Articles - Page 38

The Top 10 AI Tools for Small Business: From Automation to a Coordinated Team of AI Agents

matt-garrepy

TERMINALFOUR, a digital engagement and web content management platform for higher education institutions, today announced its plans to expand its North American operations.
The expansion comes in the form of 15 new positions in TERMINALFOUR's Boston headquarters. Naturally, This growth will strengthen the support and customer service availability for TERMINALFOUR's clients throughout North America.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/terminalfour.jpg" /> 
According to TERMINALFOUR, the expansion is a result of winning 7 new significant higher education clients. This success has been largely afforded to <a href="/terminalfour-releases-new-higher-education-digital-engagement-platform/" target="_blank">TERMINALFOUR's most recent platform update towards the end of 2014</a>, which saw the introduction of 150 new features.
<h2> “A Bigger, Bolder &amp; More Pronounced Commitment”</h2>
The 15 new positions on offer cover business development and client-facing roles including account management, client support, and training and new business development. These roles will be recruited over the next 18 months with interviews already underway.
TERMINALFOUR's digital engagement and web content management platform is used by more than 155 university and college clients to power in excess of 10,000 higher education websites throughout the world.
With its main headquarters in Dublin, Ireland, the platform helps Universities and Colleges engage more effectively online to drive key results such as student recruitment numbers. Last year it announced plans to double this to more than 300 clients by 2016, although its current client portfolio already spans the globe.
TERMINALFOUR's Boston expansion is being led by Mike Taylor, TERMINALFOUR's VP of Worldwide Sales. Here's his take on the news:
<blockquote>“TERMINALFOUR has had a presence in the US for a number of years but it needed to make a bigger, bolder and more pronounced commitment to this market. While we still have significant and robust ties to the global business unit, the expansion of the Boston team is about bolstering local resources to drive our ambitious national business development plans but also ensuring a personalized experience for our US client base.”</blockquote>
The official press release for this news <a href="http://businessandfinance.com/news/terminalfour-announces-15-new-jobs-for-boston-hq/" target="_blank">can be seen here</a>. To find out more about TERMINALFOUR's latest higher education digital engagement solution, <a href="http://www.terminalfour.com/" target="_blank">check out their website</a>.
Also, be sure to explore more of <a href="/products/terminalfour-site-manager/" target="_blank">TERMINALFOUR via our CMS directory</a>.

TERMINALFOUR Announces New Jobs For Boston Headquarters

mike-johnston

<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/sackcloth-1280539_1280-1-e1467294497959.jpg" alt="sackcloth-1280539_1280" />
When building a website, it’s obviously important to create an easy and enjoyable experience for the end-user. Often forgotten however, but just as important, is the content editor’s user experience.
Content editors will be logging into the backend of a site regularly – everyday even – for as long as the site lasts (which can be years). So, you have to create an interface that they won’t dread working with every time they have to create a new page, edit an article or moderate user content.
Since a project’s success depends on the content editor’s happiness just as much as the end-user’s, we have tips on where to start and what to consider in making their job easy.
<h2>Know Your Content Editor (Or Editors)</h2>
Who exactly are you building for? Before any planning or building begins, get to know your content editor's level of expertise and experience. The user-interface should reflect a content editor's skill and comfort working within a content management system. For example, if they're totally new to managing online content, the user-interface should be configured to be as simple as possible to accommodate their beginner mentality.
Getting to know your content editors will help you make decisions like choosing to use rich text areas versus a module with properties that lays out the content depending on its associated logic. While one option is more flexible, the other is easier to update.
If you find out that your editor will be consistently updating content that is shared across the site, you should make that task as easy as you can; a module that lays out the content differently in each area makes the most sense.
The more you can gather about an editor’s experience, abilities, their learning-curve and habits, the easier you can make their job.
<h2>Create Use Cases</h2>
Once you understand who you’re building for, the next step is to create use cases for your editors – and then make them part of your development plans.
For example, editor use cases include:
<ul>
<li>Creating and placing a poll question in an article to get reader feedback</li>
<li>Creating an image slider and placing it on a page</li>
<li>Creating a new font class in CSS and applying to specific parts of the site</li>
<li>Updating the homepage with links to new content</li>
</ul>
<h2>Define Content Structure &amp; Proposed Setup Before Development</h2>
Now it’s time to set up a workflow for the use cases that you came up with. As an example, let’s use placing an Image Slider on a page and then linking photos and thumbnails. A basic workflow is as follows:
<ol>
<li>Navigate to the page that you want to drop the Image Slider.</li>
<li>Click the “+ADD” button within the Main Content Zone and find the Image Slider Module from the list provided.</li>
<li>Within the module, hit “New” to add the first image in your slider. Once the main image is linked, you can follow the same process for the thumbnail image.</li>
<li>Hit “Save &amp; New” to link the second photo in the slider.</li>
<li>Once all images have been linked, hit “Save &amp; Close”. Then “Publish”.</li>
</ol>
The workflow for each use case should be intuitive for your content editor, and each one should be planned out before any development begins.
<h2>On-going Best Practices &amp; Planning</h2>
Content organization is key at this stage. Within a couple of years into a site’s life cycle, files and folders can start to get messy, which can be very frustrating for anyone trying to navigate through it or manage it. By setting content editors up with an organization structure (uniform naming conventions, folder structures, etc.) it will be hard for them to deviate in the future.
<h2>Plan for the Future, Now</h2>
Build modules that are reusable to make future expandability easy. Your content editors will definitely thank you when it’s time to expand and grow their site. It lessens the learning curve of having to adapt to a completely new functionality.
Examples of ways to make a module reusable include:
<ul>
<li>Include fields for properties so that content editors can easily input text, HTML, Date, URLs, images or linked content</li>
<li>If you are creating a module that will be used for a short campaign that will only be on the site temporarily, make it generic so that the same module can be reused for another campaign without needing to get a developer involved</li>
<li>If you're building a module that displays a menu for a micro-site, make it reusable so that you can drop it on any page, and it will display a menu for all the pages beneath that current page in the page tree</li>
<li>For a page that need lots of different UI elements, such as Tabs, Sliders, Rich text, Ads – create each of these UI elements as modules so that they can easily be added separately to other pages in the future</li>
</ul>
It’s also important to plan for new people that will join the online content team down the road. Whether it’s adding new content editors to a growing team or replacing ones that have left, new hires should be able to pick up the workflow easily.
A great way to prepare for new hires is to create a training guide that is easy to follow. The training guide should be very detailed, and it should outline how to use different modules and functionality step-by-step.
Content editors should also be able to quickly reference it on-the-go as they’re using the CMS and get stuck. A training guide is a great resource to have in every content editor’s arsenal.
<h2>Automate As Much As Possible</h2>
To make your content editor’s experience as streamlined as possible, automate whatever you can.
This includes things like URL generation and thumbnail generation. Implementing automation for small tasks like this will save your editors a lot of time down the road.
<h2>Train Your Editors</h2>
The final step in ensuring your content editor’s happiness is to give them plenty of time – during development – to get familiar with the new interface.
Getting your editors to enter content during the development stage is important because it allows them to get comfortable with the system well before the site goes live. It also allows time to get their feedback and to make adjustments accordingly. This will help avoid hiccups or frustration after launch.
<hr />
[dropshadowbox align=”none” effect=”lifted-both” width=”auto” height=”” background_color=”#ffffff” border_width=”1″ border_color=”#dddddd” ]Agility is a cloud-based, agile and powerful content management system equipped with tools and features that make building and managing your online properties easy and stress-free. To learn more, visit <a href="http://agilitycms.com/?utm_source=cmscritic&amp;utm_medium=blog">agilitycms.com</a>.[/dropshadowbox]
<hr />
This post is <a href="/advertising/">sponsored</a> by AgilityCMS. Find out more at <a href="http://www.agilitycms.com/">agilitycms.com</a>.

