Articles - Page 221

Not All Heroes Wear Capes. Here's Why CMS Is Your 'Unsung Hero' in 2025

janus-boye

CoreMedia is a leading provider of Web Content Management (WCM) software to organizations demanding engaging, context-driven online experiences for their customers regardless of channel or touchpoint.
We had a chance to have a chat with Glenn Conradt, VP of Global Marketing and asked him about the company, it's claim to fame and how best it can help customers achieve success online.
CC: What can you tell us about CoreMedia?
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/glenn-conradt-photo-100x100.jpg" alt="Glenn Conradt" />
GC: Over 14 years ago when CoreMedia delivered its first system to manage a media clients website, the internet was in its infancy and most of us were unaware of how this medium would impact our personal and business environments.
CoreMedia’s close roots to the disruptive and demanding challenges of the media and telecommunications industry has ensured its organic growth and technological leadership since then and today it is the platform of choice for many of the highest traffic portals in Europe and around the world. While competitors continue to provide the delivery of static websites, CoreMedia in 2006 pioneered the ability to deliver personalized content in real-time with it’s Content Application Engine and followed this up as the first vendor to deliver integrated social media functionality. While the market was talking multi-channel, CoreMedia was talking and delivering multi-touchpoint.
Today CoreMedia, while a late entrant into the North American market, is able to address the complexity of managing the online ecosystem, ensure high performance and reliability, while delivering a personal, mobile and social user experience. As a result, organizations can more effectively execute their online strategies to engage consumers, build customer loyalty and ultimately drive greater revenue and profitability, even in the most complex, highly-trafficked environments.
CC: What are the main products that CoreMedia offers and how do they integrate / communicate with one another?
GC: CoreMedia’s core product is CoreMedia CMS. The latest version, CoreMedia V, manages and delivers every type of digital content for the Web including text, video, images, music and complex multimedia. Designed to make content management easy, it features a highly customizable user interface and out-of-the-box editorial tools and workflows that can be tailored to the way web managers work. We will be rolling out CoreMedia VI towards the end of the year – and introducing a new way of working with content – so be on the lookout!
CoreMedia CMS is comprised of three primary product sets: CoreMedia Adaptive Products, which enables enterprises to deliver context appropriate content to users based on the interaction between the user, environment, device and content; CoreMedia Social Products, which enables enterprises to engage with users via social network integration and community building; and CoreMedia Open Products, which allows seamless integration with back-office systems, core applications and business portals based on open standards. All of these products are integrated into CoreMedia CMS.
CC: There are many claims on the CoreMedia website with regards to the ROI and other benefits to using CoreMedia products. How do you back up these claims? Do you have case studies to prove these statements?
GC: We do!  Hundreds of companies worldwide place their trust in content management software from CoreMedia. Our customers use our software to run their corporate websites, intranets and high traffic portals offering video services, e-government, shopping and customer services. CoreMedia technology helps media businesses with their cross-media publishing, provides social software to help companies manage their change to Enterprise 2.0 businesses and protects content with a standard suite of software for digital rights management.  You can check out some case studies below:
https://www.coremedia.com/en/Case-Studies/1482.html?queryParameter=1592
CC: What was the biggest CoreMedia success story of this year for your company / clientele?
GC: It’s been a great year for CoreMedia thus far; we’ve expanded our presence in the US with the opening of an office in San Francisco and a growing marketing, sales and professional services team. We’ve seen significant traction with our WCM technologies in Europe and Asia as companies evolve the ways in which they engage with their customers online, so our North American expansion was a natural next step.
On the customer front, the last year has seen some significant growth.
1.      Earlier this week we announced a <a href="http://www.coremedia.com/web-content-management/news-events/press-releases/internet-broadcasting-and-coremedia-to-offer-cloud-based-web-content-management-solution-for-media-companies-/-/1602/7466/-/_lyqnxwz/-/index.html">major deal with Internet Broadcasting</a> to replace their current web publishing solution with our Cloud-based technology platform.
2.      We completed a project with Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC). <a href="http://www.aamc.org/mededportal">MedEdPORTAL</a> is an interactive web portal designed to promote educational collaboration by facilitating the open exchange of peer-reviewed teaching resources such as tutorials, virtual patients, simulation cases, lab guides, videos, podcasts, assessment tools, etc.
3.      We were also incredibly excited to support the official portal for the largest sporting event in the world earlier this year; our selection and the subsequent success of the website was a huge affirmation of the reliability and scalability of our solution that we’ve been promoting.
4.      In what is believed to be the largest technology investment ever by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, CoreMedia was chosen as their online publishing platform. “Unleashed”, the first of three sites that were to be migrated, went live recently.
We’ve also seen tremendous recognition for the importance of web content management. In Gartner’s recent WCM Magic Quadrant, they predicted that WCM software will generate more than $1 billion in revenue for its vendors, up from $890 million in 2009. CoreMedia fared quite well in this year’s report- from 2009 to 2010 we experienced significant movement up and to the right to the Visionary quadrant. We feel this is a huge endorsement of our strategic focus over the past year, and plan to continue this momentum with a number of significant announcements on the product and customer side, further growth from our North American operations, and expansion of our partner ecosystem.
Lastly, we launched our new corporate website, reflecting our new branding and an improved user experience – and obviously built on our own CoreMedia CMS platform.
CC: Why do you feel CoreMedia is unique in its offerings?
GC: We covered our ability to deliver content in context, but another unique element to our story is how we can handle even the most intricate content situations. As a result of extensive M&amp;A activity and additions of layers of new technology systems and applications, the content organization within many large organizations can be incredibly complex. Content is often spread across silos, in many different systems and repositories. CoreMedia is able to make these complex scenarios simpler, providing a robust, scalable solution for organizing and managing content between heterogeneous systems, whether internal or external. Our platform leverages open standards to easily integration with external systems, including ERP, CRM, digital asset management and video repositories. This easy integration ensures seamless content management and delivery from one single source, and makes our platform an ideal solution for companies that have a complex, highly trafficked environment.
In addition to being able to handle complex environments, CoreMedia excels at creating and publishing digital content of any type from text to rich media in a highly personalized way, creating a truly engaging experience for Web users. Our Content Application Engine enables organizations to automatically adapt content to the user’s context at that point in time- factoring in user ratings and comments, GPS information, device parameters, time of day/year, or user profile data from CRM and other back office systems- to create a personalized user experience. This is a huge advantage, especially factoring in the burgeoning number of web-enabled mobile devices, in addition to the basic Web.
