Multi Site without customization: not a myth, but reality

We recently participated in a tender for a school group in Belgium (Flanders) for the development of a Multi Site solution. The contract has now been awarded to Plate, which for us is another great proof that we are making a difference for our clients with our unique Multi Site CMS. In this blog, I share four insights from the tender and how we won it.

1. Plug & play multisite

The tender calls for "developing a Multi Site Platform," but in essence Plate is that platform. This means that nothing needs to be developed because the prerequisites for Multi Site are already in place. For the client, this means significant cost savings of tens of percent over the competition. So no customized Multi Site Platform, but standardization based on our years of expertise.

Plate offers generic Multi Site functionalities that you can use immediately. These include:

• Multi Site Management: manage and maintain all websites from a central dashboard for the organization, quickly and easily set up new websites based on the central theme;
• Multi Content: share linked or copied pages between websites within your multisite with a few clicks.

See an overview of all our unique Multi Site features.

2. Continuous development

Because we develop generic features within a specific domain like Multi Site, all of our customers benefit from fixes and upgrades we periodically make to the platform. Think recently about the launch of Multi Content, but also the somewhat smaller Image Cropping feature that was launched in April. Without any downtime, updates are done automatically and you can use the features right away.

No bespoke development with additional costly maintenance, but rather to benefit from targeted features that we proactively develop in collaboration with our customers and partners from a long-term vision of autonomous content and website management.

3. Domain Experts

Multi Site is our specialty, we know exactly what is involved. Together with our partners, we help clients with a specific and proven Multi Site implementation approach to deliver projects successfully. We devise smart CMS configurations, making styling influenceable at the smallest level, for example; useful for organizations looking for individuality of components within the uniform framework. We also provide reliable documentation within a comprehensive learning environment.

4. SaaS vs open source

The choice of Plate is a conscious choice for a SaaS platform. Clients do not always have a clear understanding of the advantages and disadvantages of choosing SaaS or open source.

In the tender case in question, the competing parties offered a multisite solution within an open source CMS. The advantage for the client was that with open source, all functional requirements could be fully met because the functionalities were custom developed.

For Plate's SaaS platform, requirements can be partially met for certain functionalities, which means that the client must conform to the platform's frameworks.

You could see this as a disadvantage of Plate. However, this depends entirely on how much impact the missing requirements have on the overall solution. In this tender, for example, there was a need for a specific restriction for a user role that Plate cannot meet within the standard capabilities of access management. This did not prove unacceptable to the client.

Wondering what a SaaS platform means for the security of your Multi Site? Visit our page on cyber security.

Conclusion

For this tender, we don't need to develop custom Multi Site functionality first, but start setting up and implementing the Multi Site solution for the client immediately after the design phase. This significantly accelerates the turnaround time for the client and results in substantial savings for both the short and long term because no maintenance is required for specific functionalities. These are in fact generically maintained and receive regular updates and extensions.

So Plate was the party with the best price in this tender. Because of the already available Multi Site functionalities in Plate, we scored well on quality, despite a number of deviations within the set functional framework.

Want to know what Plate can do for your organization to efficiently manage and maintain websites and content? Schedule a demo or contact johannes@getplate.com for a consultation.