9 Essentials Your Enterprise CMS Should Deliver in 2019
With a new year comes a fresh look at what’s working for your content management system and what’s not. For enterprise businesses, any changes to a digital infrastructure can impact the entire company, especially changing their Content Management System (CMS).
Last year, companies witnessed a distinctive shift in the role Enterprise CMS platforms play. Rather than being a one-stop shop for all features a company would need, effective CMS platforms became the glue holding enterprise martech stacks together.
In 2019, any successful Enterprise CMS platform should give more than an updated look. It has to be a future-proofed investment in a company’s marketing strategy. Here are 9 forward-thinking essentials your Enterprise CMS should deliver this year:
1.Cloud-first integration
If 2018 was the year of the cloud, then 2019 is the year the cloud infiltrates every part of an organization’s digital presence. The Cloud helps organizations trade CAPEX for OPEX, breaking the 3-5 year cycle of hardware replacement and eliminating the responsibility over managing infrastructure. There are fewer limits, and enterprises pay as they go only for what they need.
How a CMS would interact with a Cloud hosting solution is the foundation of the rest of a
website’s success. A CMS should ideally work hand-in-hand with any Cloud hosting solution. That intimate connection gives a team more control over server performance and scaling.
Cloud resources within the CMS gives companies the power to grow capacity for their websites instantly, quickly react to spikes in traffic, or autoscale whenever needed. A Cloud system baked into a CMS lets your team manage these capabilities in a variety of areas, with fewer pieces to juggle.
What does the future look like? In a word: choice. Some CMS platforms are now being deployed with containers – allowing you to launch a CMS in minutes and start building your website or application with continuous deployment and no long-term contracts.
2. Solid security
Last year saw some of the biggest online presences get slammed with several massive security breaches. From Marriott to Twitter, major enterprise names struggled to keep user information secure. It resulted in damaged brand trust, PR nightmares, and (many times) a drop in profit.
No one can afford to have security compromised, but especially not enterprise organizations.
More information online means more data for hackers to crack. Popular open source platforms like WordPress are notorious for having the most frequently compromised websites of any CMS. They often need extra third-party plugins to stave off attacks, and it’s only a matter of time before those are cracked. An enterprise CMS should uphold the integrity of your data. While any website can be hacked, some platforms are more secure than others. Do your research to ensure the source code is sound, that testing and patching are part of the support plan. Consider platforms that warranty their code and services. And ask what protocols are in place in the event of a hack, from 24/7/365 critical care to SLAs.
Your enterprise organization needs features native to the CMS. However, there’s also something critical about having a CMS that seamlessly connects your organization to
technologies your team is already using—Marketo, MailChimp, Tableau, analytics
tracking and more.
Today’s digital experience landscape includes thousands of technologies. Understanding which ones to pick is hard enough; but how do you get them to work together? The CMS is a cornerstone of your digital stack, and it should help orchestrate data across different channels. That means seamlessly integrating with the most advanced applications on the planet like Salesforce CRM, Microsoft Dynamics ERP, even exotic platforms like Humanetics to manage blood donation data. The possibilities are endless – and your CMS should be the hub for it all.
When considering the API capabilities of a CMS, find out if it has documented out-of-the-box integrations. Are they committing their APIs to libraries like Swagger UI? How easy is it to build your own integrations in the future?
4. Compliance
The Internet might feel like the Wild West, but there are a bevy of regulations that every website should follow. From ADA Accessibility, WCAG 2.0 compliance, GDPR, HIPPA, and more, your new CMS should take important governance and compliance rules into consideration.
Arguably one of the most important regulatory requirements of any website is accessibility. Every web experience should deliver “digital equality” to its visitors, regardless of their disability. Unfortunately, the realm of ADA compliance remains largely misunderstood. Accessibility isn't a “set it and forget it” endeavor; it requires both achieving and vigilantly maintaining the standards.