How to Build a Website that Content Editors Will Love

A new version of PHPFox has been released. Version 3.30 became publicly available on the 1st of this month and includes some new features for this popular software for <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/list-of-social-network-software/">social networking</a>. For those who are unfamiliar with PHPFox, check out our <a href="/phpfox-review/">PHPFox Review</a> to learn more.
On with the changes!
<h2>Timeline</h2>
The timeline feature includes an update on the users profile. Admins can control if the Timeline should be forced on all users or whether they will have the option to enable Timeline on their own profiles. If  optional, it can be enabled by visiting: Profile &gt;&gt; Edit Profile. This is somewhat similar to the way Facebook Timelines work and is a pretty cool addition.
Here's how it looks:
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/3_3_0-timeline-620x472.png" alt="social network" />
 
<h2>Theater Mode for Photos</h2>
By blending Facebook and Google's photo viewing capabilities, the PHPFox developers have come up with a new feature called Theater Mode  that looks great and, in my opinion, is the best of both worlds for your users when they are viewing photos on your social networking website. 
Here's how it looks:
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/3_3_0-photo-theater-620x284.png" alt="social networking" />
 
<h2> Membership Comparisons</h2>
Perhaps your social networking website is set up with membership levels. You can now add a comparison chart to showcase the differences between the two quickly and easily.
Here's how it looks:
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/roi_instagram-1080x1080_bilznk.png" alt="social networking" />
<h2>New Sharing Features</h2>
Perhaps you've uploaded a great photo and (since the point of social networking is sharing) you want to share it on a friend's wall. Now you can, as this capability has now been included in version 3.30.
Here's how it looks:
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/3_3_0-share-item-on-wall-620x474.png" alt="social networking" />
This is just a sampling of the changes in this release. The development team at PHPFox have really been working hard on making their software more and more powerful and it shows with this release. There aren't many products on the market that stay on top of the trends as well as these guys do so if you are looking for a solid piece of software to run your social networking based site, you can't go wrong with PHPFox.
You can learn more about PHPFox's great social networking suite (or to try their demo) visit their website: <a href="https://www.phpfox.com/">PHPFox</a>

