Marg Evoq Content

What do you like best?

What do you dislike?

Evoq Content makes it painfully easy for someone with an extremely shallow technical skill set to oversee large corporate web assets. There are also many nice controls around user permissions so for larger organizations whom have a stringent process for making content updates it is also a viable solution.

The localization for multi-lingual / multi-national websites is a nice plug & play way to tailor-fit experiences for many cultures.

There are many go-to plugins available which have been rolled into Evoq Content so that you don't have to piece-meal them during configuration.

It insists on hosting on DNN's Windows Azure, which locks you into a re-occuring cost that previous versions did not require and gives you very limited access & control over your own servers. Great for non-technical individuals but a huge disabling factor if you have ANY internal technical staff.

While Evoq Content lowers some technical infrastructure barriers to entry associated with a .NET web application stack, what you have to give up in terms of being able to customize (or even access the experience, functionality, & code are not worth the cost. If it's exactly what you want - awesome! - otherwise you're going to be fighting up-hill to implement customizations.

As far as extending or customizing any aspect of the Evoq platform it's a fool's errand. There database, file storage structure, & code are obstrificated to an unusable point and there is next to nothing when it comes to documentation.

Evoq Content is setup for performing as a stellar demo to make sales to business teams, establishing re-occuring revenue in the form of hosting & licensing for DNN, & building in the up-selling of software development services to "custom" their product.

If you want to set & forget a large website your business team will mostly be adding static content to - GO FOR IT!

If your technical team owns the website, you have any custom functionality requirements, or want to own what you build - DO NOT BUY!

I've used Evoq Content for a variety of business applications, primarily:

B2B eCommerce

Social Networking

Corporate Multi-National Website

In the corporate multi-national website the localization & multi-site management were huge benefits from DNN - unfortunately I understand that their licensing policies have changed where you cannot use a single install to management websites on multiple root domains which is a huge barrier to entry for any company managing multiple websites.

What do you like best?

What do you dislike?

Other than the fact that it is a CMS, there isn't much to like. It is just better than hand-coding.

I suppose because you can add and edit content using their rich-text window, that's something to like. But when you compare it to other CMSs on the market vs the price, that rich-text entry and edit is just a barrier to entry in this segment.

It is very hard to use, and features and capability are always behind the CMS pack, let alone the user interface. It is hard so say what I dislike the most because I dislike almost all of it.

Don't bother with this software unless you have lots of money, like a hard-to-use interface, features that are behind open-source CMS and other paid CMS applications, and want to pay high prices for developers which are very hard to find.

It is the CMS platform for one of the web sites I manage, inherited from the previous manager.