The Real Story on censhare's OCP

Are you curious about how RSG reviews Omnichannel Content Platforms platforms in our OCP vendor evaluation research stream?

Well, let me show you with a closer look at our evaluation of the censhare' offering as an OCP. 

censhare offers a sophisticated, object-oriented platform that boasts several additional capabilities for web content management, digital asset management, and product information management. The system is unusually complex, but that complexity goes hand in hand with versatility; censhare is highly adaptable. The platform is increasingly adept at multichannel marketing, content production, and distribution—and it trumps Adobe’s AEM with Creative Suite / Cloud integration. This makes it suitable for many marketing- and sales-oriented use cases.

What holds censhare back is historically weak, meandering leadership, some staff turnover, poor community support, and institutional turbulence more generally. The platform also has significant technical debt to pay down.

Nevertheless the platform is imaginative in scope and broad in services. You’ll want to test if censhare the company is the right long-term partner for your enterprise.

censhare Strengths

  • Strong capabilities for catalog and print management
  • Several out-of-the-box integrations with external services and tools such InDesign
  • Object-oriented system built on graph database makes censhare potentially very useful for multi-channel use cases
  • Strong system administration and management capabilities with fine-grained access controls and permissions
  • One of a few vendors employing semantic web frameworks to construct asset and content relationships within the DAM
  • Product is “well finished:” censhare users report that upgrades run smoothly and bugs are rare

censhare Weaknesses

  • The administrative tool and the respective functionality are all in older (API-less) layer
  • Depends on Java RMI protocol, which is not easy to integrate
  • May require multiple client applications, including a desktop-based thick client.
  • The web client falls behind the thick client in terms of functionality, particularly in creative scenarios
  • Vendor leadership (now replaced) was faddish almost to the point of distraction; witness acquisitions of runtime marketing technology (chatbots and beacons)
  • For a forward-looking company, you’ll find a surprising degree of technical debt here, including a proprietary NoSQL repository
  • Despite a US office, resources in North America are thin; thus, censhare relies on third-party integrators in the US, which some customers believe are not up to snuff

Consider Your Options

censhare is just one of 10 OCP vendors that RSG covers.

Download the Full Evaluation of censhare

Within the full OCP report and decision tools, RSG also digs into which OCP vendors address certain business scenarios better than others. As always, some products will fit better — or worse — for different use cases.  Find out which OCP vendors best match your needs.

Other Omnichannel Content Platform posts