PHPFox Social Networking Software Updated to Version 3.30

<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/tie-690084_1280-3-1-e1467309523237.jpg" alt="tie-690084_1280 (3)" />
As Oscar Wilde once said, “there is only one thing worse than being talked about and that is not being talked about.” 
If he were alive today, he would probably rephrase that as “there is only one thing worse than being talked about, and that is your website going down so that nobody can see why they were talking about you in the first place.” 
Many things can cause sudden spikes in traffic, including breaking world news or new releases of hotly-anticipated products. Any of these scenarios can cause your steady stream of website traffic to morph into an unmanageable torrent that can slow your site down to a crawl, or even worse, cause it to stop functioning altogether. 
What kind of measures can you take to prevent this situation from occurring? What are the important factors you should consider to prevent this embarrassing scenario from scuppering your marketing plans?
<h2>Clouding the Issue Is Good!</h2>
Today, with the availability of cloud technology, it is no longer something that only technical people understand – the cloud is something that is a normal part of how most businesses deploy their sites. With the cloud, you can configure the cloud hosting environment that if there are more than X number of people looking at your site, or more than X concurrent users submitting forms, if the CPU utilization on the server is more than X%, or the application is eating more than X GBs of RAM, then these metrics and the conditions you set cause the system automatically to expand – scale. 
Also, when the spike goes down, the cloud shrinks the environment to remove that extra server so that you are no longer paying for it. So the best way for people to prepare for this is to take advantage of the cloud’s elastic infrastructure and, based on simple rules, it is able to expand or shrink the number of servers that are running your application accordingly.
In the past, there was resistance to the cloud in general, towards the privacy or insecurity of the data, when exposing sensitive data to a third party. That is why most cloud providers reacted to this by introducing the concept of a private cloud, where you keep sensitive data in-house behind a firewall, meaning it is safe from a third party. Instead, you are running your applications in the cloud, and they are consuming the data from your private data center, as a hybrid. But it is important that the application you want to run supports auto scaling.
<h2>Web Farm Support – What Is it and Why Should I have It?</h2>
The web farm concept is based on the fact that you have multiple servers running separate instances of the same application. 
If the nature of the application requires those separate instances to be synchronized, you have to have a way to keep them in sync. Kentico, as an app, stores some of the data in memory on the server. So if you have three servers all running Kentico, you have three separate memory spaces on each server that have their local copy of the form of data. 
If you change the data on one of the servers, you need to make sure that all those other servers know that the data changed there, and as all servers are supposed to display the same content and provide the same experience, the other servers need to refresh their data to reflect whatever is there. So you have to consider how you are going to synchronize the memory of the application that is distributed in the web farm environment, and how to synchronize whatever is stored on the file system on those separate servers.
<h2>A Step-by-step Guide to Setting Up a Scalable Environment</h2>
<h3>1. Key Metrics</h3>
You need to consider what the key metrics you should use to understand what is going on in your environment are. You have to know what the red flags are. Noticing that the site is not responding is too late! You need to know what precedes that breakdown of the system. Typically it is: constantly high CPU utilization, the servers disks are too busy, or too much operating memory is being consumed. It could also be the length of the queue of page requests sitting idle waiting for processing, and if the queue is getting longer, it means that something is going wrong. It could be that the server is too slow to handle all those requests. So you need to know how to identify that there is a problem with your environment.
<h3>2. Expectations</h3>
Estimate what your realistic expectations are. Do you usually have 100,000 users a day? Based on historical performance, as soon as you run a campaign through a certain channel, you can expect two or three times more traffic. What triggers those spikes? What is typically the highest amount you need to be able to handle? You need to load test that this environment, based on your estimation, would be able to handle this peak scenario you know happened in the past. Online tools like the Load Impact can help with distributed load testing. You need to set up a baseline, which is what your environment is able to handle under normal circumstances, and your new web farm environment needs to able to handle it.
<h3>3. Calculate</h3>
Now you are almost ready to implement your new web farm environment, but first you need to make some calculations. 
Based on the fact that you are currently running on two servers, and they can handle 50,000 page views/hour, using simple mathematics, you can work out that one server = 25,000 page views/hour. So if you need to handle 100,000 page views/hour, you need four servers. Be aware, though, the relation between the number of servers and number of page views, in this case, is not always linear. If the weakest part of the infrastructure is the SQL DB, adding web servers to the environment will not really help. 
According to this, you set up what you estimate as being sufficient to handle the expected peak and you load test and stress test the environment. This means that you do not have to reach the highest peak only, you need to go above it. You need to keep pushing the architecture and extending it until you can handle whatever expected level you have set, plus, a certain buffer zone.  15 – 20 % more than what is expected can be considered safe. And if it is not sufficient, you need to add another server and test it again until you get to the point where you know it can handle it. 
Of course, the process of setting up the environment is either easy, or it may become more complicated if the application does not contain built-in support to enable you to do this.
After that, all that's left is to roll it out.
<hr />
This post is <a href="/advertising/">sponsored</a> by Kentico. Find out more at <a href="http://kentico.com/">Kentico.com</a>.

Dealing With Traffic Spikes: How to Avoid Being a Victim of Your Own Success

<a href="https://www.shopify.com/" target="_blank">Shopify</a>, a platform considered to be high up in the eCommerce food chain, has unveiled a storefront editor which lets anybody customize the look of their Shopify store in detail and across devices.
With price plans to suit all business sizes, combined with a feature-filled platform, Shopify is one of the world's leading eCommerce solutions for companies large and small.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/storefront_hero_image.jpg" /> 
This new Storefront Editor feature enables merchants to easily customize things like logos, menus, typography, and more. The short video below takes you behind the scenes for a first hand look.
<iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/N08ftKJ4c1U?start=36&amp;feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Via their <a href="https://www.shopify.com/blog" target="_blank">official blog announcement</a>, Tom Burns of Shopify said:
<blockquote>“Storefront editor simplifies how you make changes to your store’s design by splitting your screen into two panels. In one panel, you’ll make design choices like picking colors, fonts, photos, and more. In the other, you’ll see a live preview of your store that updates as you make changes.”</blockquote>
You can learn more about <a href="/products/shopify/" target="_blank">Shopify via our CMS Directory</a>.

