Episerver is a CMS that works with the Microsoft ASP.NET technology stack. Episerver is created by a Scandinavian software development company that provides commercial enterprise-level software to power your website or intranet. Episerver offers a range of products from web content management, powerful content search and an e-commerce product. In today's post, I'll go over some of the more compelling reasons why you should consider Episerver to power your website.
Episerver CMS – An Introduction
Episerver CMS is a popular commercial content management system to help businesses deliver their online presence. First released in 1997 by then-Electro Stockholm AB, the Episerver platform has been growing in popularity ever since. This growth can be seen, as Episerver is now ranked in the Gartner Web content management leaders report within the elite quadrant of suppliers.
Who Is Episerver Targeted Towards?
Episerver is targeted towards rapidly growing and expanding businesses that are looking for a great product to enable them to grow their web presence. If you choose Episerver, you will be using the same technology to power your website as big enterprises such as Marie Curie, Kelloggs, Virgin, and Redbull.
Episerver is a commercial product and requires a license to run it. Episerver can be used to power any website, however, with licensing starting from a minimum of 5 figures and scaling from there, it's not something the average Joe will be able to afford to run a hobby site. If you want to build a website and have no budget then I suggest you check out Umbraco CMS, a free alternative here.
Benefits Of Using Episerver
Episerver is a great product. Below lists some reasons why you should think about using it:
Flexibility: Episerver CMS and its suite of products are highly regarded by the CMS community because of its flexibility, scalability, and accessibility to the widest range of businesses and sectors. Ease of customization is an area in which Episerver CMS particularly excels. This is especially true compared to other products on the market.
Every aspect of Episerver CMS is fully customizable and extendable. Pretty much every aspect of the CMS can be tailored and customized to individual business needs. Whatever you need it to do... it will!
Ease Of Upgrading: Episerver has recently moved over to a more flexible installation process. Updates to the CMS are made on a fortnightly basis. Upgrades can be installed using packages released by Episerver. This makes the process much quicker. Keeping up-to-date with the latest version as pain-free and budget-friendly as possible. Other CMS products can take months of development effort to upgrade. These time-consuming upgrade costs are often overlooked when a business is deciding on which CMS to choose.
Scalability: Episerver hosting can come in a number of flavours to fit in with your organization's IT structure. Episerver provides cloud services, in the form of Episervers own DXP service. You can also self-host your Episerver website using cloud hosting or traditional on-prem hosting if you wish. As Episerver works on any Windows infrastructure, Episerver CMS is highly scalable and can allow organizations to grow and expand.
Community: Episerver CMS has a great community of support for marketers, developers, and content editors. From someone who works with a number of CMS solutions, Episerver's community is regarded as one of the best. When your development team runs into issues, instead of wasting days and weeks trying to talk with the support team, in most instances you will find a friendly person to help in the forums.
This is another hidden benefit often overlooked by companies evaluating which CMS system to use. Some CMS vendor support networks can take days to get a good reply. These delays can end up costing thousands of pounds a year!
Episerver Technical Overview
Let’s have a look at Episervers benefits from a technical perspective:
SQL Server compatible
Simple API for technical specialists to pick-up
Developed with a test-first methodology to ensure your deployments work as expected
All aspects of the pipeline are extendable
Quick product release cycle, so bugs are usually fixed a lot quicker than other products
Workflow support
e-Commerce Support
Powerful site search add-on available
Easy upgrade path with latest versions
Easy to write SOLID code with
How to decide whether Episerver is the best choice for your company
As you can probably tell from my review, I'm a big fan of Episerver and in most scenarios, I would recommend it for most SME sized companies and above. As every business has its own unique set of needs and problems, the criteria you use to decide which CMS works for you will be unique. Building a website for your company is a lot like building a custom car as no two websites are ever the same. I have worked on over a hundred CMS projects throughout my career. I can say companies that use Episerver always regard it with high esteem.
If you are contemplating Episerver for your business, I would recommend asking the following questions:
What budget do you have to work with?
When is your deadline?
Is support important to you? If your website goes down, will you need someone who is available 24/7 to help you?
Are you happy using a commercial product that gets updated regularly, compared to an open-source product?
Do you need help designing and implementing your website, or will you do the work in-house?
If you want to do the work in-house, will you need to recruit people with new skills and do you understand the costs involved?
Is your development team fluent with .NET (C#, ASP.NET)
Can your IT team support the Microsoft technology stack
Do you want to work in the cloud?
Will you need to migrate content?
How easy is the product to upgrade?
After considering these questions, if you think Episerver would be a good fit for your company and you want someone to discuss with further, then feel free to get in contact and I can help point you in the right direction. You can get in contact with me from using the form on my 'Contact Me' page, here. Happy Coding 🤘