And speaking of devices- mobile capabilities are another key differentiator for CoreMedia. CoreMedia’s strategic partnership with Sevenval addresses this trend by enabling businesses to immediately deliver Web content customized to both the individual consumer and the parameters of their specific mobile device- we support over 11,000 of them!
CC: How does CoreMedia assist customers, learn about, interact with, and best present their products to their customers?
GC: Businesses recognize the importance of providing excellent cross-channel experiences to improve the customer experience. In fact, a recent Forrester Research study showed that 80 percent of customer experience decision makers said that improving cross-channel interactions was one of their key priorities in 2010. Consumers consistently rate satisfaction levels for cross-channel experiences as poor, however, so it is apparent that businesses often struggle to deliver.  Organizations that wish to engage with their customers online must move beyond just delivering web content to various touchpoints, such as a mobile device, PC or social media platform. They should instead consider how content will be consumed by creating a personalized experience that addresses the user’s context (e.g. device, physical location, time-of-day, season, social networking “Likes”, relevant friend recommendations, etc).  This is the benefit that CoreMedia can deliver to our customers- helping them improving the quality and consistency of their interactions with their audience by supporting multiple channels and devices with a single core content offering that automatically adapts to each user as an individual. By intergrating content within social media networks like Facebook, organizations are able to engage directly in online customer discussions, making the dialog with their customers two-way rather than just one way.
From a bottom line perspective, CoreMedia provides organizations with a more cost-effective way of engaging with customers, no longer making it necessary for various departments to have their own in-depth technical expertise to communicate across different touchpoints. By delivering relevant and contextualized content, companies can capture customer mindshare, build brand loyalty and ultimately drive revenue. It also drives down the cost of managing and delivering digital content, and increases conversion rates and revenues through more precisely targeted cross-sell and up-sell opportunities. And finally, improved self-service applications can empower customers to help themselves, either directly or through self-supporting communities, reducing the impact on already over-stretched contact center resources.
CC: Your website states that CoreMedia WCM allows users to maximize their return on engagement. Can you define this term (as you see it)?
GC: Consumers use several sources of information before making purchase decisions – they may seek independent opinions, speak to customer service agents, or examine goods physically. And they are accessing information via myriad channels, including mobile devices, social media and company websites.  As a result, there are endless opportunities for brands to engage directly with their customers. Without a solution that converts channels into touchpoints to engage with consumers in a contextualized way, you risk losing business. By synchronizing, updating and optimizing your digital content and delivering relevant content as and when your customers’ needs and situation changes, you can quickly increase the return on your customer engagement, making each interaction productive and ultimately more profitable.
CC: What is the CoreMedia Social Software package and the Social Application Connector and how can they assist customers make the most of their content?
GC: CoreMedia Social Software enables businesses to turn their websites into vibrant online communities. It offers all of the features that a community demands – personal profiles, preferences, blogs, discussion boards, forums, ratings, comments and tags. CoreMedia Social Software is a comprehensive solution designed to be low maintenance, giving you the opportunity to listen to, learn from and engage with users.
By creating a community around your products or services, businesses can empower users to help each other to resolve issues, thus dramatically reduce the support costs;
get invaluable feedback on your current products and services through ratings and comments; follow the threads on discussion boards and forums to get instant insights into what is really on the minds of their users; and create forums around specific products and services, gauge opinions, test new ideas and get honest feedback quickly.
CoreMedia Social Application Connector enables companies to engage directly with social networks, listening to the discussions and making your content freely available.
Since users meet, discuss and share ideas all over the web and, in particular, on social networks, CoreMedia Social Application Connector enables businesses to build an application inside social networks so they can listen to the discussions and put across their point of view.  Businesses can deliver content on their website based on feedback from social networks to ensure that a seamless conversation runs between the corporate website and independent social networks.
CC: What do you feel has been the greatest advancement in WCM/CMS market over the past year or so?
GC: First generation WCM technology delivered static websites. The trend to “rip and replace” these older technologies is driving by the emergence of the mobile, social and personal web. The rapid adoption of mobile technologies by consumers has placed entirely new demands on how companies manage and distribute content to their customers. Providing rich user experiences across a growing number of devices while ensuring brand consistency and cost efficiency requires a non-siloed approach. CoreMedia’s extensive work in mobile-forward Europe, together with our partnership with Sevenval, has enabled us to provide a scalable, cost effective and consistent Web experience from a single source that automatically adapts to over 11,000 mobile devices. While many WCM vendors have inadequate responses to the mobile trend, there is a clear absence of any, apart from CoreMedia, that can address this while enabling social dialogue and a personalized contextual experience.
CC: What is your vision for the next couple of years in this market? How has CoreMedia positioned itself to be the “go to” player?
GC: The mobile Web channel has often been treated as an afterthought, with poorly-conceived Web content and an unsatisfactory Web experience for the customer. In the US and Northern Europe, however, mobile penetration is approaching 100 percent, and Gartner research indicates that mobile devices will overtake PCs by 2013 as the primary channel for Web access.  There are also reports showing that China is skipping PCs altogether, using mobile devices as their sole connection to the Internet; this phenomenon is happening in Africa, as well. CoreMedia is helping meet the consumer demand for personalized, consistent, context-specific content that is tailored to their individual needs, preferences and device.
Rather than treating multi-channel as a barrier to content delivery, CoreMedia’s latest generation of context-aware content management effectively treats each interaction as input for a more sustained customer relationship, cumulatively gathering knowledge about the customer and engaging consumers in way that creates added value for them while still delivering greater returns for the enterprise. CoreMedia’s Web CMS enables enterprises to create a truly engaging experience for users across multiple touchpoints, treating customers as individuals through websites, mobile phones, PDAs and iTV, as well as through social media channels. Our software automatically adapts the content and layout of a Web site to the unique capabilities of a mobile access device, such as navigation concepts, screen sizes, browsers, markups and multimedia formats.
The release of CoreMedia VI at the end of 2010 will challenge the outdated and siloed content models that have been unable to keep pace with the complexity of managing content and multi-touchpoint delivering across the online engagement ecosystem. A new approach is needed and we believe that CoreMedia is well positioned to deliver.
Learn more about Core Media and their offerings here: <a href="http://www.coremedia.com">http://www.coremedia.com</a>