Shopify Unveils Storefront Editor

<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/ecwid-shopping-cart-logo-1024x269.png" alt="Ecwid-Shopping-Cart-Logo" />
After covering <a href="https://www.ecwid.com/" target="_blank">Ecwid’s</a> awesome ShopApp feature – which allows merchants to launch their own native iOS and Android retail app – it’s time to take a look at another Ecwid feature; automated taxes.
On a personal level, taxes make my brain hurt. In fact, I deem it as one of eCommerce’s scariest hurdles – and I’m sure I’m not alone.
To make life easier for merchants though, Ecwid recently partnered with TaxJar to automate the entire process. What more is, that automation is available for free for all paid Ecwid users.
<h2>Tax Is No Longer Taxing</h2>
The alliance between Ecwid and TaxJar means something very significant; merchants from the U.S., Canada, EU, and Australia can set up tax rates in their store with just one click. Seriously.
Once enabled, the automatic tax rate will determine a precise tax rate at checkout depending on where you and your customer are located. All the technical stuff is done behind the scenes.
How? Well, the tool knows the tax rules in your country, state, and even your county – which is the hardest part, really. It then simply applies them properly to each order as and when they come in.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/ecwid-tax-feature-1-1024x459.png" alt="Ecwid Tax Feature" />
If you’re worrying about its level of tax knowledge, don’t. Here’s why:
The TaxJar integration knows whether you’re located in a region with origin-based or destination-based tax schema, whether shipping cost or discounts are taxable, whether you should charge tax in another state or country not, whether the tax rate is calculated with a zip code accuracy. If your customer provide zip+4, it will be calculated with even higher precision. In some U.S. states the tax is calculated with a street address level precision!
The real beauty of this automated tax feature is that it will stay up to date with all new tax laws that get implemented in your country. So you never have to worry about updating your tax configurations – it’s all automatic.
<h2>More To Come</h2>
But that’s not all, because Ecwid has already unveiled some of its plans to expand their automated tax feature with the help of TaxJar.
By the end of 2016, they hope to introduce:
<ul>
<li>Multiple nexuses for US sellers, which allows for accurate rates to be calculated if your store operates in several states.</li>
<li>Automated reporting &amp; filing to fully automate sales tax management, and more.</li>
</ul>
Essentially, Ecwid is taking that scary tax hurdle and throwing it off the track, so you can focus on running your business.
To find out more about Ecwid’s tax automation feature, <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/ecwids-automated-tax-feature/">check out their blog</a>.

A Closer Look at Ecwid’s Automated Tax Feature

<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/website-content-migration-why-going-away-parties-get-troublesome.png" alt="WEBSITE CONTENT MIGRATION WHY GOING-AWAY PARTIES GET TROUBLESOME" />
While any website’s design is constantly being revamped according to the latest trends, the information it contains most commonly has to be preserved intact. And with this contradiction, lots of challenges of content migration emerge. 
Moving existing content to a redesigned site isn't as easy as it may sound, and in some cases can appear even a more intricate task than a <a href="https://www.scnsoft.com/website-development">website development</a> project done completely from scratch. 
It’s essential to separate “content”-term out of “data”, when we speak about website migration. Moving data can more or less easily be performed automatically, while content is drastically vulnerable to any change of surroundings and should be relocated and adjusted manually. This is only natural, since content is created manually. 
<h2>Benefits of WYSIWYG Editors</h2>
Content consists of all kinds of information: words, graphics and media – all mainly embedded and published in articles by site administrators or content managers. And as experience shows, 85-90% of the articles’ in the whole batch do not have a proper mark up and have all their formatting done with the help of a WYSIWYG editor. Unfortunately, these articles are the biggest part of the migration problem.
WYSIWYG editors are indeed handier in comparison to the direct use of HTML or BB-codes that are usually involved in the text formatting process. But while presenting a convenient interface and allowing users to add styling to the text and media with no fussing over all the angle brackets syntax, these editors create a huge mess of inline formatting.  
If you switch to the code mode of an article formatted with the help of a WYSIWYG editor, you will be confused by the amount of unnecessary and repeating code tags that may even outdo the number of characters of the actual text. If migrated, such article will either become a plain text without any formatting at all or will display parts of HTML code inside the sentences and paragraphs.
That’s why this kind of articles definitely needs reformatting and, depending on the length of an article, it may take from 20 minutes to an hour to edit only one article. For instance, to migrate 548 articles of <a href="https://www.scnsoft.com/">ScienceSoft’s</a> company website it took the developers nearly 400 working hours of monotonous formatting.
<h2>The Problem of Images</h2>
Articles edited in the WYSIWYG mode that need proper reformatting are not the only challenge of the migration process. Some parts of content – like tables and pictures – can’t be moved unedited to a redesigned site, even if there is absolutely nothing technically wrong with them. With their unique dimensional information, these types of media are highly dependent on website’s layout and, since they are initially created according to the existing design’s limitations, the way they appear on a new design isn’t always nice and smooth. 
You can’t make a picture have a better resolution than it already has and the odds are your web designers will have to search for another one that will replace it. It’s not like they choose the pictures themselves – they usually need approval of the marketing specialist or a senior content manager. Who, of course, will then be partially distracted from their course of work and slow down their own important ongoing processes.
<h2>When Conversion is the Only Way Out</h2>
Nobody likes to deal with conversion. It’s always about searching the right software and desperate attempts to preserve the quality without losses. But with migration of audio and video files there is often no other way out than conversion. These content parts have much more unique properties, thus more requirements for the new website’s system to meet in order to display them correctly. If audio / video isn’t in the universal MP3 / MP4 formats, there’s a high chance you will have to convert them, so that they would definitely be supported by any device. 
PDF format is also a tricky one. Normally it needs Adobe Reader to be opened, but despite being very popular, this application still isn’t commonplace and is often absent on many mobile devices. And since there’s hardly any website development company that doesn’t reasonably strive to provide easy mobile access to the content, PDFs have to be either converted into another document extension or embedded with the help of certain plugins.
<h2>Conclusion</h2>
Content migration isn’t something you can easily complete as a one-at-a-time task. Instead, it’s an elaborate process of adapting the website’s “stuffing” to new surroundings that requires lots of resources, time and scrutiny. And taking into account all the above mentioned challenges, it’s clearly indispensable to analyze the existing content and its condition beforehand, so that you could have a realistic list of incompatibilities and be ready to deal with them.
<hr />
This post is <a href="/advertising/">sponsored</a> by ScienceSoft. Find out more at <a href="http://www.scnsoft.com/">scnsoft.com</a>.

