Sitefinity - flexibility and affordability in the same package
June 24, 2020
Sitefinity - flexibility and affordability in the same package
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Progress Sitefinity
Progress Sitefinity is the powerhouse behind
Murdoch University's award-winning websites. It is our primary platform for
engagement, news & events, course selection and broader information about
the wide-ranging activities undertaken by the University. It serves our
millions of domestic and international web visitors each year and is a key
acquisition channel for attracting new students. With hundreds of pages and articles being edited and created a year, supported by nearly a hundred content editors and administrators, the
platform is easy to use and maintain.
Murdoch University's award-winning websites. It is our primary platform for
engagement, news & events, course selection and broader information about
the wide-ranging activities undertaken by the University. It serves our
millions of domestic and international web visitors each year and is a key
acquisition channel for attracting new students. With hundreds of pages and articles being edited and created a year, supported by nearly a hundred content editors and administrators, the
platform is easy to use and maintain.
- Progress Sitefinity's user-friendly interface allows us to extend use of the platform to wide range of users across the business.
- Constant feature updates continue to add valuable new features and resolve prior issues. This is one of our primary reasons for retaining Progress Sitefinity.
- The Module Builder tool has given us enormous flexibility in enabling us to add new dynamic content items to our Progress Sitefinity platform and support a wide range of business requirements (e.g. course listings, custom news articles, scholarships, etc).
- Image management.
- It is still not possible to accurately determine whether a image is in active use on the website or not (i.e. embedded on a page/widget). This makes it extraordinarily hard to properly audit our image libraries, which continue to grow and increase our hosting costs. This is without a doubt our number one issue with the platform.
- Requirement to deploy/restart application for many updates.
- While acknowledging that Progress Sitefinity uses best practice when it comes to further development of the platform, the need to deploy new code and/or restart the platform continues to be an inconvenience when managing a production website.
- Lack of granular permissions on site sync and multisite.
- Site sync and multisite are two of Progress Sitefinity's most valuable features in terms of managing our website environment. However, there is no out-of-the-box method currently for assigning a user role to a specific site (a custom role has to be created). Similarly, it is not possible to assign granular permissions to the site sync tool (a user who has access to Site Sync has access to sync all content on all sites). Having more control over these features would reduce the overhead for our site admins.
- The license model in respect of subdomains (whereby an entirely new, full-cost license is required for each subdomain) is relatively uncompetitive and severely limits options when creating a network of sites.
- Progress Sitefinity's ease of use, particularly when it comes to development, has enabled us to make considerable savings on potential agency costs by transferring the bulk of our website development in-house.
- In addition, Progress Sitefinity's flexibility and range of features has allowed us to respond quickly to business demands and reduce our time to market for new content and features.
- Use of best practice deployment methods allows us better control over associated hosting costs for the platform.
We evaluated a range of other platforms before selecting Progress Sitefinity. While many other platforms had a powerful range of features, Progress Sitefinity provided to be a comparable product at a price far more suited to our budget. Above all else, its ease of use gained the highest scores in our testing, and the interface has continued to develop and improve over the past three years.