As the Department of Justice issues more legal suits against public and private institutions, it's critical for all organizations to monitor their ADA posture and develop the best practices for managing compliance. Even Beyonce recently fell victim to an ADA compliance publicity nightmare.
A good CMS should leverage a structured data foundation, enabling pages to be easily scanned by screen readers. Additionally, it should integrate seamlessly with best-of-breed platforms like SiteImprove to scan for violations on a regular basis.
It's no longer enough to be “mobile responsive.” With increasingly more users browsing
websites on their smartphones and tablets, you must adopt a true “mobile first” strategy –
where the mobile experience is thoughtfully designed from day one. Likewise, you need a
CMS that understands this shift, and provides a foundation for building, testing and
launching world-class mobile experiences.
6.
For enterprise organizations, permissioning remains a critical requirement for any CMS platform. Only a handful of people within such large organizations should have access to an enterprise website’s content. Granular permissions give CIOs and CTOs the peace of mind they need when it comes to internal content. User permissions help make sure those with editorial capabilities are approved by administrators. However, effective enterprise CMS platforms still provides the common workflows that enable sharing and teamwork.
7. Native Multisite
Enterprise companies have hundreds or even thousands of pages under their care. It’s important to have a CMS capable of handling the needs of those sites rather than having multiple sites managed on multiple platforms.
Having all your websites on a single platform means your entire team can work from a single
interface to develop and manage content. This means more efficient training and better use
adoption. It leads to smarter hardware use and ultimately lower hosting fees.
A single CMS platform also makes it easy to spin up new sites by making clones of an existing site. Users can share the same piece of content or other assets across all your sites. This
promotes consistent template governance across your sites and ensures an enterprise brand is presented the way you want it to be no matter how many websites you have.
8. Headless capabilities
Organizations wanting to move information across different platforms might find consistency a struggle without some sort of headless solution. The promise of decoupled CMS is that the function isn’t limited to or defined by frameworks that represent the frontend of a website. A headless or decoupled CMS gives you the freedom to share data or access analytics across channels, and connect everything with the power of a RESTful API.
Imagine giving visitors the same experience online as you would a mobile app. This could include customers ordering your services through Alexa or voice-driven gadgets. Headless gives your website the ability to exist today while preparing for the devices of tomorrow – everything from wearable tech like smart watches to screen readers for the visually impaired. At the same time, you want to have the ability to host the templates and frameworks for your website right alongside your data-driven apps.
Hybrid CMS platforms put one foot in the freedom of headless and the other in the stability of the templates and frameworks your website needs. Many CMS solutions are either one or the other – traditional or truly headless—but why choose? If a goal is to be future proof, then select a cloud-based hybrid solution that gives an enterprise the best of both worlds.
9. Training and support
Know who will be there after a website goes live. Not all CMS platforms come with support options. For example, many open-source applications don’t offer direct access to support teams. Typically they develop security patches and software upgrades you have to download and install yourself. While plenty of enterprise organizations have an IT infrastructure to handle manual updates, there’s still a learning curve that comes with any new enterprise CMS.
And while you might go to sleep, your enterprise website won’t—particularly if it generates global traffic. Know any potential CMS’s support response time and the availability of those support options.
About Solodev
Solodev is a leading enterprise website Content Management System (CMS) that empowers organizations to create amazing websites and engaging digital experiences in the cloud – all with total design freedom and control. Built from the ground up for Amazon Web Services (AWS), Solodev provides unparalleled security, scalability, and redundancy with 24/7/365 U.S. based support. Solodev has been listed as one of Inc. 5000’s fastest growing companies for the last three years and recognized as a High Performing leader on the user-driven G2 Crowd Grid. Winners of the 2017 AWS “City on a Cloud” Innovation Challenge, Solodev is an AWS Advanced Technology Partner with competencies in Education, Government, and Marketing & Commerce. Solodev’s self-service CMS can be purchased on demand in the AWS Marketplace or through the GSA Contract. Learn more at www.solodev.com.