A Chat with Glenn Conradt of Core Media

mike-johnston

Reading UK— Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (F.A.Z), one of Germany’s largest newspapers, has signed an agreement with Atex to deploy the Polopoly Web content management solution across all of its properties including its main news website FAZ.NET, which averages 22 million visits and more than 116 million page impressions per month.
F.A.Z chose the Atex solution after having carried out an extensive testing phase with many of the market vendors. Throughout the evaluation process Polopoly proved its ability to adapt to the publisher’s editorial requirements. Polopoly also showed ease of integrating with F.A.Z’s existing applications including the publisher’s photo archive and Atex Editorial CMS.
The test phase was conducted in cooperation with Netpioneer, an Atex certified implementation partner who will be responsible for the global roll out of Polopoly at F.A.Z.
“We were delighted to see how fast the system could adapt to our requirements,” said Kai N. Pritzsche, Responsible Editor for FAZ.NET. “In addition, we felt that Netpioneer’s profound understanding of editorial processes was a decisive factor for the efficient implementation of the project.”
Florian Pütz, Manager of FAZ.NET, added: “The test phase approach, the Polopoly platform itself, and the close interaction between Atex and Netpioneer strongly influenced our selection process.”
“We are delighted to count F.A.Z. as one of our prestigious customers. This is further proof that Polopoly is one of the only solutions on the market that supports dynamic publishing of content in large scale environments,” said Gustaf Sahlman, Atex’s Global Director of Products. “Our sophisticated caching technology will enable F.A.Z. to handle traffic peaks with reasonable hardware requirements.”
For more information, please visit the Atex website <a href="http://www.atex.com ">www.atex.com </a>

F.A.Z. Selects the Polopoly Web Content Management Solution to Power all of its Online Properties

