Recently I was working on a very large Ektron implementation. Our customer had old legacy bespoke CMS solution which was used by very few people in business. This was simply restricting business to increase their brand awareness.
A highly engaging, relevant, and interesting content driven website is a powerful tool for brand building. To achieve this, an effective content management system is needed and a Strategic approach is imperative for effective content management.
We selected Ektron as the CMS Tool after looking into various different options and last 7-8 months were very much getting Ektron platform deployed, site migration to Ektron from bespoke CMS and enable business users to start using the new toy. Overall a serious change for business and this exercise is lot more difficult because it was a public funded organization where reluctance to change was lot higher!
Why did we choose Ektron?
- Light weight CMS solution
- Quick to roll out
- Light infrastructure foot print
- Easy content authoring interface
- Ability to build good dynamic website OOTB
- Strong taxonomies, menus and collections to build personalized site
- E-Sync : This can drive you nuts! I will write some specific issues I have experienced and respective solutions as well in the coming posts
- Release management : This needs more improvement how Ektron can support multiple complex releases in parallel. Ektron is a very DB centric application. Configuration changes like adding new templates, smartforms, taxonomies etc get added to DB. When you perform E-Sync then there is limited option to perform selective E-Sync. This means when you move your code from one environment to another then it can move everything from database to next environment and you can not control this.
- Integration with Third Party security tools: Example if you want to integrate with Third party external security tools like Microsoft ISA server, siteminder etc then it is not proven and tested integrations.
- Multiples sites using Ektron: You can do this but you need to be careful while designing it!
- Workflows: Workflows are very rudimentary still. Ektron is integrating with Windows Workflow engine in Ektron 9 and I believe this will bring Ektron workflows to right standards..
