Why to Separate your CMS and e-Business Sites

Based on the ever changing technical landscape of websites, Aptify recommends to have separate CMS and e-Business sites, instead of embedding the e-business controls directly into the CMS. These sites should still be styled to match and use single-sign-on solutions (SSO) for the best end user experience. 

Previously, e-Business controls were often embedded directly into the CMS. This was done for functionality and styling purposes for the WinForms technology used by e-Business Classic. This is no longer required in modern e-Business, regardless of the frontend used. The embedded approach brought in a number of limitations and concerns that outweigh the benefits, such as:

• It restricted website hosting options significantly. For performance reasons, is recommended that e-Business (e-Business Classic in general, and e-Business SOA in versions 6/7) is co-located with the same host as the database server. If E-Business was embedded into the CMS, this meant the CMS had to be hosted in the same location as Aptify.
  • If the CMS has been separated out, Aptify recommends hosting the CMS website with a third party provider who specializes in hosting and support for that particular CMS product.
• It limited the available CMS options to a .NET CMS such as Sitefinity, SiteCore, Ektron and others. These CMS options may be not the right choice for your organization, based on cost or technology stacks. Popular CMS options such as those employing WordPress or Drupal were not an option. These may often be more cost-effective, have greater support options as well as items like community plug-ins.
• It restricted the options for e-Business frontend technology to those supported by .NET CMS solutions.
  • Newer versions of Sitefinity require .NET Core and no longer support the ASP.NET WebForms technology used by e-Business classic. If the sites are separate, this is no longer a concern. 
  • Modern versions of E-Business can use diverse frontend technologies and libraries, such as the React framework used by the stock e-Business 7 frontend. In addition to React, organizations can optionally choose to develop an e-Business front end using their choice of frameworks, such as Nuxt, VueJS, Blazor or others. If these controls are embedded in the CMS, that requires the CMS to support these technologies.
• Embedding e-Business controls into the CMS meant both e-Business and the CMS shared one website, which complicates support, maintenance, and upgrade paths for both products.
  • If the CMS is down for whatever reason, it would take e-Business down and vice versa.
    • Even something as simple as adding a new .dll for e-Business would force a restart for the entire CMS.
  • Upgrading either e-Business or the CMS would require testing and downtime for both solutions. CMS upgrades may cause dependency conflicts with e-Business. For example, Sitefinity may require a different version of the core Windows Newtonsoft.json.dll than e-Business or vice-versa.

Establishing a separate website for the CMS and e-Business will mitigate all the above issues. It should grant greater flexibility, support, uptime and options to both the e-Business and CMS websites.

There is work involved in separating the two websites out, but once established, maintaining the two separately is not a significant amount of additional work. Any additional work (e,g, maintaining styles on both sites) is outweighed by the reduced work by eliminating the previous limitations and restrictions.