CMS thoughts?

[Greg Biniek]

I'm looking for any thoughts anyone can share with me in regards to Hannon Hill Cascade and SiteCore CMS systems.  If you currently employ one of these CMS I'm very curious to hear your thoughts... please don't just tell me how great they are but also the struggles you encountered with each.  Do they have built in modules for News, Images, and / or Calendar functionality... how well do they work... are you able to extend them?  Do either have an online forms builder... how robust are they / what are their limitations?  Feel free to contact me directly if you think that would be better.

 

Thanks!

[Edgar Riley]

Greg: I have a couple of thoughts, but first full disclosure -- I work at a firm that implements Sitecore and other CMS products. We have had good success with Sitecore in the higher ed environment.

One important note is that regardless of the CMS selected, you will not succeed if you do not allocate sufficient time for planning, both technical planning and defining governance. Where we've been asked to rescue failing implementations for institutes of higher education, the cause of the problem has almost always been a lack of planning.

Two resources that might be of value - our recent whitepapers on "Successful Web Content Management for Higher Education" and, if you are considering Sitecore, our "Best Practices for Sitecore" whitepaper. These and a dozen more are available at http://www.nonlinearcreations.com/whitepaper I'll also try to upload them with this post.

I hope this is helpful

rand

[Michael Fienen]

Greg, take a look at the CMS research we did at .eduGuru. You can download the full results and see what people thought were pros and cons of different systems.

http://doteduguru.com/id4579-results-higher-ed-cms-usage.html

[Susan T. Evans]

Hi Greg,

We have a very successful implementation of Hannon Hill Cascade Server - we began using the product about two years ago for our campus web presence (including four graduate and professional schools). We'd be happy to talk details about our experience. In general, we have found Cascade Server to be flexible and customizable.

In my view, Edgar's reply below is dead on. Projects like CMS implementations usually go south for non-technology reasons.

Best,
Susan
======================
Susan T. Evans
Director of Creative Services
College of WIlliam & Mary

[Philip Brashear]

Greg,
We looked at both products during our selection process three years ago. We chose Sitecore primarily because the in-line editing interface was a great fit for our users and because Sitecore seemed much easier to customize and implement with a fairly short ramp-up period.

Three years later, we're happy with Sitecore, but not overjoyed. It's a good product, but there are some glaring oversights in features we made bad assumptions about up front. For instance, its Active Directory module is extremely limited and doesn't actually work properly in our environment--can't work properly in fact, according to Sitecore. The product also doesn't include the concept of time zones. That would be fine if our 16 colleges weren't spread out over two time zones.

In a situation like ours--with 16 separate institutions--Sitecore can be very effective for syndicating content across sites and quickly making adjustments that affect all sites. Without a very skilled implementation firm however, it can also lead to bloated and poorly-performing sites both on the public side and in the management interface. We do appreciate that fact that Sitecore integrates with our SharePoint implementation (we use SharePoint for our employee intranet), but we wish that module were a little cleaner and easier to configure.

If you plan to use Sitecore in a fairly standard configuration--one web site with lots of flexibility for users and workflows--I think it's a great product out of the box. If you intend to stretch it a bit in a multi-site environment, then it CAN be a great product IF you have the right implementation help. All in all, we're quite happy and would make the same choice again.

As far as available modules, I've mentioned the AD and SharePoint modules already. We have the analytics module (which I think is included), but we don't use it. Neither do we use the calendar module, the search module, or the Word module. We were warned off all those by implementation firms or in some cases by Sitecore itself. Our news content is managed with custom Sitecore templates, which are fairly easy to build--again in a standard implementation with skilled assistance. Images are handled by Sitecore's default media library. It's effective in a single-site implementation, but can be cumbersome in a more complex implementation like ours.
HTH,
P