hour of testing, and at least an hour spent on sorting and setting exclusions in the backend, a LOT of this could be standardized and intuitive, and there is way too much room for human error. That said I have little trust in any fix deployed by Opti to solve this issue.
We have pulled back efforts to build out our blog as Optimizely Content Management System has no strong way to manage this type of content. It is consuming too much of the team's time as everywhere we put articles is manual and hard coded, so anytime there is a new article, you have to manually build blocks and place them every time you make a change. If this worked like a normal blog with dynamic/feed/tagging/dates functionality, we could be making a lot of progress.

Usability

It is mostly intuitive to jump in and build something, so for page building, it's great. The issue is that the more you work with it and add and build out an asset library and a block library, the harder it gets. This system works well if its one person managing content, but when there are several editors, one can't know where another put an asset or a block, and without clicking through every folder you can guess, it's difficult to find blocks. we've worked with this making a block folder for a "Code Library" for block types, but every customization of those is buried in folders and unsearchable. promotions is a cluster, be prepared to customize just about all of them.

Key Insights

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

Yes

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?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Optimizely Content Management System again?

Other Software Used

VWO, Constructor.io Search, Microsoft Visual Studio Code

Likelihood to Recommend

It is strong in the basics of site management, but it could use a lot of work with promotions and running online offers. Organization of content is pretty simple UI, and there are several page types to make a variety of content layouts. This CMS is great for sites with a need for a lot of landing pages, but it does not allow for much dynamic content, such as events, a blog, product recs/feeds, etc. It is clunky when it comes to product info management and even worse with promos, it can work but not without a lot of workarounds which is very demanding of time for those working with it. The ability to search pages is helpful, but the search within assets or blocks does not work, which makes it very complicated to use unless the user knows exactly where they put something - therefore there is a lot of copying, rebuilding, duplication because of this lack of being able to find older content that is not on live pages anymore. At a point this becomes overwhelmingly full, and infeasible to sort through.

Optimizely Content Management System Feature Ratings

Comments

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Overall great the more complex your needs the more complex the work

Software Version