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I enjoyed reading your assesment of both our product and our competitors. I would be glad to chat with you about a pricing model that we offer that you may not be aware of. based on your comment, "I like this company a lot - BUT - you need to buy a server license for each URL" it would seem that you have a slight mis-interpertation of the Ektron pricing model. Again, I would be glad to clarify.
Best,
David T. Maffei
Director of Sales
Ektron, Inc.
I am the product manager of Sense/Net Portal Engine TNG. I am more that happy to see your post, and many thanks for writing good things about us. :)
TNg will be available for download in September. We are working on a 1st release, that is good enough for a public download. As of now, we are working on the portal of one of our big customers, so we do not have time for managing a public beta program. Keep checking back to our blog.
That being said, you have a tough decision it seems. Some time back we were engaged by a client to do a similar review of CMS packages (.net was a requirement) and despite the time lapse between our projects, we found many of the same options. You’re right, the UI hasn’t changed much in design but then again they keep adding new features. The reason I wanted to post was that you noted how helpful they are and that is my main reason for choosing Ektron on an ongoing basis. It is not just sales that is helpful, their support team is also and that is a huge requirement for me. From a commercial standpoint, pound for pound, I like Ektron.
But in open source land, now that is a harder choice to make. I have used DNN, Rainbow and Umbraco. I liked Umbraco the most and have used it for projects. However, when going through the risk-benefit analysis with the client, it was always with that discussion on the differences between open source and commercial support (or open source with commercial support features) which is not always an apples-to-apples comparison. As a developer it might of note that with Umbraco you load the templates through the CMS admin itself where in many other systems you build the templates in VS and cms api’s and push them to the server. As many things in development, each has their own benefits, so the development process for each product needs to be considered. PHP offers an even broader range of open source CMS products with vary styles of support and for the right company/project might be good options as well.
Wow, more long winded than I thought, but these things may be of interest to you, if not, well, I tried. I will be interested to see where you head going forward. It may be that the at the end of the day, you choose as I do, a commercial product (like Ektron) for those instances where you wish the security of knowing that you can call a live person and open source when the client/project is more suited toward community based support. Don’t get me wrong, there are some fantastic community supported projects, but I have had occasion that ‘my particular issue’ was of little interest to the community as a whole but of large interest to me so I keep that in mind too.
Thanks for putting this out there,
David
I think EPiServer CMS is an excellent framework for developing web sites. Easy to use and very well integrated in ASP.NET. EPiServer is based in Europe and they started their global expansion programme last year, so I'm sorry you did not find so many partners i US yet.
I work for a company specialised in EPiServer, let me know if you need help with evaluation and licenses.
/Fredrik
We have begun to use Cuyahoga as our chosen framework, and its a real joy. The 2.0 beta has some great features that work for us and our plan to move into SaaS.
We are building some social networking modules at the moment, I'll let you know how we get on.
Mayur
I'm a long time Umbraco user who has just started looking at N2 CMS, and from what I can see it is a very nice design, with great code quality and test coverage.
Unlike most CMS's I have seen, it gets its document model from your code, which you decorate with attributes to specifiy editor types. A very elegant model indeed if you do not need to give schema design time abilities to your end users. Like umbraco 4, it uses masterpages and aspx for its templating, so it is all fully source controllable - that was a big problem with umbraco <4.
Take care and good luck.
You have probably seen my name on a search engine extension for umbraco that handles related pages by metadata and tag cloud type scenarios. You may well have also cursed me had you tried to use it before a colleage of mine pointed at the correct index file.
So I am a Ryan Roberts, but not the Ryan Roberts.
Send me your email address and I'll follow up with details of what we are up to and where we are at.
Cheers,
Mayur
-Ryan
We evaluated most of the ones you listed and drew almost identical conclusions for most - we shortlisted Ektron, Kentico, SiteCore, EPiServer and ADXSTUDIO. We then selected EPiServer for our strategic CMS, and have found it absolutely terrific. Strange that you had such difficulties speaking to them because we've found them very forthcoming (albeit they do have a presence in the UK).
We also partnered with ADXSTUDIO for low-cost solutions as their license model at entry level is very attractive. It's a limited product and is BADLY in need of a cosmetic and technical overhaul, but it does a job. The most recent version is a big improvement.
If you ever want any assistance with EPiServer or ADXSTUDIO just shout - the company I work for has offices in the States too. If not, then good luck with wherever your CMS journey takes you!
Dan
After heavily researching 20+ products, I stumbled upon your article. Very well written and VERY helpful. My research had important points missing and your article provided them very nicely. May be, I should compile a comparison matrix, put it up on the web, give you due credit, and link back here!!
We had narrowed down to Umbraco in the open source category and to Ektron and SiteCore in the commercial category. I wrote to Ektron on a Friday and promptly got a response saying they'd like to talk to us on Monday. The trail went cold after that. After trying twice to follow up, I had to give up due to time constraints.
On the same Friday, I had sent a mail to SiteCore as well. We received a mail back from their Sales and Marketing Coordinator in Denmark (Lila Carlyle) with concrete timeslots for the following Tuesday. I confirmed my slot and also wrote about our integration-heavy requirements. SiteCore called me on the dot. The sales coordinator made the introductions and said that she had senior techie (Frank McDonald) with her to discuss technical points with me right away.
The impression that the SiteCore team gave me on that call was one of thorough professionalism. They had researched my specific integration needs and were ready with answers when I asked questions. The best thing I liked was their honesty in telling us what was doable (with respect to our case) and what wasn't. And they had the deep knowledge to suggest well-known alternatives that would work well with SiteCore for stuff that wasn't in SiteCore's direct scope. They also provided fair details about Development License and Production License.
As a company that develops products and provides product development services to others, we will not have to think twice now. For non-commercial (or low-budget) projects we are going with Umbraco. For all relevant commercial projects, our clear choice will be SiteCore.
Nathan, thanks again for this gem of an article. Keep up the good work!
Fellow decision-makers, here are two unsolicited recommendations :-)
1) All the above products have great features. SiteCore adds human availability to it. This is VERY important, IMHO.
2) http://cmsmatrix.org/ is worth a look for its feature-by-feature comparison of most CMS tools out there.
Best wishes to all of you with your respective projects!
Cheers,
Sriram