One Stop Shop for Customer Engagement Platform - Sitecore
October 31, 2016

One Stop Shop for Customer Engagement Platform - Sitecore

Laxmi Srinivas Samayamantri | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Sitecore Web Content Management

Sitecore is being used in my organization across different brands. Most of the brands are using Sitecore just for CMS and some of the brands use end to end Sitecore capabilities. A few of the use cases are:
  • Content authoring capabilities, which allow authors to update the site content on an as needed basis and publish it anytime.
  • Allows them to host multiple sites on a single Sitecore instance, which avoids extra maintenance and license cost.
  • Sitecore analytics which helps track the visitor engagement with the site and provides out of the box dashboards and reports.
  • Webform marketers module allows them to create offline registration pages and integrate them with external integrations through action commands.
  • Learning: If you are a .net developer, learning Sitecore is very easy and even customizations are simple.
  • Authoring: In previous versions of Sitecore < 7.0 inline content editing was tough. I would say nearly impossible. But, with Sitecore 8.1 experience editor. Sitecore made it so simple for authors to update and publish the content on the page itself.
  • Analytics: Sitecore Analytics helps you track the user engagement and also provides an out of the box analytics dashboard which can be shared.
  • Personalization & A/B Testing: Content personalization and multi-variant testing is very simple with out of the box features.
  • Scalability: Sitecore has robust caching features which you allows to do component based caching that varies by different parameters. It also provides the ability to have multiple content delivery servers in a production environment and you can add as many n content delivery servers as you want (depending on the license).
  • Sitecore is Customer Engagement Platform. It comes with lots of features (e.g. Authoring, Analytics, personalization, A/B Test, Webforms for marketers etc), But, most of them are not being used by many clients. If you are really looking for just CMS (only authoring and publishing), then I don't think Sitecore is a way to go.
  • You need to have a strong Sitecore certified developer base to manage the Sitecore platform (if you are using all features). It's the same case with others. But, finding a Sitecore certified (costs $$) developer is tough in the market. Now the market is growing (thanks to Sitecore promotional events) and Sitecore is gaining popularity, It may be easy to find such developers in the future. If you want to leverage most out of the Sitecore community you need to be a Sitecore certified developer.
  • Sitecore comes with lots of built-in features and marketplace components. I feel this puts in a little tricky situation. It gives an opportunity for a normal developer to use some of the free marketplace module, which may or may not be supported in a future version of Sitecore. which may put the entire platform in risk to upgrade to latest Sitecore version. You need to have a proper process to control and validate the marketplace components before using them.
  • ROI depends on what features the customer wants to leverage from Sitecore. Sitecore is not just a CMS. It's CEP platform which comes with Analytics, Personalization, A/B Testing, and Email for marketers modules etc., out of the box.
  • Based on my experience some of the customers lean towards third party services. This is primarily due to lack of the understanding of these features. If a customer leverages these out of the box features ROI will be high. It depends on how much is being [sent] to third parties services.
  • Sitecore has very good accelerators in the market. These accelerators allows you to create response sites very quickly. If a simple campaign site takes 50K to build the site may save at least 50% of that cost. Examples of site accelerators are Brainjocks, Keystone, Cognifide etc.
Based on my perspective these are the main reasons for choosing Sitecore over others.
  • It is a one-stop shop for all customer engagement platforms with a lot of developer communities over the web.
  • It is a .NET based platform as there are a lot of .Net developers in the market.
  • Availability of Sitecore accelerators which enables to go to market quickly.
  • Automated deployments supported across environments using TFS for code and other tools like TDS, Unicorn etc., for content deployments
If you have a small to medium size business and moderate consumer traffic on the sites (not like a million hits per day), then you can just go ahead and start using Sitecore with all features, with a small developer base. This saves a lot of costs as you don't need to depend on any third party for analytics, personalization or A/B testing etc. But, if you are looking for a solution for an enterprise, a proper assessment needs to be done on the team structure and [you need to] establish processes to better manage the Sitecore platform.

Sitecore Experience Manager Feature Ratings

WYSIWYG editor
9
Code quality / cleanliness
9
Admin section
8
Page templates
9
Library of website themes
Not Rated
Mobile optimization / responsive design
10
Publishing workflow
10
Form generator
7
Content taxonomy
9
SEO support
9
Bulk management
9
Availability / breadth of extensions
9
Community / comment management
Not Rated
API
8
Internationalization / multi-language
9
Role-based user permissions
9