Marcom Portal Erfahrungen

The software is quite complex. Needed to get through learning curve before seeing positive results.

Kommentare: To date, our internal users are over the moon with excitement with what they are able to accomplish by using this software. It's very satisfying for us as administrators to hear such positive feedback. In turn, we as designers will not have as many one-off projects to work on which will free up our pipeline for more creative and time consuming jobs. This is a huge plus in our marketing department. It will help us to better meet the needs and demands of our internal customers.

Vorteile:

I like the ability to have a company branded portal that is visually appealing and user friendly for our internal customers. The ease of adding folders to this portal is great and allows for more templates to be available in greater categories for our users.

Nachteile:

I am not thrilled with how complex the template preparation is. Using FusionPro is easy, but then after composing, all the work that is needed on Marcom is quite extensive before being able to see results. And, of course, the more complex your template, the longer it will take. You really cannot take much time off from working on your templates, either. If you do, then you run the risk of forgetting what valuable information you have learned along the way. So, the key is to stay on top of it in order to stay fresh.

Review of MarcomCentral

Kommentare: Overall, our five-year relationship with MarcomCentral has been positive. While we've hit our roadblocks, the team always arises to the challenge. The software helped us create an environment where local markets can autonomously create marketing/event materials, while achieving brand consistency by locking down the branded design elements and incorporating an approval workflow. The platform, however, is not particularly strong with copy fitting, and the rich text editor does not entirely fill the design gap, so most of our more complex brochures have to be custom designed. Over the last 5 years the software has significantly progressed to incorporate our enhancement suggestions and keep up with industry trends, though at times we've experience long turnaround times for work and requests. Though, the new support ticketing system gives greater transparency into the process.

Vorteile:

MarcomCentral allows us to maintain brand integrity while giving autonomy of marketing material creation to local marketing admins.

Nachteile:

Currently we are experiencing a lot of difficulty migrating from the old to new portal. It does not feel like a thorough QA testing phase was completed with a variety of product types because our products keep turning up new issues. Several integral functionalities were not considered for the new portal, so in some instances, we are taking two steps back in efficiency as a result.

Our system was improperly implemented by Marcom and we are struggling everyday because of it.

Vorteile:

The only thing I can say that I like about this software right now is the portal looks nice for our end users.

Nachteile:

We were not taught best practices and have struggled to set up and run our system because of this. Our orders are assigned different order numbers which confuses our vendor and our end users. The digital downloads take quite a while to actually download and we were told this is likely because we have too many customized pieces. We purchased this software because of their promise of ability and functionality to have customized pieces. We were told that we could have resizable ads on the ad for our end users but what we weren't told is that their system simply stretches and distorts the artwork we provide in order to accommodate different ad sizes. It is not the smart resizing we had hoped for (and were sold on).

Great Software. Less than great support

Kommentare: MarcomCentral has an incredible product they offer that is very complex. Some of these complexities go a little beyond what the basic user may understand, which can seem to make an easy task or simple template become tedious. While customization can be made with JavaScript knowledge, MarcomCentral very much limits the customizations possible, even with JavaScript. However, MarcomCentral has one of the better variable data Admin tools available as it offers a wide variety of field types, options and the ability to easily make changes.

Vorteile:

MarcomCentral makes it easy to create basic static product and variable products for users to create. Many settings are self explanatory and the Support Team at MarcomCentral controls a majority of the main settings before implementation.

Nachteile:

MarcomCentral Support controls a lot of the main settings. The support team is almost impossible to reach with emergencies and do not support JavaScript in templates, however they do provide a wizard to help create rules they do not support. Outside of MarcomCentral, there is a JavaScript related forum, but articles are very difficult to filter through and it seems the employees that help out with this do not get paid to do so, so it is completed in off hours.

MarcomCentral review for Capterra

Kommentare: We've had a wonderful experience from set-up, to launch, to support. We've never felt like we were on our own during any stage.

Vorteile:

This software has truly revolutionized how our sales department can access, customize, order and distribute our marketing material. Although it does still happen, having MarcomCentral has really cut back on the one-off requests that our team used to have to drop everything to address. The system is easy to use and maintain. And, when in doubt regarding anything, we know we have a wonderful support team that we can access at any time.

Nachteile:

The start up was a bit daunting. The MarcomCentral team was always upfront about the start-up and the amount of time it would/could take. We were ready to run when we actually had to slow down to a crawl until we got all the back end databases set-up. The team did make all of this much easier and stayed with us through every step until we got way more comfortable and tried everything on our own.

Not as expected

Kommentare: We would love to fully integrate MarcomCentral into our company strategy in a variety of ways and use it across the organization in a variety of ways as the hub for all our collateral and promotional items. #rd party integration with vendors has been difficult, and content creation has been difficult and expensive, so it's been much more challenging than anticipated to actually roll out.