<a href="http://www.demandbase.com/index.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Demandbase, Inc.</a>, a technology company providing marketing performance-improvement solutions, today announced the availability of a new Real-Time ID Service for Web Forms, enabling B2B marketers to overcome low customer conversion rates and poor data quality common in online marketing. Marketers can plug the API-based web service into existing online forms and instantly see higher ROI on any program that relies on web site visitors to submit information, including Google paid search, email, webinars, banner ads, social media and other lead generation programs. This latest product launch follows the Demandbase API for LivePerson web chat, driving higher sales and support sufficiency for online chat.
“B2B Marketers are faced with poor cost-per-lead metrics relative to their B2C counterparts, and are still struggling with how to monetize web traffic into actual sales leads.” said Chris Golec, CEO of Demandbase.  “So many marketing and lead gen campaigns depend on visitors completing some kind of registration, inquiry, or lead form for success. With more than 97 percent of visitors lost, web form abandonment becomes the Achilles heel for B2B marketers. “
The Real-time ID Service for Web Forms plugs in to existing forms to identify businesses and critical company or account information. This enables significantly shorter forms that more visitors will complete because information like company address, industry, revenues, or number of employees can simply be appended in the background.  With the amount of information often requested of Web visitors–frequently more than ten questions–typically only two to three percent of web visitors will bother to complete the form.  In addition, a large portion of information entered by visitors is either inaccurate or inconsistently formatted, making it difficult for marketers to merge into CRM and Marketing Automation systems for retargeting or qualification for sales follow up. The Demandbase Real Time ID Service for Web Forms greatly increases both the accuracy and the quantity of information on a potential lead that is fed in to sales and marketing databases.
”The improved conversion rates, increased data quality, automated data hygiene, and deeper information made possible by the new Real-Time ID Service offers ‘no brainer’ economics for any B2B marketer that cares about lead volume, cost per lead, and, ultimately, revenue,” added Golec.
Leading marketers are adopting the Real-Time ID Service to advance their online marketing performance results. “Demandbase’s new Real-Time ID Service provides deeper web site visitor intelligence which drives faster conversions, higher quality leads and lower costs per lead,” said Lisa Kost, vice president of corporate marketing and global field marketing for ArcSight. “Demandbase has helped us fine-tune the front end of our demand generation engine and increase our pipeline velocity while improving efficiencies between our sales and marketing teams.”
The real-time identification of key accounts is made possible by Demandbase’s Business Resolution Platform, which uses proprietary algorithms that intelligently combine a database of 800 million IP addresses across North America and Europe, over 30 million business contacts, and information from  social networks critical for business including Facebook and LinkedIn.  This multi-tiered process ensures that target accounts are identified by Demandbase in a fraction of a second and appended with the most current information, fully standardized for CRM and marketing automation systems.  The cloud-based service has matched more than 1 billion visits in 2010 and currently identifies more than 100 million businesses every month without the use of cookies or tracking personal information.

Demandbase Unveils New Web Service to Dramatically Decrease Web Site Abandonment  and Increase Online Conversion Rates

Multi-award winning software platform Intranet DASHBOARD (iD) has announced the release of an all new SharePoint Connector, offering unprecedented connectivity with the enterprise collaboration giant.
iD has expanded the software to include an all new iD API that delivers the ability to extend and customize the out of the box intranet offering. The SharePoint Connector is the first application to be developed using the iD API, and both are included at no extra cost.
“We wanted to create the SharePoint Connector to enable clients to leverage the respective strengths of both software products,” said Connie Pandos, Director of Intranet DASHBOARD.
The SharePoint Connector showcases ease of use from both a usability and development perspective. Requiring no technical nous to operate, iD provides the ideal platform to quickly and easily make SharePoint content accessible for a wide range of users.
iD’s SharePoint Connector acts as a window to SharePoint for intranet users, enabling content including Task Lists and Document Libraries to be surfaced seamlessly within iD’s usable intranet interface.
“SharePoint’s collaboration capabilities are great, but the challenge lies in providing a user-friendly intranet framework for managing and accessing its content,” said Connie Pandos, Director of iD. “That’s where iD comes in.”
iD now delivers all the benefits of an off the shelf solution with the flexibility of a bespoke offering.
“iD is more versatile and customizable than ever before – an agile, adaptive intranet platform.”
The latest release of iD is available for download today and includes both the SharePoint Connector and iD API.
Website: <a href="http://intranetdashboard.com">http://intranetdashboard.com</a>