Website Content Migration: Why Going-away Parties Get Troublesome

<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/study-789631_1280-1-e1467386627900.jpg" alt="study-789631_1280" /> The best customer support portals are more than just web interfaces between a company and its customers. They are <a href="https://financesonline.com/magentrix-pros-cons-top-collaboration-software/">collaboration hubs</a>, empowering a vendor to host its partners and clients to share ideas, come up with new strategies and innovate as a community.
Customer support agents can spend less time answering routine customer cases, and act as community managers to ensure:
<ul>
<li>Knowledge base articles are accurate, current and indexed/tagged for discoverability</li>
<li>News feeds are up to date with current news about product enhancements, security patches and bug fixes</li>
<li>Customers are aligned with resources for training, support, design and/or development as needed</li>
<li>Content is pushed out to customers and prospects via newsletters and social media</li>
<li>Website visitors can engage with customer service through live text chat on their desktop or <a href="http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2956618">mobile device</a> of choice</li>
</ul>
Many companies are looking for omni-channel approach to customer service utilizing one of the many channels available, such as:
<ul>
<li>Email marketing tools</li>
<li>SMS messages</li>
<li>Online ticketing</li>
<li>Live chat</li>
<li>Phone calls</li>
</ul>
If you have a comprehensive, high-performance web presence in place, but want to scale up your customer self-service options, you have at least five possible paths moving forward:
<ol>
<li>Leverage your existing content management system and write code to provide a live, or batch integration with a back office CRM or ERP application</li>
<li>Develop a custom portal, and “bolt” it on to your existing website. Build an API connection to your help desk application</li>
<li>Subscribe to a customer ticketing/support application in the cloud, and embed it in your CMS/custom website</li>
<li>License a separate CMS, and CRM connector bridge application. Or possibly, a CRM portal framework which is installed directly into your customer service application of choice</li>
<li>Subscribe to a cloud-based system which doesn’t require a separate CMS or take up any digital real estate in your support/customer <a href="https://www.magentrix.com/products/features/casemanagement">service case management</a> application</li>
</ol>
Each of these options has its own distinct advantages and disadvantages. How you rationalize these factors will vary based on your business priorities, the technical resources you have available, and budgetary availability.
Customer service and support portals generally offer these benefits:
<ul>
<li>A support knowledgebase, and/or an FAQ page (or pages)</li>
<li>A ticket generation and tracking system</li>
<li>Technical help documentation, and/or how-to videos</li>
<li>A <a href="https://www.magentrix.com/products/features/forum">community forum</a>, where customers can seek out similar questions from their peers, and best practices. Many forums allow members/subscribers to suggest new features for the product roadmap, or find known bugs, workarounds and/or release notes.</li>
</ul>
Considering options 1-5 above, you can probably achieve most of the functionality here with just about any CRM portal you deploy, provided you have enough expertise and funding available. The top ten key decision making factors which determines which portal path businesses should take are:
<ul>
<li>Ease of implementation and ongoing management</li>
<li>Business application integration options</li>
<li>Capital/operating costs</li>
<li>Cohesiveness between your corporate website and the <a href="http://www.softwareadvice.com/resources/customer-self-service-portal-improves-cx/">customer service portal</a>, or option to consolidate on a single platform</li>
<li>The development/design/technical skills required to install, design, develop, publish and management of the portal and related content</li>
<li>The availability of a Software as a Service portal solution</li>
<li>Impact of the portal on the <a href="http://msdynamicsworld.com/story/microsoft-dynamics-partner-roundup-electronic-signatures-retail-self-service-crm-portals-publi">xRM business application</a> performance, and the xRM app on the portal performance for that matter</li>
<li>Opportunities to add extended functionality to the self-service support portal, such as a community hub, acceptance of online payments, and/or e-mail marketing functionality</li>
<li>Reporting capabilities for the portal, either through Google Analytics, or a platform-specific <a href="https://www.magentrix.com/articles/blog/Analytics_and_Metrics-4-01-2015">content analytics</a> engine</li>
</ul>
When you integrate the client experience with your internal case management system, such as Salesforce.com or Microsoft Dynamics CRM, you reduce calls and e-mails into your support center, drive down support costs and improve customer satisfaction. According to a <a href="http://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/industries/telecommunications/our%20insights/lessons%20from%20digital%20telcos%20five%20initiatives%20to%20improve%20business%20performance/higher_satisfaction_at_lower_costs_digitizing_customer_care.ashx">McKinsey study</a>, many companies have realized cost savings with forums and collaborative communities of over 80 percent.
When you combine the ease of deployment and management of a cloud based, collaborative customer portal platform with a powerful online CRM business solution, it’s a win-win for the company and its customers.
Are you reluctant to contract costly, extensive programming projects to deploy <a href="http://www.fastcompany.com/3013177/creative-conversations/why-the-future-of-customer-service-is-self-service">self service platforms</a> on enterprise CMS applications like Sitecore or Kentico? Cautious about investing in costly CMS support, maintenance and/or licensing, like with Sitefinity and/or SharePoint? Your existing CRM might be ideal for your static content; but might lack interoperability with your business applications.
Though CRM applications were not built to act as a CMS, some CRM portals such as Microsoft’s CRM Portal (formerly Adxstudio) and Salesforce.com’s native portal platform require their customers to do just that. Purpose-built ticketing apps might be sufficient for small businesses with limited needs.
The Magentrix platform for collaborative customer self-service is at the nexus of ease of deployment, affordability and ease of business application integration. As a complement to an existing CMS deployment, or as a stand-alone customer service platform, Magentrix portals deliver customer service efficiency, minimize technology overhead and controls cost. <a href="https://www.magentrix.com/products/customerportal">Learn More about the Magentrix Solution.</a>
<hr />
This post is <a href="/advertising/">sponsored</a> by Magentrix. Find out more at <a href="https://www.magentrix.com/aspx/trypartnerportal">Magentrix</a>.

