Adobe Experience Manager Vs SharePoint The Real Difference

If you are looking for a web-based content management system for your organization, you must have come across the names like Microsoft SharePoint and Adobe Experience Manager (formerly known as Adobe CQ5). Both these systems help in browser-based collaboration, document management and digital asset management. 

In this post, we present to you a crisp comparison of these two systems to help you in choosing the best one suited for your needs.

SharePoint:

SharePoint, a product by Microsoft, is a web-based platform that provides tools for document management, file management, collaboration and social networks which organizations can use for building their intranet and extranet portals. The document sharing is offered through a password protected centralized space. 

SharePoint is being widely used by organizations for creating websites. Earlier organizations used it only for creating intranet portals but with the advanced web content management capabilities, now it is being used for creating external facing websites as well. The websites and digital assets stored on SharePoint can be accessed from any device using the web browser.

Why should you select SharePoint?

• SharePoint’s biggest strength lies in its scalability and the use of all related Microsoft products. It is extremely useful for cross department communication and collaboration in a growing company.
• Easily customizable Enterprise search is another very strong feature of SharePoint.
• SharePoint also offers Business Connectivity services which makes the integration with business apps quick and easy.
• It offers a wide range of readymade functionality – admins as well as the users can choose to stick with an out-of-the-box product or customize it as per the business needs.
• The publishing framework is matured with easily customizable workflows, content approval, versioning, multi-lingual site, etc.
• Access control to specific content is extremely easy with the well-structured hierarchy model in SharePoint.
• It offers great options to control documents and maintains a very good version history.
• The powerful personalization feature of SharePoint allows the end users to design landing pages with information and content based on their choice and preferences.
• SharePoint 2013 has made social computing and collaboration very intuitive. With tools like My Sites and tools such as blogs, wikis and RSS, users can easily capture and share their knowledge and expertise. It encourages collaboration and improves innovation.
• SharePoint's multi-step upgrade process allows organizations to upgrade their servers without any impact for the users.
• SharePoint is an extremely good platform for policy and compliance management.
• Companies have found SharePoint extremely useful for storing and sharing of company policies procedures, company announcements, newsletters and events.

In a nutshell, SharePoint is a very good platform for enterprise content management, collaboration and business applications.

Limitations and Best Practices:

• Limited availability of documentations for complex scenarios and workflows.
• SharePoint is very intuitive for basic tasks but requires training for advanced tasks such as creation and management of subsites or other content on a regular basis.
• Although SharePoint offers limited relational support, it is not very well suited for relational applications.
• It is highly recommended that every organization implementing SharePoint has an appropriate Governance plan for the application in place.
• SharePoint has perceived to be very complex from the administration side.
• It offers limited functionality with browsers other than Internet Explorer.
• Integration with other platforms such as Adobe, SAP is not very easy (although this may not hold true with a client object model interface that is part of SharePoint 2013).

Adobe Experience Manager:

Adobe Experience Manager is a powerful content management system. It offers features such as website and app creation, content management and digital asset management. 

It also offers very powerful marketing campaign content management spreading across various digital marketing channels such as websites, mobile, newsletters, microsites and landing pages. It allows marketers to design and develop targeted marketing campaigns along with real-time analytics and marketing optimization.

Why should you select Adobe Experience Manager?

It offers very useful eCommerce Content Management features which allow seamless integration with any eCommerce system along with syncing of product catalog, product category and detail pages creation, and also shopping cart optimization.

• The social media content management feature allows content integration from community sites and social media networks to the website.
• It allows easy creation of custom online communities, member groups and forums.
• Along with the whole lot of feature integration with other marketing and analytics tools, the marketing collaboration features allow project and workflow management, and in-depth analysis of data such as sentiment, engagement and impact using graphical interface.
• The user interface for authors as well as developers is really intuitive and easy to use.

In a nutshell, Experience Manager is a good platform to use for digital marketing activities and external facing content management with eCommerce.

Limitations and Best Practices:

• The developer documentation is little limited and with small and closed developer community, there is little community support available.
• The stability of the software is not as good as expected from an enterprise tool.
• For customized workflows, the learning curve for users can be steep.
• Purchase, training and certification are quite expensive.
• Integration with third party platforms is not very straight forward.
• Site navigation and drill down to specific site areas can be a bit complicated - depending on the complexity of the site.

Experience Manager requires engineers to set up templates and the creation of templates is not very straightforward.