Sitecore Experience Manager (XM)

Ability to manage a very large set of webpages in an international environment. The ability to add different types of users that have access and control over a set of webpages and can make updates and changes without the need to know HTML or another weblanguage. Sitecore provides standardized templates and options to customize pages, or make them active or inactive.

We chose Sitecore because it can do just about everything we would want from at platform like this. It works, it's scalable, it's personalizable, and can integrate with both our current and future planed marketing technology stack.

Best of Sitecore includes enterprise-grade personalization. It has multi-site, multi-language support, as well as robust security and compliance. Also, great content workflow and versioning. It has tools for marketing automation built-in, like email campaigns, lead scoring etc.

It's a somewhat technical landscape that does require experience or technical knowledge to manage and navigate the system. You need to understand how webpages are built up, how your web structure is implemented, and how to navigate modules and menus. Also it is hard to update a large number of webpages in one go, for example if you want to update the contact person details at the bottom, then you manually need to update them one by one. It's not like you can select 20 webpages and do a 'cron job'.

It's difficult to learn. There's weeks to months of just learning how to use the extremely complex implementation. It also is not something that can be undertaken alone - so make sure to count that into budgeting.

Sitecore is built on .Net. So it would be best to implement in organizations that have already invested in Microsoft infrastructure. We did have to rely on .Net developers to have the technical prowess to manage the site.