High Score Labs News   •   Aug 19, 2022

Sitecore Experience Manager (XM) is a powerful and intuitive content management system that simplifies the creation, delivery and management satisfying experiences across multiple channels and devices. An alternative to the comprehensive Sitecore Experience Platform (XP), Experience Manager lets you run XP without the Sitecore Experience Database (xDB) enabled or purchasing xDB licenses.

If you asked any marketer or website owner which attributes of a management system are most important to them, you’d hear words like headless, intuitive, easy-to-use, flexible, cloud-based, cross-channel, and integration. Sitecore Experience Manager ticks all of these boxes.

Headless

Sitecore has always preferred going the headless route which injects a great degree of flexibility into their systems. You can create, edit and seamlessly deliver content in XM across multiple devices and channels, be it desktop, mobile, AR, and IoT devices. This allows for more planning to go into your contents so you can deliver meaningful digital experiences across all your channels.

Flexible

Another aspect of Sitecore’s flexibility that’s evident in XM is in hosting options. Sitecore offers on-premises hosting, hybrid cloud hosting, or managed cloud hosting. Support for deployment on Microsoft Azure PaaS is also provided. These hosting options are robust enough that you can choose your security, upgrades, and development infrastructure.

Intuitive

XM combines Sitecore’s drag-and-drop form creation with intuitive WYSIWYG in-page editing interface so you can edit text, links, logos, and component-specific personalization right on the page and in real time.

Usability

Building web pages is easier and more intuitive than ever with Sitecore Experience Manager. It requires less coding and simplifies page architecture. Time to market is also reduced with the out-of-the-box reusable and templated UX layouts and pre-built components offered. XM also makes use of a “data tree” structure with folders as containers with a parent/child relationship to structure your site for easy navigation.

Cross-Channel and Multisite

Sitecore Experience Manager is truly cross-channel with support for all channels your customers use to access your website. It automatically detects and optimizes content for visitors’ devices. XM also allows you to manage multiple websites concurrently enabling you to publish content across multiple websites.

Multi Language

XM allows you to present content in the right language for your audience regardless of which channel they’re accessing your website from. All of this is done in one system, without the need to write separate pieces for different languages.

Integration

XM is very extensible, and offers support for a wide variety of user-friendly integrations using connectors. It also supports an even wider assortment of systems, plugins, extensions, and modules for ecommerce, social media, marketing automation, etc.

Unfortunately, Sitecore Experience Manager does not possess many of its robust predecessor’s (Sitecore Experience Platform) functionalities such as AB and multivariate testing, analytics, and marketing automation; still, its robust assortment of integration options can help you work around the limitations. If having all these features in one place is important to you, you may explore the fuller option.

Nevertheless, Sitecore Experience Manager is a killer of a CMS, keeping in close competition with the likes of Adobe Experience Manager and Optimizely Web Experimentation. It has generally positive reviews, with an 8.2 out of 10 stars on TrustRadius. So, you can be sure you’re getting good value for your money.

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