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The AMS landscape is evolving rapidly. With the ever-changing nature of technology, older comments can sometimes provide a skewed view to the person seeking feedback. Archived reviews are more than 60 months old, and aren't counted towards the average five star ratings or percent recommended.

Survivor 2014: ESX xCatalyst (we did it!)

Customer Service
1
Does your AMS vendor respond to your organization's requests in a timely and thorough way?
Ease of Use
2
Reliability
0
Customization
1
Primary Job Function: 
Other
Number of Years Using the AMS: 
1-3 years
We launched ESX - xCatalyst just under a month ago. I would say, without hesitation, that the xCatalyst platform is extremely flexible, and the company is excellent to work with. They are very fair, and very good at what they do. At the same time, I would have to say that they are primarily engineers... meaning... they give you what you ask for, and not always what makes the most sense. Case in point: We had a specific feature that they implemented for us. In our old custom solution, it worked slick and everyone was happy. In our new system, this one feature was simply terrible (due to constraints within their system), and it created a major roadblock for a subset of our members. Yes, there was a workaround, but even the user blessed with the greatest intuition would be hard-pressed to figure it out without a lot of instruction. It wasn't a problem with their system - it was a problem with what we were asking their system to do, and until we fully understood (and saw) how this worked inside their system, we didn't realize how frustrating it actually was. Yes, they gave us what we asked for - but on this specific item, it simply didn't make sense to do it that way. They have been very quick to work with us, and again, extremely fair, and we're getting a new solution deployed either today or tomorrow that will be much friendlier and should remove the roadblocks. They are generally very fast to help resolve issues, very good to work with, and they have a good product overall. The only real problem we have with this powerful system is that the learning curve, overall, is fairly steep. In order to solve problems, and be all things to all customers, we've found that certain things are scattered about. There is an Association (database) side, and a Site Admin (Web) side. Some web stuff is on the Association side, and until you figure out the maze, you're not really sure where you should go to do certain things. Some things are hard coded (they have to make changes), some things are user editable. Some things are super easy, some things are uber-complicated. We imported our old website, and quickly discovered that the import was fairly useless. That was more because of major changes we were going to make than any fault of ESX. If you're going to change your site, I'd suggest bringing in somebody that knows HTML and design, let them do the work, and just skip the import process. I don't think we ended up using any (at least not much) of what was imported because it just didn't fit. Again - no fault of ESX, just that we were changing enough that a clean 'start from scratch' would have worked better. Also, setting up new pages (with some complexity) initially takes some doing. The WYSIWYG in ESX can be a little flaky. Example: If you use relative URL's (which you should as much as possible, in most cases) and copy and paste w/in their WYSIWYG, it converts them to full URLs. This can create issues on the site if half the content points to stage when you go live. Once you know the issues, there are easy workarounds, but we had a few surprises along the way that made parts of the process a little frustrating, but still do-able. Overall, the team is great - and again - very fair. Be sure you write really good requirements before handing everything other. Don't just send them a conceptual idea of what you want, but also send them exactly how you expect it to work. We could have done a LOT better in that area and saved headaches and rework. Would I do it again? Absolutely - especially now that I know what to look for!