What are the Criteria for choosing between SiteEdit and the Experience Manager

Question

On a Tridion 2011 SP1 system, you have a choice between implementing SiteEdit 2009 SP3 and the more recent "User Interface update for SDL Tridion 2011 SP1" (also known as Experience Manager). What criteria are important in making this choice, and why?

For example:

1. Ease/cost of implementation
2. Infrastructure
3. License costs
4. Future support
5. Improved functionality

Answer 1

Both SiteEdit 2009 SP3 and Experience Manager are currently supported products. But it's clear that SDL's focus going forward is to further extend Experience Manager and not SiteEdit 2009 anymore.

In simple scenarios SiteEdit 2009 may be a bit easier to implement, due to the fact that Experience Manager has a bigger impact on the Content Delivery system due to the prerequisites for its Session Preview mechanism. When I install Experience Manager without Session Preview however, I find that it takes me no more time than setting up SiteEdit 2009 - a product that I've installed considerably more often.

But Experience Manager should typically cause fewer integration problems, due to the fact that it doesn't use a server-side proxy. A lot of more advanced authentication scenarios should simply work with Experience Manager, where they've proven challenging with SiteEdit 2009.

I think the above covers points 1 through 4 of your question. I'll leave number 5 to others, although I already mentioned "Session Preview" as one of the big new features in Experience Manager.

Answer 2

My thoughts (I'm still calling the new product UI btw):

• UI will only work on 2011 Sp1 Hr1
• SiteEdit is quite old now, UI is the later product... why would you choose to install something that isn't the latest software?

To your points:

1. the cost of installation of 2009 will be a waste when you have to installed UI shortly after :)
2. UI doesn't have the proxy anymore, it's part of the CM machine. setting up sites is much much easier 3/4. No idea on license cost, I'd imagine SE2009 isn't supported by SDL though, so I'd ask SDL.
3. UI is really great, I'm not going to write an essay on the new stuff, but I think the point on your list, that isn't there, should be:

'What do the end users think of both systems?'

This is a user editing tool, infrastructure, implementation of technical details, which I'm sure you can work around for either (should you have to), if you're putting in a tool that will be used by users and you have a choice to make, shouldn't it be the one that they agree works best?

Answer 3

I will add my 2 cents on costs - In a most of my implementations, getting SiteEdit 2009 installed and tested typically has taken less than half a day per environment. Make sure you apply all the hot fixes from SDL Tridion World to get it to work with the latest browsers.

The new UI can optionally use something called 'Session Preview' (to enable fast publishing) which makes use of several Content Delivery technologies such as OData. If you are not already using these in your implementation, then their is likely to be a considerable investment into infrastructure/application design to get it designed/installed/working/tested (I have heard cases where this has taken over a month), which will make the Experience Manager considerably more expensive to implement in the short term. If you don't use the 'Session Preview' feature, (as Frank has already said) the implementation time/cost is similar, but you will not benefit from the new fast publishing features of the newer product.

As for functionality - the two environments look and feel very different. Experience Manager is clearly the direction the products are moving towards and provides a much slicker interface. So if your client is new to SDL Tridion, I would suggest using it, however if they are a long time SDL Tridion customer who has experience with SiteEdit 1.3 or 2009, and you don't plan to take advantage of some of the newer features in the short term, I would be tempted to stay with SE 2009, and make the shift to Experience Manager when they upgrade to SDL Tridion 2013.