Sitefinity

After years of maintaining and old static web site that was not fit for mobile we upgraded to a CMS.

We looked at the free open source products, but they lacked commercial support.

We needed a product that had most of the CMS aspects built-in, and was easy to configure.

Sitefinity hit a sweet spot for us, it is very cost effective and was easy to stand up in the Azure cloud. The cloud support was so important, as we no longer wanted to have the servers on premise. The fact that it was built on .NET gave us a fast track because we had a lot of experience with IIS and .NET. Sitefinity is a very mature product with a long support history. If you Google Sitefinity you will see what I mean. Never under estimate the need for support. Sitefinity has quite a few business partners to help deploy and maintain your site. Our initial site design and build was done by a web content creator company. They had never worked with the product; because Sitefinity is built with web standards they were able to build our site with their current skills. We have been running Sitefinity for 4 years and we have experience zero downtime. There are many modules built in to support common web site features like documents libraries, comments, form data collection, security, administration, etc..

Some areas that we feel could be improved are around upgrades and deployment. Sitefinity is backed by a SQL database that has to be upgraded for each new version. When you have a build pipeline that includes QA sites this can be tricky. In the end you have to maintain separate databases and manage the connection strings for each environment. The other downside is having to manage a .NET solution and be able to build and deploy. It takes a very experienced .NET developer to handle this. However you have total control, but at a cost of complexity. The other downside is it is .NET (full framework), it can feel bloated and very large and slow to work with. As most .NET developers know, .aspx pages are very bad at cold start. You will need to warm the site to make it work at acceptable speeds.

Make sure you have the expertise with .NET or have a business partner lined up.

The biggest bank for the buck is handing the day to day ownership and maintenance of our web site, the business takes full ownership. I cannot stress this enough, IT should not own what marketing or customer services knows best. The business can move at their speed.

it is very autonomous for business users.

not too much, its a good tool. We probably arent using the features so i guess more demos to clients.

keep to the updated version

it is our main cms

The possibility to giver our clients independence to generate their own content and all the marketing features that help us to generate better engagement.

Learning curve for programmers was a bit slow at the beginning.

Personalized interaction with end users. Time to market for the solutions and features, we offer a more robust solution

Developing custom functionality is very easy once you understand the workflow

Upgrading sites could be better, it’s always been painful to do ourselves

Get your developers trained

Custom customer dashboards, insurance claims, and more

The possibility to manage different languages and multisites

I think that the start up process is too slow

As I told before it easy to use and implement

Integrated authentication with external providers

Making quick updates by marketing easier

Bugs with the product. Fortunately, Progress listens to our needs and fixes asap

Keep version up-to-date.

Some smaller updates can be one faster

Sitefinity is easy to use to build sophisticated pages even with just the out of box widgets.

Customizing and connecting related widgets is a little more complex than expected.

Interview current users to get a feel for any tips, tricks or traps they have run into. The more you know the better your implementation will be.

We are a higher education institution trying to drive students leads to matriculated students. We have reduced our bounce rate more than anticipated.

Sitefinity is easy to use and learn. It is very expanadable and customizable. The ease of creating translations for multiple languages very quickly is very nice

I started on version 5.4 and just recently upgraded to 11.2. Over the last 5-6 years I have had 4 upgrades and outside of 1 of them, they all have been quite painful. They have not been as seamless as I thought Somme of them would be.

Use MVC and stay away from Web Forms or Hybrid mode. I believe Web Forms and Hybrid modes makes things more confusing.

Sitefinity has helped deliver content to the public users in an efficient way across the 12 languages we have for our multi-lingual.

Sitefinity allows myself as a developer to take the requirements the business gives me and translate them into what the end user expects, without much customization from myself. Sitefinity comes with a ton of out of the box features, but it also allows you to customize and extend widgets to meet your needs.

There are not really any downsides of Sitefinity. The only challenge we have faced is keeping up with the continous release of upgrades.

It’s very easy to use and if you have any difficulties the support is great.

We migrated from SharePoint to Sitefinity and solved a lot of the issues the business presented us when searching for a new platform. This includes a more intuitive WYSIWYG, more robust customization, and ease of use.

Throughout the upgrades, we have seen the benefits with easy integration with our custom authentication solution.

The ease of use of SItefinity is compelling, and the ability to quickly train content contributors made this a win for my company.

We bought the enterprise license to get SiteSync. I am a little disappointed in it. It is very buggy and flakes out often. The interface in v11.2 bombs out a lot, even though the tasks actually complete.

We moved from a static website to more of a transactional, marketing focused site with SItefinity. Our focus was on locations - the primary reason people visit our site. We tied a request for quote form to each location. We now average $7M a month in sales leads from the website, creating an easy and obvious ROI.