Enhancing SharePoint with Intranet DASHBOARD

Flypaper Studio, Inc., making Flash and motion graphics creation simple for digital signage networks, announces today the release version 3.3. The latest updates and new components included with this version support the growing demand in digital signage for faster, better quality content with a focus on touch-screen interactive experiences. The newest multi-touch features, including the ability to slide, swipe and flick at all components on a screen, allow companies to do cooler things with digital signage, and do them more affordably and in significantly less time.
“The demand for digital signage is growing so exponentially, that companies are struggling to keep up and continually improve on the content itself. Flypaper is working tirelessly to stay ahead of the curve and give digital signage network owners and operators more options for creating killer content,” said Don Pierson, founder and president of Flypaper. “Multi-touch is the latest functionality that everyone is looking to incorporate, and this latest version of Flypaper helps showcase it beautifully.”
Flypaper's Version 3.3 has several new features and updates aimed at making the customer experience with digital signage more interactive. New components that are especially powerful for kiosk displays include a virtual keyboard, a timer that kicks in during periods of inactivity, and a print button. Gesture support has been added to all components so users can slide, swipe and flick the display, making it a more engaging experience. Developers can also now add in Media RSS feeds and scrollers, run video within text, and input real-time weather data. In total, Flypaper added nearly 40 new features, updates and enhancements to version 3.3.
“Just when we think we've reached the limit for a touch screen display, Flypaper brings in new elements that raise the bar even higher,” said Scott Mathews, CEO of MG Digital Media Network. “They have done a great job of staying one step ahead of what the industry needs.”
Flypaper is revolutionizing the digital signage world by enabling the development of high-quality, affordable Flash content that is very fast to create and easy to edit. The Flypaper Flash Content Creation Platform is a licensed environment where companies can create and share vast amounts of digital signage content and motion graphics. Users benefit from hundreds of already available templates and components, or can create their own quickly and easily, with no prior development experience.
About Flypaper Studio, Inc. Flypaper Studio, Inc. is the leading Flash Content Creation Platform that empowers programmers and non-programmers alike to create, edit, share, track and reuse high-impact Flash and video content. The Flypaper platform allows anyone to edit and manipulate components without touching programming code. Through an SDK that converts Flash elements into Flypaper Components, Flash Programmers can create components, which can be edited and reused. Output from the application rivals the interactivity and quality of custom Flash development, but in a fraction of time and cost typically associated with such projects. For more information, visit <a href="http://www.flypaper.com/">www.flypaper.com</a>.

Flypaper's latest version supports multi-touch elements for touch screen content

A new release of mojoPortal has been made available. This is a compatibility update for the changes in ASP.NET that resulted from the <a href="http://www.mojoportal.com/the-fix-for-the-aspnet-security-bug-is-now-available-on-windows-update.aspx">security patch recently released by Microsoft and now available from Windows Update</a>.
<blockquote>
Before the security update, there was a possibility for a System.Security.Cryptography.CryptographicException when decrypting the role cookie if the machine key had changed and the user was already authenticated. We already had error handling for this error, but after the security update the behavior changed and it would throw a more generic HttpException there which we were not handling, and this would cause users who were previously authenticated to experience an error until they cleared the cookie.
Even without a machine key change, the same error could happen if a user was authenticated before the windows update was applied, the error could happen for that user after the update was applied (because there were also changes to how cookies are encrypted in the security update) In this release we have added handling for the new more generic exception so the cookie will be reset if this error occurs and the user will not experience an error on your site.
</blockquote>
New features include:
<ul>
<li> upgrade to CKeditor 3.4.1</li>
<li> upgrade to TinyMCE 3.3.9.2</li>
<li> updated Italian resource files thanks to Diego Mora</li>
<li> fixed a bug where menu items that were configured as unclickable were still clickable in the breadcrumbs</li>
</ul>
Check it out: <a href="http://www.mojoportal.com/mojoportal-2354-released.aspx?utm_source=feedburner&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_campaign=Feed%3A+mojoportal+%28mojoPortal+Change+Blog%29&amp;utm_content=Google+Reader">mojoPortal</a>

mojoPortal 2.3.5.4 Released

The Tiki Community is proud to announce the availability of Tiki 6.0 beta. You can download the beta directly from SouceForge (http://sourceforge.net/projects/tikiwiki/files/Tiki%206.x%20-Rigel-/).
This latest release of Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware contains more than 1,500 code changes by nearly 50 Tiki Developers. Dozens of other Tiki Community members contributed to this release in other areas such as testing and documentation. See http://doc.tiki.org/Tiki6 for information on major enhancements and and changes in this release.
Tiki administrators are reminded that this is a beta version and is not intended to be used in a production environment. Tiki 6 is scheduled for release at the end of October.
About Tiki
Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware is a full-featured, web-based, multilingual (35+ languages), tightly integrated, all-in-one Wiki+CMS+Groupware, Free Source Software (GNU/LGPL), using PHP, MySQL, Zend Framework, jQuery and Smarty. Actively developed by a very large international community, Tiki can be used to create all kinds of Web applications, sites, portals, knowledge bases, intranets, and extranets. Tiki is managed by the Tiki Software Community Association. For more information, visit <a href="http://tiki.org">http://tiki.org</a>.

