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Home > Community > Technical Blogs > John West Sitecore Blog > Sitecore Differentiating Factors Blog Series: Pre-Integration
Pre-integration of the ASP.NET web Content Management System (CMS) with the Online Marketing Suite (OMS) and the Email Campaign Manager (ECM) differentiates Sitecore from competing web CMS solutions. This blog post about pre-integration of the application server, the analytics engine, and email management with the CMS is part of a series about Sitecore Differentiating Factors.
When I started working with Sitecore, I considered pre-integration of the CMS with the application server to be an important differentiating factor. At that time, Sitecore was one of very few ASP.NET CMS products available. Most web CMS products used scripting languages or custom integrations with application servers, code to generate code, and other relatively complex solutions. As someone who dislikes release management, especially involving hacking a system to implement customizations, I felt that these products often replaced a content management problem with a CMS implementation and/or code management problem. With Sitecore, the IIS web server integrates the ASP.NET application server, and you can think of Sitecore as an extension of ASP.NET, providing engineers with a single environment, technology, and API for both managing Web sites and implementing and extending the CMS itself. Now, with varying levels of complexity, more web CMS products use ASP.NET. I think few provide the CMS and managed Web sites as a single development platform, with a shared API, data storage, and even custom codebase. I still honestly think Sitecore provides the best environment for Web developers.
With the OMS and the ECM, in a new way, pre-integration is again a differentiating factor for Sitecore. Together, these products integrate analytics and email management into the CMS to provide information about clients, split and multivariate testing, campaign and goal tracking, audience profiling and segment behavior monitoring, click-path analysis, personalization, most popular content, traffic sources, search terms, and other information within a single CMS user interface. It seems that the market in general is moving towards this level of integration, putting Sitecore on the leading edge of the curve. Various competitors might offer similar features, but some appear stitched together from multiple vendors and services rather than architected together as a single platform.
Next in the Sitecore Differentiating Factors blog series: The Security Model.
Tags: Architecture, Future of WCM, Web Analytics
John has over ten years of experience in the CMS industry. His areas of focus include the Sitecore community, Web industry research, Sitecore technical documentation, and product management.
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