5 Reasons Why Your Digital Experience Platform Must Be Agile and Flexible

A digital experience platform (DXP) is a software that consistently manages, delivers, and optimizes the digital touchpoints of your customer journey.

In a world with everything from websites and apps to APIs, wearables, and IoT, it is perfectly reasonable to expect that the platform behind it all should be agile and flexible to meet today’s and tomorrow’s challenges.

Here are five reasons why your digital platform must be agile and flexible, and how Enonic might be the preferred solution.

1. Agile: Building Solutions Faster

Time to market is as important as ever, especially today when bedroom startups compete with established enterprises. New technologies enable more features and services to be rendered in smarter, cheaper, and more effective ways than before. Just think about the startups Uber and Airnbnb versus the taxi and hotel industries.

Being able to quickly adapt to shifting market trends is tremendously important, for big and small, old and new, established, and up and coming. To empower your coworkers to make magic, your organization should make use of a platform that is user friendly for both editors and developers. Such a platform should support modern technologies to enable speedy development.

The Enonic platform offers modern technologies that developers love: Server side JavaScript, universal coding principles, MVC architecture, the developer’s favorite templating framework, and front-end agnosticism. Enonic features the essential components, so you don't need to spend time on integrating functions like search engine, authentication, NoSQL database, and CMS.

Video: A Short Introduction to Enonic »

2. Flexible: Covering a Range of Needs

An organization often has several tasks to solve in their digital offerings. In the past, most used the web and digital experiences to showcase a product. Here the website essentially functioned as an online brochure. Today, user needs and tasks are far more sophisticated.

Today organizations use DXPs for customer retention, marketing, self service, and brand protection. To deliver these functions, you need different types of components. Make sure that your chosen platform is flexible and includes the features, or can be easily integrated with third party services.

Further, a digital platform should support both content and site editing. A platform without customization options for content editors is a poor platform indeed. It should also be able to let you model complex content types for any need, like testimonials, person profiles, services, and interest rates, in addition to the more familiar ones like blog posts, images, and landing pages.

Enonic covers a broad range of needs by being a content platform with powerful APIs. For an Enonic developer it's just as natural to build a web application as it is to build a CMS driven website. There is more functionality in the platform than your average CMS, including the mentioned search, NoSQL, and authentication framework.

Read also: Enonic: the Ultimate Composable CMS »

3. Agile: Continuous Deployment

An essential part of being agile is to move and turn gracefully, adapting to changing circumstances like a cheetah on the prowl. In the digital realm this involves releasing often and making small steps, instead of undertaking large projects with complex and time consuming deployments.

Avoid long term, large projects which take months and months to test, and that delivers services slowly and perhaps too late to cater to customer needs. Focus on building systems for automatizing deployment.

The principle of agile tells you to prioritize functionality over something flashy and overly complex. It’s useful to remind yourself of the four agile values:

1. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
2. Working software over comprehensive documentation
3. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
4. Responding to change over following a plan

The agility of Enonic is demonstrated through e.g. the use of APIs for deploying applications for exporting and importing data. APIs can help any project to be deployed continuously, and they work together with automation tools like Jenkins.

Don’t miss: 12 Ways Enonic Can Help You Save Time on Daily Tasks »

4. Flexible: Empowering the Content Editor

Most content editors like to work seamlessly and to feel empowered by their CMS. They like the flexibility of tuning small features on a given site or app to suit a purpose, all while retaining brand compliance. When content editors meet a wall of restrictions and need to contact developers to solve even seemingly simple tasks, they become annoyed.

A great digital platform features an interface to configure the solution within a secure, but still flexible framework, without the need to be technical or have an extensive knowledge of programming. There’s no good reason to involve developers for everything all the time in a DXP.

Make sure that your chosen platform Includes flexible content architecture, landing page editors, and ready made integrations. On the Enonic platform, editors can also configuring parts, reuse fragments, download apps from Enonic Market, and use flexible content types, like recipes, products, blogs, and persons, etc.

5. Agile: Fully Managed Cloud

Smooth deployment and operations are as much a part of agile web development today as frameworks for building solutions faster and agile principles. And one of the current methods for achieving such a desired state is through a managed cloud.

This is a fully managed cloud platform to run digital experiences. In a cloud, content management and platform services are offered in one package, allowing you to create, scale, and deliver content and digital experiences to any channel.

Such a cloud solution frees your time and resources, letting you focus on core business and to build great applications instead of being bogged down in operations. A fully managed cloud solution lets security, scaling, backups, and upgrades be handled by experts, who can bolster your team with more knowledge of the given solution than your inhouse DevOps.

Enonic offers its own Cloud to ensure agile success to our customers. It is a content hub and platform services in one. The former includes headless CMS and composable CMS, while the latter includes data storage, runtime, and developer tools.

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Your digital platform needs to be flexible and agile in order for your organization to stay relevant and in business not just today and tomorrow, but also in the coming decades. You might prefer a Formula 1 race car from the 1970s in terms of classic design, powerful engine sounds, and general awesomeness, but the venerable vehicle just won’t compete with today’s faster and more agile F1s.

The Enonic platform is precisely a modern Formula 1 race car in the world of digital experiences. It will get you results fast, it will be easy to maintain, and it will ensure you success in the foreseeable future.

First published 6 May 2019, updated 13 January 2024.