Oracle Endeca Experience Manager (XM) is a powerful tool for businesses to craft custom experiences for their users by dynamically promoting product and content. Products neatly fall into Endeca’s wheelhouse; however, content is traditionally the domain of powerful Content Management Systems (CMS). While XM has some CMS-light capabilities and can be further extended using custom Flex editors (don’t do it), a CMS is necessary for companies that want full styling capabilities and flexibility as well as those that have a need for more formal content management tools. When a business is replatforming with both XM and a CMS, it is often challenging to determine where one tool begins and another ends especially without existing processes to help guide the decision.

The processes necessary for business users to create and manage content are strongly impacted by the degree to which Endeca Experience Manager and the Content Management System “owns” the content. In other words, where the dividing line of responsibility is drawn between the two tools influences both workflow and capabilities. In this post, we will take a closer look at the two approaches at opposite ends of the spectrum.

The CMS-centric approach

The example banner outlined in orange is created entirely in your CMS. To use this in a promotion, a business user will log into XM, navigate to the landing page and add a new instance of a Banner cartridge. The user sets the trigger (based on time, personalization, etc.) Then the user must enter the URL of the banner (the address in the CMS), save changes and preview.

Advantages:

Creating the banner completely in the CMS is precisely what the tool is designed for. There is significantly flexibility in what can be done with the content in the banner window.
The asset is reusable and versioned
Creative work load is more evenly distributed; less upfront development time.

Disadvantages:

The two links (see details, see all fitness) must be pasted in which means the content creator will need to use the Endeca-driven preview app to navigate to the appropriate URL, copy and then paste into the CMS banner code.
The XM team needs to wait for the creative team to create the asset before it can be used.
Product price is not dynamic–or not easily made dynamic.

Disadvantage mitigation:

Move some of the responsibility close to Endeca. For example, the two links can be left blank in the CMS. The XM cartridge editor can be modified to have two Link Selectors for setting the URLs. This allows the user to pop up the Endeca Mini-Browser to navigate to the appropriate URL and save that selection: no cutting and pasting required.

Endeca Experience Manager-centric approach

The example banner outlined in orange was assembled in Endeca using an image from the CMS. The process for this approach is similar to begin with: the business user will long into XM, navigate to the landing page and add a new instance of a Banner container cartridge. Then, the user adds a banner cartridge to the right of the container (red square) and configures it (paste URL to image, optionally set click action.) Next, the user adds a custom Record Spotlight cartridge (green square) to the left side of the container. Using the Endeca mini-browser, the user selects the product to be featured. Because this cartridge is designed specifically for the view shown above, the cartridge will automatically populate the product name and short description as well as making a real-time call to the e-Commerce system to get the latest price, so those values do not need to be entered in the cartridge editor. Depending on how the cartridge is designed, the user may have the option of setting the background color by typing in an RGB value. Finally, if the user wants a “See all” link for all items in this product’s category, they can do so by using the mini-browser to select the category.

Advantages:

The business user is closer to the content creation process. This helps turnaround time.
There is less creative work for the creative team, also helping turnaround time.
It is easier for static and Endeca links to be managed by the business user.
The business has more complete control over the “experience:” within the tight restrictions of the predefined templates and cartridges, the business can put any cartridge in any section where it “fits” and has can easily change static and dynamic links at any time.

Disadvantages:

There is less creative potential.
The Endeca cartridges have heavy upfront development effort including the process of trying to anticipate the various ways business will need to use the cartridges.
Some creative elements will be more challenging: as an example, the little arrow from the right cartridge to the left may be challenging to add as there are two entirely separate cartridges rather than one cohesive web fragment.

Disadvantage mitigation:

In essence, most disadvantages can be mitigated by building more and more functionality into the cartridge editors (in other words, duplicating capabilities inherent to the tools you are replacing.) The notable downside of this approach is heavy investment cost: upfront design and development, a requirement for specialized dev resources (XM uses Flex for any advanced cartridge editors) and significant rework potential when upgrading the XM product.

Summary

Customers that prefer more flexibility in style and content presentation often choose the more CMS-based approach, giving up some control of the business team and increasing turnaround time for new content.

Customers that prefer more flexibility in page content and behavior, giving more control of content (experience) management to the business at some cost to style/presentation flexibility and decreasing turnaround time for new content and promotions.

A third approach is to embrace both methods by focusing the CMS-heavy cartridges where desired (e.g. the Homepage) and using the fully XM-based cartridges in areas where business users want the the most immediate control (e.g. Category landing page.)

Finally, there are a few companies (Nike, Sony) that have essentially chosen both approaches by staffing fairly large and tightly knit teams of designers, developers, marketers and business owners that operate full-time and are dedicated to producing highly styled content with many options for the XM users to assemble pages quickly.