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|  |  | What do you want your Web site to do? Ektron CMS400.NET lets you do whatever you want to do on the Web. CMS400.NET provides features like content & document management, Web site analytics, blogging, forums, navigation tools, and online calendars. Code: ASP.NET v1.1 & VB |
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Overall Rating:
 User
Rated
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Improving with every release 
Written by Nathan Fulwood from Edinburgh, UK (Monday, March 29, 2010)
Writer is with: http://www.realise.com
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Strengths: Marketing-led, very rich feature list, good UI
Weaknesses: Maybe too feature-rich
Details: If you read through these reviews chronologically you'll hopefully get the picture that the product's improving. Ektron is a serious CMS, I suspect some of the gripes are from rushed or badly planned implementations. We've implemented 7-8 times in Corporate and Financial Services environments with good results. The latest version, V8, of this product made great improvements to the user interface, which makes the management of the many features much easier. The comment about E-sync below: we use E-sync to move content between staging and live environments for financial services clients with no issues (and many benefits over timed releases etc.) Our clients would not accept loss of data as a by-product of this. Again, e-sync is something that needs carefully planned at the outset, and Ektron can offer best-practice around this aspect of the project. We're based in the Uk. We get good pre-sales and product support, and input from the user community. All in all, well worth considering for the price point, but either work with a good partner or ensure your developers are familiarised with the product and approach its implementation diligently.
Review Based On: 24 Month(s) of usage |
6 of one half a dozen of the other 
Written by Anonymous User (#1614-333) from UK (Thursday, March 25, 2010)
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Strengths: Excellent Core Functionality
Weaknesses: Weak Web 2.0
Details: The core Ektron product is fundamentally sound and does what it says on the box. XML content and an excellent set of core controls makes for easy and sound core site delivery. With a little care UI functionality can be extended with frameworks such as JQuery and Mootools. However, areas such as blogs have to be developed with care as they can be broken EASILY and the forums are truly diabolical. Ektron would do well to concentrate on thorough testing and reduce the number of releases - stability over badly considered and implemented functionality would be well received by ALL users.
Review Based On: 72 Month(s) of usage |
Good .NET based CMS 
Written by Anonymous User (#1562-337) from UK (Thursday, March 25, 2010)
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Strengths: Ease of use for non techs, Pagebuilder, Supported modules, lots of customers, Widget exchange
Weaknesses: Big in USA not so big in Europe but seem to be fixing this
Details: Looked at a number of .NET based solutions including Sitecore, Episerver, Umbraco - Ektron came out tops for its pagebuilder technology - way ahead of the others. Was worried by the fact the others promoted freeware for forums and other web 2.0 - Ektron offered complete cms and social media apps from one source and supports them (we had the open source headache previously of updating unsupported freeware apps so keen to avoid it this time around). Users loved the drag and drop iGoogle approach to building pages. Their supported widgets are new so library of supported apps is currently limited but growing daily (expect this to save loads of time in future). So far so good ! will update if anything changes.
Review Based On: 6 Month(s) of usage |
Very poor software 
Written by Anonymous User (#1612-152) from Kansas (Friday, January 08, 2010)
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Strengths: NONE and I mean NONE!
Weaknesses: Every bit of this software
Details: First of all the Esync feature does not work period! It causes file deletion that's if it moves the file/content at all. The user interface is pretty but a rose covered road apple is too. URl aliasing sucks, coding sucks. Avoid this software like the plague. Support is horrible, thats if you can reach someone that speaks english. About 99.9% all problems encountered had to figure out ourselves because their support is clueless.
Review Based On: 12 Month(s) of usage |
Great CMS
Written by Anonymous User (#1545-148) from USA (Wednesday, June 10, 2009)
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Strengths: eSync, PageBuilder, Active Directory support, URL Aliasing, social networking and personalization...
Weaknesses: a little slow, limited api's, documentation
Details: It is one of the best CMS. I liked it a lot. Yes they can improve in a few areas of the CMS. But overall it is a great product. I got good customer support. I think ver 7.65 is far superior than most CMS's out there. eSync, PageBuilder utilities was just the right fit for my need. Personalization using customizable widgets was the best feature, and my clients loved it. And icing on top of the cake is the e-Commerce drag and drop server controls.
Review Based On: 6 Month(s) of usage |
Keeps getting worse.
Written by Anonymous User (#1529-225) from PA (Thursday, May 28, 2009)
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Strengths: no comment
Weaknesses: Documentation, API
Details: Ektron CMS400.NET keeps getting worse with each upgrade. Instead of improving the features that are there and fixing the bugs, new features are added that do not work (Esync,api calls), and the bugs keep piling up.
If you just use the out of the box templates and don't plan on customizing or coding for it, it make work for you, but other than that beware. The api will get switched on you, functions that used to work break.
Documentation is lacking in a lot of areas and does not seem to get updated or is incomplete in other areas.
Review Based On: 24 Month(s) of usage |
DMS Stinks, Lousy Support 
Written by Anonymous User (#1214-99) from Washington, USA (Tuesday, January 13, 2009)
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Strengths: WYSIWYG Content Editing
Weaknesses: Upgrades fix some problems, cause more problems
Details: While I agree with the other reviews wholeheartedly, I need to add my two cents' worth. Our company purchased the Ektron product for its integrated DMS, and it STINKS! We have had problem after problem with overwriting Word documents; Ektron support blames Microsoft (while sales insist their product works seamlessly with MS). They promise these issues will be "fixed" with the next "upgrade," but with each install new problems pop up. Don't buy Ektron for its DMS support, you'll be sorry...
Review Based On: 23 Month(s) of usage |
CMS400 - Poor support, slow interface, slow search
Written by Anonymous User (#1747-350) from Portland, OR (Tuesday, July 22, 2008)
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Strengths: Broad features from forums, wiki, dms, and content management
Weaknesses: Security doesn't always work, features often have minimal usage, slow interface, search results slow
Details: Used application for 8 months now from developer standpoint.
- API's are poorly implememnted and sometimes don't even work
- Search results when used with taxonomies are very slow, sometimes taking up to a minute for results to be returned.
- Security does not always work. Applying security (who can view what) in forums has no effect, nor does files placed in the library for download (finally fixed as of 7.53).
- Response time to view pages with several pieces of content is a bit sluggish, but bearable.
- While has features such as forums, they are very minimal in usability and individual feature set.
- CSS implementation is atroshious. Ektron's CSS usage "steps" on other css constantly and is not properly implemented, causing nightmares to work around.
- Support is very poor. Periodically you might get a a rep who can help immediately and is great, but most times plan on spending 45 minutes on hold average to talk with someone and not get issue resolved. When support says "I will research this and call you back", don't plan on hearing from them for weeks to a month. Left several messages/complaints with managers and never a call back.
On positive note:
- With each release they are improving their api's and bug fixes. In time they might have an acceptable application (assuming support ever gets their act together)
Review Based On: 8 Month(s) of usage |
Product/company has problems
Written by Anonymous User (#1627-116) from Charlotte, NC (Thursday, February 22, 2007)
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Strengths: .Net based, WSYWIG interface
Weaknesses: Relies on ActiveX control to do edits, slow/shoddy support, small company
Details: We implemented this product and had some pretty major problems.
The upgrade processes don't always go very smooth. Quality control doesn't seem to be very strong. Support is pretty slow to get resolutions to even major bugs (e.g. menus don't work with IE sometimes).
There isn't much of an escalation path because the company is so small and frequently it takes weeks to get a call back from anyone.
The product will be better once the company matures a lot.
Review Based On: 4 Month(s) of usage |
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