A Quick Summary
Many sites may be good at what they do, whether it be displaying information or listing products for sale, but only a few sites provide the ability to encourage the growth of a customer community. One key to growing a loyal community of returning customers is to develop a site which focuses on the end game – the presentation of a special a customer or end user experience. The goals that define what that customer experience will look like may vary from company to company, but it could include things like: building trust, convenience, research information, a shopping experience, or motivation for further action. Whatever the goals and whomever your audience, a robust and flexible Content Management System is instrumental to creating lasting value and a growing customer community. On top of goals surrounding the end user experience, site administrators need to have a simple interface to modify content so that the site content avoids the danger of stagnancy. Any effort to remove obstacles in what, at times, can be an arduous process of revising content and updating digital assets in the midst of a sea of code will be welcome relief for those given the mantle of website content management. While it is true that a well-designed web Content Management System makes it easier to add and update information on your website, a really great web CMS goes beyond this to help make the customer experience special – an experience that provides differentiation and customer loyalty. The most successful brands, most revered institutions, and the service organizations with passionate clients are all ones which have discovered ways to make their customers’ experiences stand out from the rest.
Product History
Enabling compelling web experiences on your website is what the ECF G5 CMS does. It accelerates the value proposition that people like you in your key role can contribute to your organization. This includes higher top line revenues, automation of expensive manual processes, improved time to market, superior customer service, or constant, clear communication.
Internally, we have been developing our CMS for the past two years and have successfully launched a number of sites on it already. So even though this will be our first public release, it is already a well-tested, mature product and will be backed by a number of case studies from a number of reputable enterprise-class customers.
So What’s New?
The CMS will completely control the look and feel of the front-end website. All links, menus, virtual pages, URL rewriting, and more are now controlled by the CMS. The CMS allows for extensibility through the use of customer CMS Controls. It has some inherent similarities with other products like SharePoint and DotNetNuke, but there is one major difference: the architecture was designed with maximum flexibility in mind. For example, the ECF G5 CMS Controls do not have to be inherited from any specific class. There is no need to implement any specific interfaces or any specific methods. All you need is a User Control and a .config file to act as a CMS Control and it automatically appears in the CMS interactive toolbar. This allows for easy integration of web and widget-like controls into the ECF.
Another feature of the CMS is the new menu paradigm. The menu in our previous version was driven by the structure of the catalog, which is intuitive but has its limitations. The new CMS provides a way to create a completely independent menu structure that can link to various pages. You can even create an unlimited number of menus (top, bottom, left and so on). Each menu can also have a different structure based on language. That allows sites to have completely separate menu structures for different sites while sharing some or all of the content.
Moreover, you can now create a complete folder structure with pages at the site level. The site no longer depends on menus or catalogs. The folder acts as a container for different pages while a page acts as a container for different controls. We’ll save some of the more technical details for later.
One of the most important features of any CMS system is an approval process. You might not want anyone to post content to the live site without approval. This is accomplished through a new workflow and page state concept, both of which are customizable. You can, for instance, define the “Draft > Review > Live” type of workflow for all your pages. Regular users may only be given the ability to change the state of a page from Draft to Review while an administrator may be the one who can approve and publish those changes to the live site. Lastly, the new CMS system tracks all different versions and revisions for all documents and pages and allows rollback to previous versions at any time.
All of this content is managed via an admin interface with built-in content publishing tools using a web browser. Online WYSIWYG browser-based editing and in-context editing with drag-and-drop controls from the front-end view of the actual public web page allow IT site administrators or members of the product and marketing team to edit the web content much more efficiently. And the Design and Preview modes with an underlying, customizable workflow process allow companies the kind of control that is often necessary when multiple departments are involved with the flow of information.
High Level Feature List:
· Support for multiple sites, catalogs, languages and currencies
· Manage multiple branded sites through single interface
· Content Publishing Tools (editing via browser, in-context editing, preview mode)
· Multiple views for content editing: Public View, Design View, Management View
· Design View allows you to drag and drop controls and edit the site from the public website on the fly
· Personalization
· Wizard driven interfaces
· Flexible and Customizable Navigation
· Extensible and dynamic menu structuring – allows for different menu structures while sharing some or all of the content
· Windows for Workflow approval process
· Version management and archiving
· Template based content creation
· Rich metadata management
· Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and support for search friendly vanity URLs
· Any type of design, brand, navigation, & theme through flexible master pages
· Multiple templates included with a distribution
· Supports any type of additional content pages (virtual pages)
Posted
Feb 26 2008, 11:38 AM
by
RayChoi