Delivering End-to-End Optimizely DXP in Higher Education

image by blomkvist

When a UK University partnered with my team to reimagine their brand portal, the ambition wasn’t just to refresh a website, it was to lay the foundations of a full digital experience transformation, powered by Optimizely.

This project marked a milestone for both the University and our agency. It was the only full Optimizely Digital Experience Platform (DXP) delivery we started this year, and the first time our team has implemented in the higher education space, The higher level aims of this program focused on bringing together CMS, DAM (via CMP), OptiID, and foundational elements of ODP and Content Recommendations. As Program Lead, I had the privilege of overseeing delivery across all work streams and helping the UK University unlock the strategic value of their platform investment.

The Brand Portal was only the first public facing person portion of the program delivery.

The Challenge: Fragmentation, Friction, and Missed Opportunity

The previous brand portal was a collection of pages on their primary domain, and hosted the details of the brand they were moving away from. It lacked a clear governance model and didn’t reflect the breadth of the university’s identity - across five faculties, dozens of departments, and hundreds of communications touch points. There was also decent evidence in our evaluations that it was not very SEO friendly.

We needed to create:

• An easily searchable, brand-consistent experience

• Where relevant, gated-content to protect assets for authorised users only

• A single source of truth for assets, guidelines, and templates

• Training and support for the Brand and Content team at the University so they could make the most of their new platform.

• A future-proof platform to support broader digital transformation across the University's full digital estate

image by Quang Nguyen

The Solution: A Modular, Multi-Product Optimizely Build

This project brought together multiple Optimizely products in a tightly coordinated solution:

Optimizely Product	How We Used It
CMS 12	Delivered a clean, fast, and fully accessible site with modular components built for flexibility
DAM (via CMP)	Centralised brand assets and created a structured metadata model for findability and control, capitalising on the customiseable taxonomy and auto-tagging for assets
CMP Workflows	Planned for Phase 2 to manage brand content approvals and collaborative content planning
OptiID	Introduced to enable secure content access for future restricted tools like tone of voice guides and templates, supporting access to over 20,000 authorised users
ODP & Content Recommendations	Purchased as part of the University'’s roadmap to deliver personalised content and improve internal search over time to be rolled out as part of Phase 2

It’s worth noting this was our agency’s first multi-product Optimizely DXP build for Higher Education, and the client became our flagship example of how to use Optimizely Graph to search DAM (CMP) content via the CMS.

Delivery in Practice

We ran a focused five-sprint Agile build following a detailed discovery phase that involved stakeholder workshops, brand audits, and technical planning. My role was to ensure smooth cross-functional delivery for our multiple agency disciples and the the various departments at the University, as well as the product SMA's at Optimizely. Notably the sometimes competing requirements of the IT teams necessary Governance and the Marketing teams required speed. We effectively manage the operational readiness checklist, and supported the University's Digital Content & Brand team with CMS and DAM training ahead of go-live.

This wasn’t just a build, it was a foundational shift. We supported governance models, coached the delivery approach, championed the Portfolio leads strategic advocacy, and created a scalable structure for future content and asset growth.

What We Learned

• Start with governance. The best platform in the world won't help without clear roles, ownership, and processes.

• DAM adoption is a change management project. We helped the client's teams not only upload assets, but structure them with metadata, usage rights, and versioning strategies.

• Product enablement matters. Helping teams use what they’ve licensed is just as valuable as launching it.

What’s Next?

This University's journey with Optimizely is just beginning. The next phases include:

• Replatforming the main university site to Optimizely CMS

• Introducing personalisation with ODP and Content Recommendations

• Expanding DAM governance and migrating all digital assets to the central source of truth away from the current distributed collections.

• CMP workflows to manage brand guideline updates and template changes

This project has set the bar for what strategic Optimizely implementation can look like, not just a website launch, but a platform-first mindset shift.

Why It Matters

For anyone delivering in the Optimizely ecosystem: it’s not just about technical builds. It’s about understanding how each tool (CMS, CMP, DAM, ODP) can support real operational change.

This client gave us a brilliant opportunity to prove what’s possible when platform implementation is aligned with strategic outcomes, or helps expand ambitions because they couldn't envision what was possible until they had access to the platform, with a partner focused on enablement. And we’re just getting started.