Tiki 6.0 Beta Now Available

Kentico is one  of the most popular .NET Content Management Systems in the marketplace (<a href="/kentico-the-cms-for-the-net-generation/">review</a>) and we wanted to take some time to learn more about their product and their companies goals. Mr. Petr Palas, founder and CEO was gracious enough to spend some time with us and answer a few questions.
CC: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your relationship with Kentico. Are you a founding member? How did your interaction with Kentico come about and what did you do previously?
<img title="petrp" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/petrp.gif" />
PP: Before starting Kentico Software, I worked as a product manager in the .NET component industry. Back in 2004, there was no decent or true .NET CMS on the market and many companies were developing their own CMS. I saw an opportunity to create a content management system and offer it to web agencies. So I started Kentico Software. Our first client was Gibson Musical Instruments. Six years later, they're still using Kentico for their main corporate website.
We are a private, profit funded company without debts or external funding and we've been profitable since year one. We experience more than 100% growth of revenue annually since inception and currently have 65 employees, 2,500 clients, almost 5,000 active web sites and 1,200 active partners worldwide across 84 countries.
CC: What is the primary focus of your company? What type of corporations / organizations do you primarily focus your attentions on and why?
PP: Kentico CMS is a highly flexible and scalable solution designed to cover the small brochure sites to multi-site to multi-national projects of Fortune 500 companies. Our customer is anybody who needs a full-featured .NET CMS that is easy to use, flexible and backed by excellent support.
Still, there's one significant group of clients that we focus on – the web agencies who use Kentico CMS as a platform to create client websites. We've built a lot of our business helping web agencies deliver high quality websites on time and with fewer resources. Unlike many other CMS vendors, we’ve made a strategic business decision to not compete with our channel of solution partners and integrators by not offer our own professional services – instead, we direct these clients with integration requirements to our recommended solution partners.
CC: How does Kentico assist customers learn about, interact with, and best present their products to their customers?
PP: I would say the most important benefit of Kentico CMS is the ease of use. I’m sure every CMS vendor will tell you that their CMS is easy to use, but I say this based on the feedback we consistently hear from our clients.
For example, from web agencies that have  deep experience with several CMS products, Kentico is very intuitive for non-technical users, they do not need to spend a lot time training their clients and they receive fewer calls from end users in comparison to any other CMS product. This is really critical for the success of any CMS project – if your CMS is not user friendly, the content administrators won't use it and you will end up with outdated website that doesn't deliver expected results.
CC: Do you feel your product is unique in its offerings? If so, why?
PP: Of course our CMS offering is unique. One of several unique values of Kentico is the completeness of the solution. Other vendors often rely on third-party products in such areas as e-commerce or social networking. This often leads to a poor user experience, architecture full of compromises, a more costly implementation and often leaves clients with software that cannot be upgraded due to compatibility issues with third-party products and the latest version of the CMS. The fact that you receive all features directly from Kentico means you also benefit with lower initial and ongoing costs and dramatically lower project risks.
Kentico CMS is particularly strong in two feature areas: rapid website development and multi-site support. While many products offer various drag-and-drop interfaces, Kentico provides a complete environment for creating websites through your browser. It means that web developers without extensive .NET knowledge can work in a front-end portal interface and your more experienced developers can focus on complex .NET coding using the integration Kentico CMS offers with Visual Studio.
Kentico CMS is the only commercial .NET CMS vendor who built multi-site support into the core of the system. It means you don't have to make compromises with half-baked multi-site architecture. And we have clients who successfully deploy hundreds of websites centrally managed in a single installation.
CC: What do you say to those that scoff at the security and stability of the .NET framework when compared to other technologies?  What has .NET enabled you to do better?
PP: As a software vendor who has been using the .NET platform for 6+ years, we believe that .NET is the best platform for our clients. It's secure, stable and provides enterprise-level scalability. Unlike other platforms, .NET is backed by Microsoft who continues to invest resources in maintaining and extending their core platform. We have seen Microsoft very responsive to security issues and bugs.
As a Gold Partner we work closely with Microsoft to provide what we believe is industry leading integration of Kentico CMS with Visual Studio. The combination of the Microsoft platform and Kentico CMS allows our clients to develop websites with tools they are already know in a secure and robust environment.
CC: What is your vision for the next couple of years in this market? How has Kentico  positioned itself to be the “ go to” player?
PP: As we have seen the overall WCM market will continue to mature. Customers will expect even more features and value for their investment. This is an area where Kentico has always been strong – delivering solutions for real-world scenarios, easy to implement, easy to use, and has low ongoing technology costs.
This philosophy had a significant impact as we looked at our own product roadmap. We saw that online marketers are a huge under-served area. Right now, we're working on Kentico CMS 6.0 that will dramatically improve the way that marketers can generate new business for their companies. The new on-line marketing functionality will empower every marketer to optimize their website for higher conversion rates using A/B and multivariate testing, provide visitors with personalized content and deliver qualified leads to their sales team. Unlike other solutions that are too complex for non-technical users and require full-time staff to keep them running, Kentico will bring these features to marketers who need an immediate ROI without growing their budget.
CC: Online marketers have definitely been getting noticed more and solutions (whether integrated or separate packages altogether) are starting to get more functions within CMS like Sitecore for example. What will Kentico do that will make it the more appealing option?
PP: We have been watching the online marketing space closely. Like any new technology we see that it’s expensive, requires extensive integration and increased deployment and maintenance costs that are out of line with customer expectations. As we talked to customers we saw the technology had matured but neither the acquisition, integration, or maintenance costs have. Kentico Enterprise Marketing Solution that will be introduced with version 6.0 next year will deliver an easy to use, cost efficient solution that is fully integrated with other CMS functionality. Our customers are very excited about this new functionality – we would love to show you more as we finalize our development.
CC: What was the biggest Kentico success story of this year for your company / clientele?
PP: We see more clients deploying Kentico for major sites with extreme traffic. Newsmax, Conduit, Motors.co.uk, Gibson or Blackboard are just a few examples of such sites.  As an example, the Newsmax site serves 20 million page views per month, with over a million pieces of content, while running on a single, stand-alone production server. We also see more web agencies standardize on Kentico as their core platform and offering Kentico as an alternative to Ektron or Sitecore, because they don't have to spend the majority of the project budget on licenses and can spend more time on delivering a successful website to their clients.
CC: You’ve recently celebrated 6 years of fantastic growth coupled with a continually expanding staff, what do you attribute this success to?
PP: First of all, we were fortunate to enter the .NET CMS market at the right time. Growth and success are easy, if you follow the core principle that is part of the Kentico Software culture – keep delivering what your clients asked for. We're not just implementing fancy new features, but we continue to improve existing functionality based on client feedback. Of course, we wouldn't be so successful, without our loyal partners who successfully adopted Kentico CMS as their core platform for creating websites.
CC: What do you feel has been the greatest advancement in WCM/CMS market over the past year or so?
PP: I would say the major advancement was the fact that WCM is no longer considered to be just about managing content. People expect that a CMS should do everything they require to support their web strategy and succeed with their on-line presence. They want a solution that will allow them to sell products on-line, engage with clients in social networks and integrate with their existing systems, such as ERP or CRM.
Also, site owners want to see measurable results and an optimized visitor experience, so they get the most from their investments. This is what we understand under the term WEM. I think this is so important version 6 of Kentico CMS will have a heavy focus on this.
CC: How do you define the term ‘CMS’?
PP: In Kentico, we believe that a Web Content Management System should provide marketers and developers with everything they need to achieve their goals on-line. Whether they need to publish search engine-optimized content, sell products on-line, integrate social networks or improve their marketing results, they should obtain it in a single, fully integrated solution. They shouldn't merely receive a framework and be forced to develop costly integrations of multiple specialized products, which often happens with many other CMS vendors.
Additionally, they shouldn't be forced to buy numerous add-on modules, requiring complex or even impossible upgrade paths from multiple vendors, which is quite often the case with open-source CMS systems. Kentico CMS delivers all functional components out of the box, and concurrently, offers extensive flexibility in how you use them or extend them.
CC: Thank you for your time Mr. Palas.
Want to learn more about Kentico? Read our <a href="/kentico-the-cms-for-the-net-generation/">review</a> or visit them on the web at <a href="http://www.kentico.com">http://www.kentico.com</a>

