Among posts published in our blog, there are many about CMSs: Umbraco, Joomla, Drupal, Magento, WordPress etc. But one that slipped under our attention is Sitecore CMS.
What is Sitecore?
Sitecore is software Development Company that provides enterprise website, intranet, portal and marketing automation software. Sitecore offers two major products: CMS and its fully integrated “Customer Engagement Platform” which allows seamless integration between its major components: Web Content Management (CMS), Customer Engagement Platform, DMS (Digital Marketing System), E-commerce services, Sitecore Intranet Portal (SIP), Sitecore Foundry.
The Sitecore CMS – an introduction.
Sitecore CMS is .NET-based content management system and vc. Open source .NET based management systems (like Umbraco or Kentico for example), it’s paid resource. It’s not cheap (the cheapest Sitecore license starts around €10k and quickly goes up from there and then you still need to buy support) and depending on this fact the target market of this CMS is big enterprises such as Toshiba, Siemens, KIA, Mazda, Canon, Nestle, Microsoft, including government websites of Denmark.
Lunched in 2001 Sitecore’s CMS popularity has been growing over the last few years. According to the results of annual statistics, Sitecore demonstrated good results and what is particular important it is global player and highly competitive US and UK markets.
Sitecore’s benefits.
The Sitecore CMS is considered a pretty good product for its flexibility, scalability and accessibility to the widest range of businesses. Flexibility is an area in which Sitecore CMS excels as it is fully customizable and extendable, and practically anything can be overridden or extended. Scalability – Sitecore CMS is highly scalable and has been architected to scale extremely well, allowing organizations to grow and expand. Accessability – Sitecore is used by many companies, ranging from small and middle-sized to global leading ones.
Let’s have a look also at Sitecore’s benefits from a technical perspective:
• SQL Server and Oracle support allows flexible and hierarchical data storage;
• Simple and understandable API for technical specialists;
• Ability to configure and expand by increasing the pipelines supply, event handing, etc.;
• The engine dynamically collects and cashes management components that help to create solutions to re-use the code;
• Device management – designate page elements and other content for different clients (browser, PDF, XML, feed) or for mobile devices.
• ASP.NET Membership Services manage security, authentication, authorization, roles and profiles
• Workflow facilities make it possible to quickly define sophisticated material before being published
• Media Library provides storage of huge amount of items/data
• Integration with Visual Studio 2010 IDE
How to decide whether Sitecore is the best choice for your company.
If you decide that your company needs a CMS solution you probably need to make first steps towards understanding your use and defining requirements. If to speak about Sitecore CMS we’ve prepared some tips to find out if Sitecore is a good option for your company:
– You/your development team are fluent with .NET (C#, ASP.NET);
– You have a good sized website to host;
– You’re willing/ready to invest and migrate all your websites and web apps into a .NET environment;
– You agree with the payback period that could take over 1 year or longer depending on what you spend to implement and what customization you have done.
One more hot issue to consider is whether you’re ready to go with the paid license. Sitecore CMS is a paid one, it’s not open source. So you should pay for support and access to the code base if you need to create a highly customized deployment with heavy involvement from your team.
So to end up the abovementioned I could say that from technical point of view Sitecore is really looks great and it’s very powerful player among other management systems on the market as it is thoughtfully designed and well developed.
Thank you for your attention to my post and if you have any comments about any aspect of the Sitecore CMS, please feel free to leave your comments.
very good explanation
It’s a nice and short run-through, but I’m missing the comparative point of view in your review. How good is it in comparison vs. WordPress, Drupal, Umbraco etc.? What are the cons? Is there only pros?
No Pros actually, more over initially it was created for WebForms, which is outdated technology. if you fan with CustomCotnrols may be it is for you