Hi all. I have been looking for more information on the pros and cons of HCMS vs Excel for content. I looked through this article, and found this info…
“With Excel, each individual device in the field has its own copy of the Excel spreadsheet plus any associated media, so updates typically mean using Composer to make changes, republishing the experience, then redeploying the experience. It’s a lot more work! The one advantage vs. Headless CMS is an Excel-based experience can be offline 100% of the time. With Headless CMS, occasional network connectivity is required.”
Can anyone elaborate on these 2 options and how you make the choice? Also, what does “occasional network connectivity is required” mean exactly?
With the headless CMS you can enable your colleagues, partners, or customers to upload, edit, and review content for your experiences via a web-based interface accessible in any browser on any OS. They won’t need to understand how you built your experience with Composer or how you are using this content to fulfill the needs of your project.
Occasional network connectivity is required to be able to update the local copy of the HCMS base on the Player device.
If you use Excel, you can be offline. You can also edit/modify the Excel sheet from within the experience. This is not currently possible with a HCMS base.
Here are some help articles and Intuiface Academy courses on Excel and the Headless CMS:
That is great Ryan. Thank you for the detailed response.
So if you had a program at a trade show using the HCMS, would it need internet to run? Or just if you wanted to update content?
If I had no need to update the excel sheet via the experience, would there be any advantage to using excel vs HCMS?
Once your XP has been running once on the device that will run at the trade show, and the H-CMS base has had the time to completely sync, all the content from your H-CMS base is locally cached on the device and you won’t need internet to run. This is provided your Player has an active licence.
The only advantage of using an Excel file I can think of is if that device will never have an internet connection to have the chance to run that first H-CMS base sync. Using an Excel file within an XP, you can just copy the whole XP with the Excel content on a USB stick and paste it on that device at the show (Provided it’s a Windows device). You will still need a tiny bit of internet connection to activate your Player license.
What I’ll say is since we released the H-CMS, I barely use Excel anymore as a data source, since I have all the same features with the H-CMS (filtering / sorting / local caching) plus the easier way for me to collaborate with whoever is going to fill in / upload the content for me.
All the XPs we use on our own booths at tradeshow are built using the H-CMS.
We do have some limitations on “devices other than Windows”, which include iPads, but nothing that concerns the H-CMS on an iPad. See the list here (Search “HCMS” in the page) as well as our H-CMS limitations list here.
Thanks! One last question…
I have an XP that involves text with bullets and ® (hopefully superscripted). It looks like that doesn’t seem to work that well with H-CMS. Is it better to use excel for that?
You will most likely get the same results with Excel or the H-CMS.
The easiest solution is to copy & paste your bullet point / symbols from your text source directly in the content text field of the H-CMS.
The rendering in Intuiface Player will vary depending on the font you are using.
See example below.
Remember you can also import an excel file content into your H-CMS base, see details here.
If you want more control over the rendering of the text, you can also input some HTML in the H-CMS text field, then use an HTML Frame to render it in Composer instead of a Text Asset. See example below.
I’m curious about the Rich Text property that says “coming soon.” Would that handle things like bullets and superscript without needing to use html? Also, any clues on when that is coming?