Interview with Petr Palas, Founder and CEO of Kentico

Weglot - The easiest way to translate a website

The easiest way to translate a website

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The very first beta of the popular open source content management framework, Drupal 7 has been released. Drupal 7 brings about a ton of changes such as:
<ul>
<li>revamped user interface</li>
<li>a new admin and default core theme</li>
<li>image handling in core, fields (CCK!) in core</li>
<li>module and theme upgrades from within the browser</li>
<li>an automated testing framework with over 24,000 tests</li>
<li>improved security and scalability</li>
<li>revamped database</li>
<li>AJAX and file systems</li>
<li>jQuery 1.4, jQuery UI 1.8, RDFa</li>
<li>many more</li>
</ul>
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/screen-shot-2010-10-07-at-5_32_26-am-580x258.png" alt="Drupal 7 Admin Interface" />
Please see <a href="http://drupalcode.org/viewvc/drupal/drupal/CHANGELOG.txt?revision=1.373&amp;view=markup">CHANGELOG.txt</a> for a comprehensive list of all improvements in Drupal 7 or <a href="http://drupal.org/drupal-7.0-beta1">download</a> your copy today..

The first beta of Drupal 7 is now available for testing

Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware: Celebrating eight years of continuous development
This month marks the 8-year anniversary of the release of (what is now called) Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware. Since the initial release in October 2002, Tiki has grown from a wiki solution into a full-featured, web-based, content management solution.
To date, more than 200 people have contributed to the Tiki code-base, with hundreds more to other parts of the project (documentation, support, etc) making Tiki one of the largest open source projects in the world(http://www.ohloh.net/p/tikiwiki/factoids/). With new code commits averaging every two hours, Tiki is in a continuous development cycle and its “wiki way” development process means that the community is very dynamic and agile.
<img style="border:0pt none" src="https://info.tiki.org/dl79" alt="Assorted Tiki Logos" />
Gatherings of Tiki Community members take place across the globe. These “TikiFests” are a chance for community members to plan, discuss, and code Tiki features (and socialize!). More than 50 events have occurred, with many more planned in the upcoming months.
Recent partnerships with Kaltura and BigBlueButton for collaborative videos and web conferencing, respectively, ensure that Tiki continues to move forward. The upcoming Tiki 6 release introduces a host of new features and enhancements.
Happy Birthday Tiki!
About Tiki
Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware is a full-featured, web-based, multilingual (35+ languages), tightly integrated, all-in-one Wiki+CMS+Groupware, Free Source Software (GNU/LGPL), using PHP, MySQL, Zend Framework, jQuery and Smarty. Actively developed by a very large international community, Tiki can be used to create all kinds of Web applications, sites, portals, knowledge bases, intranets, and extranets. Tiki is managed by the Tiki Software Community Association. For more information, visit <a href="http://tiki.org">http://tiki.org</a>.

Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware: Celebrating eight years of continuous development

The newest upgrade to Sourcefabric’s Campsite, a multilingual content management system for news websites, allows multiple template upload and improves multilingual template set for websites.
“One of our main goals is to offer Campsite to as many local developers as we can. With this issue of Campsite we are opening up to Poland – a country with great developers and we hope to welcome many of them very soon to our community” – says Sava Tatić, Sourcefabric’s managing director.
Campsite 3.4.3 introduces two new features, 10 bug fixes, and 4 improvements. Login problems that have been reported by IE and Opera users have been solved.
Full list of changes:
New Features:
<ul>
<li> Added Polish localization</li>
<li> Multiple template upload</li>
</ul>
Improvements:
<ul>
<li> Sample site template set is now multilingual and includes support for user comments</li>
<li> The upgrade process has been redesigned to disallow the automatic start upgrade script after files copy</li>
<li> Demo data has been updated on the campsite-design site</li>
</ul>
Bugs Fixed:
<ul>
<li> Article types in the sample package should have proper display name</li>
<li> Small fixes to custom sorting in the Universal List</li>
<li> On upgrade error the displayed message is wrong</li>
<li> Opera &amp; IE browsers doesn't support the login into admin interface</li>
<li> Site title, Meta keywords and Meta description doesn't support UTF-8 chars</li>
<li> On upgrade the system_preferences.php should be deleted</li>
<li> Very slow article edit page openning for non english version</li>
<li> Periodically PEAR::DB reports “Mysql connection error” on any hosting</li>
<li> Fixed administration session timelife</li>
<li> The installer should check if exec was enabled</li>
</ul>
Campsite 3.4.3 is available for free download here: <a href="http://links.sourcefabric.org/Campsite343">http://links.sourcefabric.org/Campsite343</a>

The new Campsite 3.4.3 comes with improved multilingual templates

Until recently, Danish developer Composite have been distributing the company’s professional content management system – Composite C1 – on commercial terms. But now Composite has decided to go open source and allow anyone to download and use the complete product for free.
Composite C1 allow website builders to get a user friendly CMS up and running fast and allow for customizations via free and commercial packages as well as tools targeting both frontend and backend developers. .NET developers can use technologies like .NET 4, LINQ, ASP.NET Controls and MVC while frontend developers are capable of completing many more tasks than they usually can in a CMS.
– The whole mindset behind Composite C1 as a .NET-based product was originally to make it successful on the commercial marketplace – which it is on a regional basis. This background bring a much more intuitive and user-friendly experience to market than other Open Source based CMS-alternatives. Actually, I think we’re one of the very first companies worldwide to convert a fully-featured, commercial .NET-based CMS into an Open Source project, says partner Oskar Lauritzen, Composite.
– Our Open Source initiative aims at making Composite C1 accessible worldwide to a significantly larger population of companies and organizations. At the same time, it gives us a tremendous opportunity to widen the base of developers working to strengthen the product as well as to develop C1 add-ons of their own, he continues.
With a history spanning the last decade, Composite is already regarded as a proven and experienced commercially focused developing house, “so it’s perfectly understandable if our venture into Open Source will raise a few eyebrows out there,” says Oskar Lauritzen.
But not so amongst the company’s existing paying customers, who backs the initiative unanimously. Even Microsoft, who has lent significant developing support to the C1-project during the last three years, feels that the initiative is a pretty good idea.
– Composite’s Open Source initiative is really remarkable and exciting. First and foremost because it makes good sense to open up the code of a .NET-based product, as there’s simply so many gifted developers out there who’s already familiar with the platform, says Ole Kjeldsen, Enterprise &amp; Platforms Director, Microsoft Denmark.
– Actually, I think that Composite is one of the really interesting developing houses to follow right now, concludes Ole Kjeldsen.
In the near future, Composite will establish a marketplace where professional developers can cooperate on Composite C1 add-ons and make them commercially or freely available, depending on which model makes the best sense from the developer’s perspective.
<a href="http://www.composite.net/">http://www.composite.net/</a>

Established Danish CMS-vendor Composite goes Open Source with CMS based on Microsoft .NET 4.0.

The Joomla Project is proud to announce the immediate availability of Joomla 1.6 beta 11. Since the Joomla 1.6 beta 10 release on September 20, they have fixed approximately 21 issues in the tracker and have closed an additional 33 tracker issues. This progress is directly related to the continued efforts of the Joomla! Bug Squad.
Grab your copy from <a href="http://www.joomla.org">http://www.joomla.org</a>

Joomla 1.6 Beta 11 Now Available

Call Tracking + AI 

Call Tracking + AI that Turns Calls into Leads

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