SiteCore CMS

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SiteCore CMS (version 6.5 as of this writing) is targeted at highly-interactive marketing sites with fast-changing content & layouts, supplying an editor-friendly .NET-based framework, with an increasing focus on Web Engagement Management (definition, "5 Pillars" of WEM).

Features

Sitecore is strongly and unapologetically linked with Microsoft technologies. It makes extensive use of .NET on the server side, and stays true to the Microsoft Office user interface for content creators, taking advantage of advanced Windows features whenever content creators are on Windows (which, frankly, is still the bulk of content creators). Sites can be set up for deployment (on site creation) to Microsoft Azure.

Note that Sitecore is not a particularly out of the box solution; a good deal of development is necessary before a site goes live. Some of this is similar to Drupal (e.g. Drupal sites need a theme, Sitecore sites need templates). But additional work must be done prior to going live with Sitecore; anecdotal information suggests Sitecore is more of a "toolkit" than a "ready-to-go solution".

CMS features

N.B.: Though Sitecore strategically positions its products as tools for digital marketing, it packages the CMS features separately from it's "digital marketing system".

The main features of SiteCore are:

  • Coding-free page layouts. The system permits both intermediate templates that establish basic site look & feel, plus the ability for expert content creators to create custom pages based on that template.
    Demo video (See the "Sitecore MS Marketer & Business User" video):
    Only local images are allowed.

    The primary emphasis is to enable advanced end users the ability to create marketing landing pages without developer assistance. Note, then, that this also includes the ability to create forms.

  • Flexible content editing. Editing can be done both in-line on an existing page, as well as in forms on new pages. Editing resembles the Office-style "ribbon" interface.
  • Social media type functionality. Capabilities include blogs, wikis, forums, polls, surveys, web forms, email-a-friend, post-to-Twitter/Facebook, and others (including integration with other systems such as Teligent's Community Server).
  • Multilingual sites. This extends to both localization of the Sitecore interface as well as creating content with multiple languages (as well as enabling third-party translators interfaces to perform translations).
  • Media (digital asset) management. Drag/drop addition to the media library for text, video, images, PDFs, and documents, with support for metadata and alt tags.
    Only local images are allowed.
  • Multisite. A single installation can support multiple sites, but anecdotal murmurs suggest it is not very robust (despite recent addition of a "clone site" feature).
  • Device-specific mobile presentation. Content creators can define how content is to be delivered to various mobile devices, from smartphone to tablet to RSS feeds. Device detection is available.
    Only local images are allowed.
  • Personalized content, and progressive profiling. Sitecore relies heavily on this being a key differentiator for its product. The product attempts to show "personalized content" to site visitors, personalized down to the individual visitor. Site owners first define a set of attributes appropriate for their customer segments (e.g. professional, consumer, buyer, etc.). As site visitors view site content, the CMS begins to build a profile for the user based on what the visitor views on the site. As the profile values becomes meaningful, the site can be configured to show segment-specific content in portions of the page (using conditions / actions to display targeted content, e.g. "If visitor has high 'professional' score, then display 'product from professional set' in this block.")
    Only local images are allowed.
    Various user experiences can be previewed in the content creation interface, simulating various conditions / actions. Anecdotal information suggests that customer use of this capability is still in its infancy, and that success in using it requires extensive analysis of the business, target visitors and ways to categorize them, creating content that matches these categories, then creating pages that utilize this. Because this is typically an activity performed by the site owner (vs. site builder), it often isn't completed, or is completed fairly generically (with limited results). While this capability sounds powerful, it remains to be seen how big of an actual business impact this will have on customers. Intuitively, it feels questionable this can scale to a site with millions of page views / month.
  • Built-in SEO help, such as this type of assistance to help users complete basics needed for search engine discovery:
    Only local images are allowed.

Digital marketing system

This extra-cost component of Sitecore provides:

  • Built-in analytics. Sitecore provides its own analytics, presumably because it is optimizing reporting to the approach it wants to take in digital marketing (vs. generic analytics from Google, Omniture, etc.). These include a:
    • A C-level dashboard for customer engagement, campaign performance ranking, and multi-channel results.
    • Specific reporting on the results emerging from its personalization features
    • Real-time personalization
    • Campaign optimization

    Only local images are allowed.

  • Email marketing. Sitecore bundles its own email marketing engine, that provides:
    • Campaign-based emails that can re-use content from the CMS, and which can use progressive profiling
    • Ongoing lead nurturing (drip campaigns)
    • A/B-multivariate testing within the email campaigns, with results tracking. Results include time of day and day of week analysis.
    • Segmentation based on email interactions / clickthroughs
  • CRM integration, including links to Salesforce & Oracle, plus email/mobile alerts to sales, daily lead reports, and sales priority reports.

