When your organisation is searching for a new platform to deliver digital experiences, you need to carefully consider a vast selection of features that will fit into your existing architecture and skill set. Of course, what your organisation requires differs depending on size and industry. However, based on 20 years of experience and inputs from our customers and partners, we have included the most important topics and common features you should consider. Happy reading!
What features do your project require? Make sure you do not forget anything with our handy checklist.
Multi-site
Multiple users
Complex roles and permissions
Now for the more technical stuff, the architectural requirements themselves.
Investments
How well does the potential experience platform fit in with the existing technologies of your organisation—essentially your heavy investments? Remember, not everything has to be thrown out on account of simply being old. Great and agile systems are still exactly that, regardless of age.
In any case, do research on how well the digital experience platform fit with your current technology, including, but not limited to:
On premises vs. managed service
The question of hosting your digital experience platform on premises or by a managed service in e.g. the cloud is important due to concerns of security, maintenance, backups, scaling, and other issues from the world of DevOps
On premise
On premise keeps more control in the hands of your organisation, but can be more costly due to internal DevOps teams and hardware resources.
Managed service
A managed service offers no need for a deep understanding of backups, the basics of security, etc., with all of these being handled by DevOps professionals.
Use cases
While headless and hybrid CMS have been mentioned already, it is useful to envision a use case to really know exactly what solution your organisation needs.
Classic
A classic CMS is primarily meant for building and maintaining websites.
Headless
A headless CMS is primarily meant for apps.
Hybrid
A hybrid CMS is meant for both websites and apps.
Performance
The performance of your digital experiences depend on a variety of factors, but which the underlying experience platform can contribute to enhance:
CDN
Does the vendor support a content delivery network model?
Local
Or is only local delivery possible with the setup?
Data storage
Is the solution based on NoSQL or a relational database? Relational databases might be a bottleneck or require more skills for management and tuning.
Resilience
How robust is the solution and how does it handle unexpected events? As usual, it boils down to what your organisation needs, and it is traditionally more expensive with higher demands. However, the cloud can solve many of these problems.
The quality of your systems and their maintenance depend on the quality of your skill-sets.
As a final note, we strongly recommend that your organisation issues a proof of concept (PoC). Conducting a PoC is superior to all the marketing gimmicks and demos in the world. In a PoC, you get a working product in an effort to solve the special requirements of your organisation, and you can really get your hands dirty and try before you buy.
Every vendor can perform a great demo, and thus it might not be the best way to learn about a given product. Issuing a PoC, however, enables you to learn as much as possible about the solution and how it can fulfil your requirements.