Customer Service Portals: Fitting in With a CMS or CRM

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If you just heard a loud noise echo across the digital marketplace, it might have been a sonic boom. But don't let your ears fool your eyes: this was a visual explosion, and it has us intrigued.
A few days ago, Milan-based start-up <a href="https://boom.co/" target="_blank">BOOM</a> acquired Berlin-based visual production start-up <a href="https://www.lemonone.com/" target="_blank">LemonOne</a> for an undisclosed sum. Now, that might not ordinarily catch your eye (or your ear), but what got our attention was the growth of a relatively new sub-category: visual asset management (VAM).
Not to be confused with the abundant plethora of TLAs (three-lettered acronyms), VAMs are evolving the <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/acquia-widens-its-dxp-stack-with-widen-acquires-dam-and-pim-capabilities/">digital asset management (DAM)</a> charter by focusing more deliberately on the role of imagery within an ecosystem. Along with housing files like photography, VAMs go further by offering tools that enhance the management of creative files, brand elements, video components, and more. 
VAMs seem to have a number of different applications, but there's a <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/visual-asset-management-what-why-you-need-kevin-bouffard-c-e-t-/" target="_blank">great overview</a> by Kevin Bouffard of 3SixtyEdge about a use case for construction. In it, a VAM provides a more immersive experience for integrating different image assets into a 360-degree tour of a building or property. Very cool stuff. 
As you might guess, VAMs are a perfect content management repository for agencies and marketing departments that are developing integrated visual solutions. As such, BOOM's acquisition of LemonOne further expands its content capacity to help creative teams build visual campaigns, organize imagery, collaborate on ideas, and publish visual content anywhere online.
<h2>BOOM makes waves by managing the full visual lifecycle</h2>
Founded by <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacopobenedettiai/" target="_blank">Jacopo Benedetti</a>, <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/federicomattiadolci/" target="_blank">Federico Mattia Dolci</a>, and <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/giacomo-grattirola-1b8a58100/" target="_blank">Giacomo Grattirola</a>, BOOM has specialized in visual asset management. The company has raised over $18M in seed, Series A, and Venture funding in the last three years and has grown rapidly since its launch in 2018 – now serving clients in over 80 countries.
The acquisition of LemonOne strengthens BOOM’s presence in Europe, accelerating the delivery of its mission to create a scalable environment that empowers digital companies to effectively manage their full visual content lifecycle – from initial production to final distribution – from anywhere in the world in line with e-commerce growth and increased demand for visual content.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2022/06/boom-workspace-screen.png" alt="Boom Workspace Screen" />BOOM Workspace Screen
“This is a major leap forward in BOOM’s strategy to serve the whole of Europe and beyond through our ground-breaking digital platform," said Federico Mattia Dolci, CEO of BOOM. "We have been growing our team across Europe and the Americas, and we are now delighted to join forces with the team from LemonOne. They bring fresh energy, passion as well as a wealth of vertical expertise. We look forward to doing great things together!”
<h2>Squeezing the juice from LemonOne</h2>
Founded in 2017, <a href="https://www.lemonone.com/" target="_blank">LemonOne</a> has grown to serve online marketplaces, real estate agencies, and food delivery companies with on-demand, tailor-made visual content for their digital presence.
LemonOne’s clients will join BOOM’s network of customers – which includes major names such as Dolce &amp; Gabbana and Houzz – on the BOOM Worksite, a centralized platform that enables digital enterprises to organize, share, and collaborate on visual assets with internal and third parties.
LemonOne’s team will join BOOM’s workforce to boost service capacity for its growing customer base and enable the company to focus on its technology and product arms as it develops its new SaaS platform, Worksite. Meanwhile, LemonOne’s photographers will join BOOM’s community of visual content creators, enabling BOOM to serve a broader range of customers across mainland Europe.
“BOOM is breaking the ground to develop a revolutionary category leader in the space of visual asset management while LemonOne built a European market leader for digital photo production," said Maximilian Schwahn, Co-Founder at LemonOne. "By joining forces and being able to offer every company a one-stop-shop solution for booking, collaborating, and publishing visuals, we are able to reach our founding vision even faster. Therefore, we are super happy to partner up with BOOM and benefit from each other’s strength to make 1+1=3 for all our customers as well as our community.”
If you’re interested in checking out BOOM, you can <a href="https://boom.co/get-started/" target="_blank">get a free demo here</a>.
<h2>About Boom</h2>
<a href="https://boom.co/" target="_blank">BOOM</a> is a Saas company that powers smart solutions for visual asset collaboration, management, and production. Through a centralized end-to-end platform, BOOM allows creative and marketing companies to create, organize, collaborate on, and publish content anywhere online, making their workflow fast and frictionless from start to finish. BOOM’s client portfolio includes international players such as D&amp;G, Deliveroo, Glovo, and Westwing, all of whom have enjoyed BOOM’s visual production resources as well as the platform’s service as a single source of truth for all their visual assets.
<h2>About LemonOne</h2>
Lemon One provides businesses such as major online marketplaces, real estate agencies, and food delivery companies with on-demand photos within hours through algorithms that match them with a broad network of photographers. With Lemon One, businesses get tailor-made, high-quality visual content for their online presence, without extra effort.

