FirstSpirit (a Rezolve Ai solution) CMS
Headless APIs have streamlined large-scale content migration but still need bulk export options
What is our primary use case?
My main use case for Crownpeak Digital Experience Management is the migration from Crownpeak to Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), where the entire content is in Crownpeak and there is an API exposed for each page or resource. We invoke those APIs from AEM to create the pages in AEM.
In terms of challenges regarding my use case and the migration process, there were many pages in Crownpeak, and each page has a unique URL. The challenge was that when we ran this in batch mode, we had to make a unique call every time, and there is no process in Crownpeak that can give the response in JSON for more than one resource. This resulted in having to make a call to Crownpeak for each individual page.
To manage this limitation during the migration, we maintained a spreadsheet where we listed more than 500 URLs and ran those through our input spreadsheet. Our scripting logic read each URL in a loop, making the API endpoint calls to Crownpeak.
How has it helped my organization?
Crownpeak Digital Experience Management positively impacts my organization by providing all content in the form of API, so we do not have to manually review how the pages are created on Crownpeak Digital Experience Management platform. Instead, we rely on the API response that contains all the necessary information, which smoothly creates the pages in AEM.
I have noticed measurable outcomes, such as faster migration time due to the lightweight JSON response. Crownpeak Digital Experience Management API response is quite fast, and our logic to parse the JSON and create the pages in AEM is also fast, making it a highly efficient approach to migrate content from Crownpeak Digital Experience Management to AEM.
What is most valuable?
In my opinion, the best feature Crownpeak Digital Experience Management offers is its headless approach, which allows the JSON response to be consumed by any platform, making it excellent for any front-end application, including React or Angular applications, which can consume this data exported by Crownpeak Digital Experience Management in the form of API.
This headless capability benefits my projects because any consumer platform using any kind of front-end application, whether it is plain HTML, CSS, or JavaScript, or any front-end framework such as React, can make calls to Crownpeak Digital Experience Management API and render it. This leads to no tight coupling between the API response and the consumer platform, resulting in a flexible approach.
Regarding features that stand out apart from the headless approach and flexibility, Crownpeak Digital Experience Management provides the entire content, including page title, metadata properties, descriptions, and tags, ensuring a comprehensive API response that creates a full page without leaving any areas where we need to do manual work.
What needs improvement?
Crownpeak Digital Experience Management can be improved by providing APIs that group content rather than giving the response for one page at a time. For example, having all article content exposed in one API, as well as news and blog content, would help reduce time-consuming individual API calls.
Regarding needed improvements, I think that reading the JSON can be quite complex. If Crownpeak Digital Experience Management could provide a CSV format where all content is exported, it would help content authors review or make changes before creating pages in AEM, especially since they are not very proficient in reading JSON files.
For how long have I used the solution?
What other advice do I have?
Crownpeak Digital Experience Management is a good platform if you want to leverage the headless approach, centralizing content management while allowing various platforms to consume that content from a centralized place where you can easily update and modify it.
I gave Crownpeak Digital Experience Management a rating of seven out of ten because of a couple of challenges. The API is a one-to-one resource with one API endpoint, and Crownpeak Digital Experience Management could have grouped multiple resources into one API response. Additionally, the JSON format is quite complex and not easy for our content team to update; exporting data in CSV for multiple pages would help significantly.
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Role-based templates have transformed how our teams manage large, content-rich websites
What is our primary use case?
I am not currently using Crownpeak Digital Experience Management, but I did use it in my previous role for approximately 20 years.
My main use case for Crownpeak Digital Experience Management during those 20 years was website updates.
I handled real-time updates and on-demand updates that were traffic alerts that had to be posted immediately with Crownpeak Digital Experience Management.
What is most valuable?
The best features Crownpeak Digital Experience Management offers are templates that we used, and they were very easy to maintain, enabling me to make an update that would cascade throughout the rest of the website quickly.
When I update those templates in one place, the change takes effect throughout the site and it self-deploys.
Crownpeak Digital Experience Management has positively impacted my organization because it was very easy to use, it was easy to scale, and we could always add people to it with access and permissions to just the areas where they were going to maintain that area of the website, which provided many nice benefits.
What is nice about Crownpeak Digital Experience Management is that I can give people access to just the areas that they are able to maintain, so they can update their own content and I don't have to update everything for them, which saves time and effort in comparison to many content management systems that I have seen.
What needs improvement?
I cannot remember specifically how Crownpeak Digital Experience Management can be improved, but I think there were some excellent engineers working on those issues. The interface of Crownpeak Digital Experience Management was getting a little outdated, but it was holding up, and that was the main thing.
For how long have I used the solution?
I am not using it anymore, but I did use it in my previous role for approximately 20 years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Crownpeak Digital Experience Management is stable.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
In terms of scalability, adding new users to Crownpeak Digital Experience Management was very scalable.
How are customer service and support?
The customer support for Crownpeak Digital Experience Management is excellent and the best. I would rate the customer support of Crownpeak Digital Experience Management a 10 on a scale of 1 to 10.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Before implementing Crownpeak Digital Experience Management, we had some type of homegrown solution cobbled together, and we needed something that was dedicated to serious content management.
What was our ROI?
Crownpeak Digital Experience Management allows so many users to access it, saving us a significant amount of time because they can post their own content.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The pricing, setup cost, and licensing of Crownpeak Digital Experience Management were maintained by somebody else at the overarching media agency.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Before choosing Crownpeak Digital Experience Management, I do not remember evaluating other options.
What other advice do I have?
My advice to others looking into using Crownpeak Digital Experience Management would be that it is very useful if you have a really large website or websites, as you can always add multiple sites to it and set up permissions for people to contribute their content for just those sites or even just folders within those sites. It was a good product, and I would rate this review a 9 overall.
Platform has empowered customized, accessible multi-site experiences and supports versatile rollouts
What is our primary use case?
The usual use cases for Crownpeak Digital Experience Management that I work with mostly include enterprise websites, multi-site, and international roll-out, as well as personalization and accessibility.
What is most valuable?
I have found complete customization and very good integration with other systems on the periphery to be the most valuable and useful features of Crownpeak Digital Experience Management.
Crownpeak Digital Experience Management's headless CMS architecture is extremely versatile, and we can really do anything with it, with no limitations.
The compliance tools of Crownpeak Digital Experience Management include accessibility compliance tools and SEO features, and I would say the accessibility is pretty good. It is also completely customizable to the individual website, helping to configure out-of-the-box automatic checks adjusted to the specific programming on your website, going beyond what you might expect from a browser extension.
What needs improvement?
Customer support is very responsive, but migration could use more work, although they are actually doing a lot with that right now to automate website migration. Migration is a new area, and of course, it could use more work; I would rate it maybe an eight or nine, knowing that there is always room for improvement.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been working with Crownpeak Digital Experience Management for over five years.
How are customer service and support?
Whenever I had questions for customer support, they always answered very swiftly, sometimes multiple times per day, and were very interested in helping us resolve issues.
What other advice do I have?
I work with Crownpeak Digital Experience Management FirstSpirit SM CMS, and it is basically a DQM tool also.
Regarding Crownpeak Digital Experience Management's visual workflow tools, I know they have those, but I do not use them myself, so I cannot say much about that one.
Multi-site management is extremely important for any website that has multiple languages or different pages for different countries. In my experience, built-in AB testing is always very important for the final success of any website if you want to prove that certain changes to the pages are worth the investment, and I actually wish more customers would use it.