Vorteile:

The UX for end users is good. Once the software is setup, it's fairly easy to navigate and use. Has options to expand offerings.

Nachteile:

The setup has been a nightmare and not what was advertised in the sales process. Getting new content on the site takes much longer than anticipated and requires a lot of back and forth and in most cases professional services are required to implement, with a lot of oversight from our team.

Davey Review

Kommentare: We see the value of a storefront and have certainly appreciated this as our initial foray into a storefront. We'd love to see a stronger, clearer and more responsive service experience from [SENSITIVE CONTENT HIDDEN] when things go wrong. They aren't available during the holidays and their service team isn't familiar enough with individual storefronts to accurately comment on them. We appreciate that the organization is launching new versions of the portal but find it challenging that the technology team isn't willing to have conversations about timelines regarding features that are important to our users. To us, the organization seems to have strict silos which impede their ability to deliver a quality service experience.

Vorteile:

We like that it has the ability for single sign on for our users.

Nachteile:

We find the functionality clunky (heavy reliance on flash) and find it challenging that the organization isn't in a position to help us adjust features based on user feedback.

Front end experience is good, back end experience is clunky

Kommentare: I am the second person from Trimble Geospatial to work with the portal. There are about 4 Trimble divisions using MCC as individual portals. I started with the portal just over a year ago and had to come up to speed with it pretty quickly. I have managed to add a lot of content for our clients. In order to do this though I have experienced a lot of teething problems with the admin templates/limitations/customer service at times. I totally appreciate the customer service issues have been addressed now. I do struggle with the complete process as it is quite involved and we seem to push the limitations of the software quite a bit. Especially as I am now in the process of creating language versions and need the portal to support chinese/cyrillic fonts...as a start! There are two outstanding requests I have at the moment which I feel are quite important for flexibility. 1. I attended the MCC conference in San Diego, and met Douglas Cogan. Lovely guy...and we got chatting about the limitations of the graphics boxes, how it would be great if we could have angled ones instead of just a rectangle. I followed that when I got back to the office and sent him an email in March...have not heard from him since then. 2. Print file impositions. We have many documents that are 4-page / 8-page / 16-page or more, and currently the configurations only allow for single page bleed and crop. We think this is a very important "Fix" rather than an "Enhancement" of your portal. It is extremely important that a client can download a document...take it to his local vendor...and it is already in printer spread layout...for ease of printing, deadlines, and also cost for them. Unfortunately the portal as it is now...they can only download single pages with bleed and crops. So you can imagine if they have an 8 or 16 page brochure to take to a print vendor it would mean quite a cost for them to manipulate to printers spreads. Apart from that...I actually enjoy seeing the end results when the materials go live and I have had really good feedback from our clients that they now have marketing literature that they can customize and they are using the site :) regards
Jodie

Marcom Review

Kommentare: I think there is lot that I don't know and while our support team has helped us be successful, their support is more reactive than proactive in assisting me. I would like them to tell me what could be done up front rather than waiting for me to ask since I'm so new to the software.

Vorteile:

I think there is a lot of potential for the software but I'm still trying to clean up the products and understand how to set up the various product types.

Nachteile:

The admin portal is slow. I'm still learning how to create efficiencies of the portal but it appears that there are several things that have to be done manually and can't be done in bulk operations. The KnowledgeCenter articles are written for someone who is very familiar with the software rather than novice users (which I consider myself to be).

Very user friendly and helpful for organization.

Vorteile:

Makes organization simple and ability to track and share information is a plus. Web tools for learning the product are vast and helpful.

Nachteile:

Switching between 2 Smartsheets sometimes takes some time and you have to find your place again when you switch back and forth between sheets.

Marcom

Kommentare: Our directors use this as a great tool for purchasing marketing materials from us

Vorteile:

Ease of use and functionality. Our directors use this as a great tool for purchasing marketing materials from us

Nachteile:

We haven't had much for issues with this program, but on the occasion that there has been a questions, I've found when leaving a VM with the company I never get a return call.

Doesn't always deliver

Kommentare: It's cumbersome, choppy, not intuitive and clunky. There are too many steps to creat and save something. The developers promise one thing but when it comes out it doesn't work. Example: Social media. Integrations don't align with current vendor systems so they become worthless to us.

Vorteile:

I don't really like this software. It is not intuitive, there are to many steps to create and publish a product.

Nachteile:

It's cumbersome, choppy, not intuitive and clunky. There are too many steps to creat and save something. The developers promise one thing but when it comes out it doesn't work. Example: Social media. Integrations don't align with current vendor systems so they become worthless to us.

Review

Vorteile:

The team of people at Marcom are professional and nice to work with.