Visual Content Management Platform BOOM Acquires Visual Production Company LemonOne

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To wrap up this featured week with Ecwid, we’re focusing on the <a target="_blank" href="https://www.ecwid.com/apps/Featured">Ecwid App Market</a>.Coming back to today’s topic, it’s my view that no platform is truly complete without at least a basic app store to provide optional functionality boosts. And Ecwid has that – and more.Let’s take a look at Ecwid’s App Store.<h2>Keep Your Store Growing</h2><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/sshot-3-1-1024x489.png" alt="sshot-3" />Adding functionality to the front-end and back-end of your store will help keep its growth on track. And Ecwid recognized that by making weekly additions to its App Store.Some of the categories found within the store include:<ul><li>Marketing</li><li>Shipping</li><li>Store Management</li><li>Theme customization</li><li>Accounting</li></ul>And what’s more is, many of the apps are totally free.<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/ecwid-apps.png" /><h2>Developer Friendly</h2>I could tell you that Ecwid is developer-friendly, but I think it sounds better coming from an actual developer:<blockquote>“Most eCommerce platforms only partially support 360º views. Crazy, I know, but there is good news…Many eCommerce platforms are catching up, albeit slowly. We've built 360º view Apps for other eCommerce platforms, but most platforms are hesitant to let us build a deeply integrated App that works perfect.And then, there's Ecwid.Ecwid is the first eCommerce platform that decided to have 100% compatibility with our 360º viewer at Imajize. In fact, we worked directly with the software engineers at Ecwid.The result? Together, we built one the most polished 360º view Apps yet. With this App installed, you can easily add our 360º viewer into your Ecwid product page. It's almost too easy.The team at Ecwid played a huge role at making this happen (so thanks, Ecwid!).”</blockquote>All that praise for Ecwid came recently from Imajize, an app developer that was happy about Ecwid’s support for its 360 degree view image producing application. Support that, they say, has been hard to come by elsewhere in the eCommerce industry.If that’s not developer friendliness, I don’t know what is.To check out the Ecwid App Market for yourself, <a target="_blank" href="https://www.ecwid.com/">head over to their website</a>.And with that, we tie up the last entry of Ecwid’s featured week here on CMS Critic.