Solution accelerators

Sitecore packages its technology into several bundles (that optionally include additional capabilities):

  • E-Commerce
  • Intranet
  • Multisite

Other information

Company: Sitecore
License: Proprietary
Language: .NET / C#
Download: None
Online Demo: No demo per-se, but see links to videos above
Pricing/packaging: Per-server, per-user (editor), plus fixed-price bundled add-ons for the digital marketing system, and solution accelerators
Sales channel: Sold both through authorized channel partners (essentially Microsoft channel partners)

Comments

"More than a CMS"

robertDouglass's picture

Their recent press release has a lot of targeted guidance as to where they're going, and how they see the market evolving:

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/sitecore-accelerates-global-growth-and-...

"We are experiencing a dramatic shift from what we know today as stand-alone technology for Web content creation and management to a platform for e-commerce, marketing automation and analytics," said Michael Seifert, CEO, Sitecore. "It requires more than a CMS to manage customer communications on the new Internet and drive business success. Our customers and partners have been very enthusiastic about the accelerated pace of results our Web platform brings to sales and marketing initiatives. It's beyond anything they have worked with previously to intelligently guide customer conversations across all interactions and channels."

Sitecore extended the scope of its product solution set with the introduction of the Customer Engagement Platform. Sitecore's Customer Engagement Platform takes Web content management to a new level by adding and integrating key ingredients for digital marketing success. Furthermore, Sitecore introduced a cloud computing solution for global businesses interested in cost-effectively deploying website delivery centers in the cloud.

In addition, the company acquired the development team and the intellectual property of Pectora, and introduced Adaptive Print Studio to deliver more dynamic, personalized, customer-facing print media.

Note that while they're focusing on "customer engagement", they also acquired a print company, meaning that the two teams inside of print companies (the print team and the new media team) are indeed converging, which is what we're seeing in the market as well.

It strains credibility that..

batsonjay's picture

.. they could displace print tools. IMHO, anyway.

Yes, but they might be able

robertDouglass's picture

Yes, but they might be able to join the teams. From what I understand, publishing houses still suffer from "Print team" and "New media team" disconnect. If you can unify the workflow and promote sharing of content, you've got a compelling product.

About the design of the

yoroy's picture

About the design of the Guardian iPad app:

Unlike the iPhone and Android apps, which are built on feeds from the website, this one actually recycles the already-formatted newspaper pages. A script analyses the InDesign files from the printed paper and uses various parameters (page number, physical area and position that a story occupies, headline size, image size etc) to assign a value to the story. The content is then automatically rebuilt according to those values in a new InDesign template for the app.

From http://www.markporter.com/notebook/?p=1080

Migration from Sitecore to drupal....?

chintan4u's picture

Hello guys,

If anyone worked on migration project like sitecore to drupal..? Need help.
appreciate if you can provide any starting point/links

-Chintan
drupal@india.com

helpful blog

Bhanuji's picture

I am not working for migration of the site core to Drupal, but for other migrations I worked..

I have some info in my blog. (http://bhanu555prakash.blogspot.com/2012/12/migrate-to-drupal-7.html). Please feel free to reach me.. If you find any problem

Thanks in Advance,
Bhanu

Words of experience

det2048's picture

My client migrated to Sitecore 7.0 from Drupal 7. I was a bit hesitant and I gave many warnings on this move. But the sales pitch for Sitecore was pretty impressive. A year later after the move, we are still in the process of migrating content from many different platforms, mostly wordpress and drupal. Also we are not even close to getting the same capabilities and power that Drupal offers for development. There was very little out of the box that was useful or in their marketplace for expanding the capabilities (because the community is small). We went from 1 developer (myself) to a large outsourced team with dozens of managers and specialists. This is a complete mess and we still are developing the system to get the platform to have more of a scaleable aspect to content development. Like for instance if you want to create a component with certain content in it and want it shared on a certain group of pages lets say 1000 pages, you have to goto each page one by one and associate that shared content. In Drupal you just create a block and my_path/* on the block and that block is on all those pages. Its really not worth the effort developing, its easier to build the engagement capabilities into a module for Drupal. I would say sitecore is great if you have a small site, but it does not scale up well. They did improve it with "Buckets" a bit and there are some good things about Sitecore I would like to see in Drupal, its template inheritance system is pretty clean. Besides all this, think carefully of the costs before migrating to Sitecore. We are upgrading to Sitecore 8.0 soon. I'll keep you all posted. As an FYI our content managers are reluctant to let go of their Drupal sites and move to our new platform.