Nachteile:

There are a lot of steps to add products and it is not easy to navigate.

a good DAM

Kommentare: Overall, it has been such a pleasure during the RFP process and working with [SENSITIVE CONTENT HIDDEN]. He was very helpful in explaining how Marcom can support our needs, gave us log in demo to share with our colleagues and was extremely patient with our different team members and several demos he performed.
We are now in the kickoff/implementation phase. And the team is working diligently in getting us set up and ready for our launch in February. [SENSITIVE CONTENT HIDDEN] has been very nice and a pleasure to work with.

Vorteile:

Honestly, it's too soon for a review. But throughout the sales process, I found [SENSITIVE CONTENT HIDDEN] to be very patient and understanding of our needs during the RFP process. He walked us through several demos and worked with us on helping us with our needs for a DAM for our company.

Nachteile:

We are in the very early stages of kick off and implementation, I can't provide feedback on this as of today.

Since partnering with MarcomCentral in 2013, we have seen tremendous growth on our portal.

Vorteile:

Turnkey, easy, personalization, back-end link/SSO, reporting, versions, print-on-demand and flexibility.

Nachteile:

Repetitive process steps for upload on the admin side. Navigation between products on the admin side.

Responsive, willing to find resources to seek out solutions or workarounds.

Vorteile:

Flexibility, native use of javascript - can apply to most use case situations. Like the plug in format to avoid having to use a proprietary layout software.

Nachteile:

Admin tools can be a bit clumsy to navigate. Would appreciate a sleeker more robust ui with at a glance features and ability to make quick cascading changes.

Very happy with the product.

Vorteile:

I love the ability to easily modify and customize the UI to accommodate customer requests and make the forms more intuitive for our users.

Nachteile:

I would like to see added functionality to include the ability to bulk upload from a single form, incorporate the use of a Marcom dashboard/UI with forms to create or add to existing XDF, TPA's , Images, etc.

Working with the Marcom Team has been exceptional.

Vorteile:

The ability to offer on-demand/self-service branded, personalized, compliance-approved sales support materials to our sales professional across our Member Banks has been invaluable and we continue to expand and leverage our usage of the system.

Nachteile:

No significant cons to report. The product definition process can be a bit time consuming, but the bulk upload tools help with efficiency.

Overall, it was good, with a few hiccups along the way.

Kommentare: The allowed much more flexibility for our users to customize their assets.

Vorteile:

The ease of use for the end users. Software support by customer service agent was very helpful and always made herself available to my team when we needed her.

Nachteile:

The admin side is much more technical than anticipated. Working with FusionPro seemed to be quite difficult for our designer. The training for use of the Admin site could probably be expanded to give a more indepth understanding of how to manage the app, especially considering the cost of training.

Disappointing that it's still not mobile friendly which makes this online tool very archaic

Vorteile:

Easy for end customers to use, easy to connect to our Content Management System, easy to change look and feel for most pages.

Nachteile:

Not mobile friendly, not easy to set up customizable assets, often the site doesn't display loaded assets properly.

Robust system that makes creating a DAM easy and user-friendly

Vorteile:

I like that the MarCom Central software offers the capability to create customizable collateral for our distribution team.

Nachteile:

My biggest complaint is that MarCom Central does have restrictions to integrating with some of our business platforms. We also ran into some issues the log-in setup, as MarCom does not allow changes or customization for login.

Good stuff, with great potential!

Kommentare: Pros:
- Can integrate multiple vendors, and multiple types of vendors
- Works for a variety of types of assets
- Has allowed us to make new templates, and new types of assets, available to various teams within our organization in a way not possible before
- Front-end site is pretty straight forward and easy for users to understand Cons:
- Much of the software is still somewhat "out of the box" - i.e., customization options are few and there is little flexibility
- Back-end system requires a fair amount of training, which is often only available in extensive documents or pre-recorded webinars. For less tech-savvy users, the back end system can be tough to navigate. To recap, the software has been a great asset to us so far; I continue to look forward to future enhancements!

Love the system but the admin can be a little clunky

Vorteile:

Very customizable and a lot of things you can accomplish in Marcom Central. They are always willing to help us work out any need we come up with and make it work in the system.

Nachteile:

The admin side can be very clunky. With several portals, it's hard to keep up with updates. Often they get applied to one portal but not another.

Great product for our sales team

Kommentare: MarCom Central has helped our marketing team cut down on the number of custom projects to support our sales staff and focus on larger campaign opportunities. The system for the users is very intuitive and our team took it quite quickly. On the backend for the administrator, it take a bit of getting used to but for simple products, upload is easy. The account management and support team are a great asset when you are working on a more complex product set.

Marcom for DaVita's Marketing on Demand

Kommentare: I think the features and functionality are good, but could expand on ease of use, and reporting from the back end. The value for money gets a lower rating because there were a lot of inconsistencies in hours quotes for us that caused a lot of stress and tension that could have been avoided with a set plan in advanced.