Likelihood to Recommend Adobe Experience Manager allows web content managers to share the work of site maintenance while being able to set access/publishing. Editors don’t need to have advanced HTML experience to make edits or even build new pages. Having workflows to allow authors/editors to request publish gives content managers the ability to review content before it is made public. Being able to set on and off times for pages helps control when content is released and retired. AEM is not ideal for highly specialized and customized designs with lots of interaction/automation
Read full review Well suited for our needs of multiple images for auto auctions from a variety of sellers. Pointing them to one platform is easier than attempting to use a variety of platforms as we were doing before (email, slack,
Dropbox and
Google Drive would randomly be used by a variety of employees )
Read full review Pros It allows us to scale so that we can make a change on a global footer. And it applies to all of the different property websites. It allows us to set up components and compartmentalize things in a way. The big thing is that it's scalable. And then it also ties into Adobe Analytics and other Adobe products. So we are a complete Adobe shop. Every Adobe product that we can use, we use. I don't think we do it for marketing so much, but for doing target testing and analytics, data scientists are using the same product and so it all speaks. Read full review Flexible. This CMS can be easily extended and provide access to dynamic content Simple. The WYSWG is very easy to work with and identifying pages and content in the system is fairly easy Clean Interface. The interface is clean and uncluttered keeping focus on the content and not other factors. Read full review Cons It's still, at the end of the day, a very traditional platform in by that we mean it's a bulk air platform. There are too many components, which means a lot more operating costs in terms of manageability and things like that. We have tried to streamline that as much as we can, but the multiple components still exist. If anything, Adobe could kind of think about that a little bit to maybe decouple some of those and make them a more slimmer platform. I think that would help. I think that a lot of customers are still in the traditional environment and as we ourselves are looking to move to the cloud, I think some of that will get taken care of, but I think that's one area where it would help if Adobe can put some thoughts into that. Read full review Contentful uses "references" to allow you to build very modular content. If I have a "slider" content type, I can create a "slide" content type which references a "button" content type, and so forth. This works well, but I occasionally wish there was a better solution for one-off content, like a settings page. Currently, this is done for creating an entire content type called "settings" with a single entry. Not a big deal, but not ideal, either. There are a few quirks with GatsbyJS integration, etc, but these issues are being fixed and improved upon very quickly. A minor gripe, but Contentful does not have a way to organize fields within an entry. Entries with many fields are somewhat tiresome to scroll through. Read full review Likelihood to Renew We had and still have a fantastic experience using Adobe CQ. Lots of flexibility, great integration with other Adobe products we already use and a powerful technology make it a great fit for our corporate environment. Also as the community grows, it makes it easier to network with other developers and users to get new ideas on how to continue to get the best out of the software.
Read full review Usability Adobe launched the Touch UI experience a few years back, I think it's been four to five years now. I didn't see much improvements in terms of usability. So there's definitely there's room for improvement there, especially around our authoring team. They really struggle when it comes to finding things in them or navigating easily to pages. It's always a struggle for them. I think the overall authoring user experience, the way authoring UI, the way it is set up, can be optimized. I think in its current state, I don't think it's that well set up. It can definitely be redesigned for sure.
Read full review Reliability and Availability Being part of Adobe Suite means you are already notified when the tool has any outages. However, I have never faced unplanned outages. Whenever you face any issue with the site, it is clearly stated if there were any planned outages and how quickly you will be back to normal. So, I will say that even the outages are planned and managed in a great way like their other services.
Read full review Performance With respect to performance, Adobe experience manager is one of the best in the CMS space. We didn't observe frequent slowness on platform, however the systems which are accessing experience manager should be of good specifications without which slowness would be observed. Adobe experience manager works well in integration with other solutions, unless the destination application is designed to trigger frequent calls to AEM.
Read full review Support Rating Adobe Experience Manager, in all its capacity, is a great alternative to any other CMS you are using. It helps in rapid development and makes life easier for maintaining the website for multi-language sites. Technical know-how is eliminated at content authoring. Better documentation in terms of live examples with videos would be appreciated.
Read full review Implementation Rating Depending on your individual needs, It is really quite simple to create an authoring experience for a website that looks really good. I have been part of many implementations and many teams and have seen many projects that were super successful and others that were not implemented well. AEM has room for a lot of flexibility in the implementation process compared to other CMS like SharePoint
Read full review Alternatives Considered At Canadian Tire Financial, in the time I've been there, we've always used AEM, but in past places I've used
WordPress , I've used
Squarespace . Things that are more general user-friendly where you're like building your own blog or you're creating a small business website where it's basically just text, you're not intaking information or something like that. I think the customization options in AEM are huge. My experiences with
WordPress were pretty straightforward. Again, it was like, I don't know, like college newspaper website or something like that where you're just like putting content up for people to look at. You're not necessarily taking in any other information. Maybe you might allow people to log in or something and save articles or something pretty straightforward, but then even then I remember that stuff taking me forever to do, to figure out and scroll through tons and tons and tons of documentation. It's just not fun. No one enjoys doing that and then even then you might not have the answer available to you. And that's so frustrating. Hey, it's super user-friendly, figuring out the content editor is pretty straightforward. You're not clicking around and being, "what the heck am I looking at?" Or you're not looking at a bazillion menus to be like, "maybe the thing I want is in here." I can't stand that. I want to be able to look at a page, see what I'm going to be getting in production, and then publish it. I don't want to look around in menus to figure out how to add something to a page.
Read full review In the past we've used
WordPress to manage documentation content.
WordPress was more flexible than Contentful but also prone to inconsistencies and we ended having a lot of hacks to accomplish various
WordPress tricks. With Contentful there's less ambiguity so content producers are less likely to go astray. We also have our own in-house programmatic template solution for managing content, but this was a previous pain point when we needed to get the dev team to do a deploy for every content change.
Read full review Contract Terms and Pricing Model Instead of being directly involved in the tool purchase, I am involved in analysis or what we can use to maximize the tool. Small organizations may find it expensive. However, if the team or organization focuses more on your ROI or the features you will get, then it will definitely be worth it. Pricing is based on a number of factors, including team size or the use of the tool. The user can select the pricing option that best fits their needs based on the number of form submissions they make or the number of pages they wish to publish on their global/multisite sites.
Read full review Professional Services The professional services team within adobe is one of the best in terms of technical and solutioning knowledge. However, considering the billing charges of adobe professional services team, it is always recommended to involve them during platform initial setup or when a complex solution is to be built with platform customizations.
Read full review Return on Investment Well I can't speak monetarily but I can say it's allowed us to get some sites out and messages out very quickly. We've been able to stand up some sites incredibly under very tight timeframes. Messaging, especially during the pandemic, we were able to not only get information out about COVID, we were able to get messages out to the general population about information about their insurance, about issues that were happening, how to find test sites, how to find test kits, how to find information about your insurance, how to get information about storms or anything happening. So we found it was able to get up messaging very quickly and turnaround sites pretty fast. Once we got rolling on it, we were able to do it and we found that it was just able to get that messaging and sites out very fast. Read full review Positive - new hires are able to get onboarded quicker with us using Contentful Positive - we can customize the journey of what modules/material the user sees after a course/video/article Positive - it's been an overall game changer when hiring external candidates who need extensive training Read full review ScreenShots