The Ecwid App Market: A Hub of Growth & Customization

Since arriving on the scene back in late 2013, <a href="https://ghost.org/" target="_blank">Ghost</a> has been hailed for it's blogging-centric approach. It made a lot of tasks easier for bloggers, but it also had some areas which weren't as smooth, like navigation management. That has now been seen to.
In the most recent CMS Awards, Ghost was crowned the <a href="/2014-most-promising-cms/" target="_blank">2015 Critic's Choice Most Promising CMS</a>.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/2178663.png" /> Before this much needed update, users had to code custom navigation menus directly into each Ghost theme, Hardly a hallmark of user friendliness. 
Now though, Ghost has unveiled a new interface which enables users to easily build and edit custom navigation menus.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/nav-admin_1.gif" />
Users can drag-and-drop menu buttons, rename them, edit their URLs, add news ones and delete existng ones, all from the same simple interface. Now that's more Ghost-like.
Ghost Pro users will notice this update immediately, whereas self-hosted Ghost users will need to upgrade to <a href="https://ghost.org/download/">Ghost 0.5.9</a> in order to enjoy easier custom navihgation management. 
You can see the <a href="http://blog.ghost.org/navigation/" target="_blank">official announcement here</a>, and you can also <a href="https://ghost.org/" target="_blank">visit the Ghost website</a> to get started on your own blog.

Ghost Introduces Simpler Custom Navigation

The open source content management system <a href="http://typo3.org/" target="_blank">TYPO3 CMS</a> is available for Microsoft Azure effective immediately.
<a href="http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/" target="_blank">Microsoft Azure</a> is the Microsoft cloud solution for enterprises looking to integrate on-premises apps and data, whereas TYPO3 is a free and open-source web content management framework based on PHP. The Swiss software company was founded in 2004.
According to the TYPO3 Association, more than 500,000 active websites worldwide use TYPO3 CMS.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/typo3-logo-webdesign-duisburg1-1_400x0.png" alt="Typo3" />
Microsoft Azure customers now have total access to TYPO3 CMS on the Azure Web App Gallery. Naturally, this will enable such users to build, manage and/or adapt complex websites. Additionally, they can now easily change system requirements through autoscaling.
Peter Jaeger, the Senior Director Developer Experience &amp; Evangelism (DX), and Member of the Management Board of Microsoft, Germany, had this to say:
<blockquote>“Microsoft is increasingly embracing open source applications for the company‘s platforms and solutions. This is because we do not attach priority to technologies, but to people who wish to be productive across platforms and devices.
In recent months, we have made several development tools like .NET open source, thereby intensifying our collaboration with the open source community.
Deployments of TYPO3 on our Microsoft cloud platform Windows Azure are another step towards the community: not only do we address developers, but also many thousands of web designers and website administrators who benefit from Azure as a high-performance, secure and easily scalable platform.”</blockquote>
For more information on this integration, check out <a href="http://typo3.org/news/article/typo3-cms-now-available-for-microsoft-azure/" target="_blank">TYPO3's official announcement</a>.
Also, you can explore more of <a href="/products/typo3/" target="_blank">TYPO3 via our CMS Directory</a>.

TYPO3 CMS Now Available For Microsoft Azure

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<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/arastta-welcome.jpg" alt="arastta-welcome" />
As with many other software solutions, Open Source will soon be a standard for the eCommerce platforms, too. That’s why <a href="https://arastta.com">Arastta</a> team developed Arastta Cloud service.
The question is simple in this regard: Is there any other Open Source eCommerce platform or solution on the cloud? And the answer is: No! Arastta Cloud is the first and the only Cloud based Open Source eCommerce service. So when you create an Arastta Cloud account, you can access your store’s all PHP files and database tables via phpMyadmin interface.
So let’s say you need a feature for your store and couldn’t find an extension for that specific need, or you have your own development team and want to create your own solution for your needs. It’s not possible to implement them to your store on the other Cloud eCommerce services. But thanks to open source Arastta Cloud service, you can easily implement any customization or modification on your store.
Also you can see what lays beyond your store’s interface. Arastta Cloud is a trustful eCommerce solution because you know what’s executed with your codes and what they do.
<h2>The Advantages of Open Source</h2>
</div>
<div>
Being Open Source provides another great advantage to Arastta Cloud users: freedom of leaving. If you are not satisfied with the Arastta, then you can leave it with all your data because you can access all the files and database. But this is not possible with other cloud platforms since they only allow access to limited areas of your store.
Arastta Cloud brings all advantages of being an Open Source platform to its users but at the same time that doesn’t cost them. Whole structure is built as single-tenant, thus all stores are isolated from each other. In case of an attack or hack, it doesn’t affect other stores and accounts.
Additionally, automatic / one-click updates, server and hosting maintenance, extra security measurements are included in the Arastta Cloud plans. So Arastta Cloud users can focus on their sales, marketing and customers while Arastta team do all the technical and boring stuff for them.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/dashboard.png" alt="dashboard" />
Here is a quick overview about Arastta Cloud’s advantages:
 
</div>
<ul>
<li>Customize, extend and modify your store without any limitation</li>
<li>Control and see what lays under your store’s infrastructure</li>
<li>Backup or download any files or database tables</li>
<li>Not happy with your Arastta store, we do not hold you captive. You can move your store elsewhere since you can access everything</li>
<li>Single-tenant platform. Each store and account isolated from each other</li>
<li>Automatic backup &amp; restore with one-click</li>
<li>Auto updates</li>
<li>One-click updates</li>
</ul>
<div>Create an Arastta Cloud account for free and try it out today – <a href="https://arastta.com">https://arastta.com</a></div>
<div></div>
<div>Get more details about Arastta – <a href="https://arastta.org">https://arastta.org</a></div>
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This post is <a href="/advertising/">sponsored</a> by Arastta. Find out more at <a href="https://arastta.com">arastta.com</a>.

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