Articles - Page 73

Brightspot Illuminates the Future of CMS with Human-Controlled, AI-Powered Storytelling 

matt-garrepy

<a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/deploy-scalable-cost-effective-websites-in-minutes-using-solodev/" target="_blank">Yesterday we discussed Solodev's new cloud infrastructure built layer by layer to give customers the full power of Amazon Web Services</a>. The final pillar of Solodev is Support and in 2016, Solodev decided to take their support offering to an entirely new level. Here’s a list of some of the new additions to Solodev’s support offerings:
<ul>
<li>24x7x365 HelpDesk</li>
<li>Enterprise Support Plans</li>
<li>Staff Augmentation Services</li>
<li>Onboarding Teams</li>
<li>Video Tutorials</li>
<li>Technical Documentation</li>
<li>Solodev Web Development Blog</li>
<li>Customer Success Engineers</li>
<li>Phone Support</li>
</ul>
Solodev now offers standard support to all customers while also offering enterprise support plans at an additional cost. Standard support plans include HelpDesk access to submit support tickets, phone support, and access to Solodev’s technical documentation, instructional videos, and web development blog that posts daily code tutorials.
<h3>Solodev Launch: Deliverables Tailored to your Needs</h3>
Solodev’s new enterprise support offering, Solodev Launch, is a collaborative team-based approach individually tailored to customers’ business goals and site objectives. Although Solodev Launch is extremely enhanced support, it also serves as an extension of your marketing, development, design, and IT departments and can fill any roles missing on your team. Solodev Launch has a single purpose – to help Solodev’s customers get up and running as quickly and effectively as possible.
<h3>Enterprise Support: When Downtime is Not an Option</h3>
Solodev’s enterprise support plans give you access to in-house developers at Solodev who can assist you with diagnosis, repairs of site functionality, module implementations, system integrations, and platform customizations. Customer Success Engineers enhance your technical team, help champion best practices and help ensure consistency and accuracy with your Solodev deployment.
Sometimes waiting even for a couple of hours is just not an option which is why Solodev’s enterprise support ensures you don't have to wait your turn to get help. With their 1 hour, 24×7 response time you can sleep better at night knowing support is just a phone call or email away.
Solodev has an array of web related roles that can fill in the missing roles on your team. Whether you need a quick help with your design, integration or enterprise training, you can source professionals to ensure your projects turn into a success.
<h3>What's Ahead for 2017?</h3>
As you can see Solodev didn’t just move to the cloud or roll out a new release of their product this past year. Solodev made massive upgrades and added onto their product offering as they plowed through their product roadmap. Solodev turned their offering into a well-oiled machine and, quite possibly, the only turnkey enterprise CMS solution on the market of its kind. With an enterprise grade web experience platform backed by a carefully crafted cloud infrastructure sitting on Amazon Web Services and robust enterprise support offerings to ensure customer success, Solodev is definitely the CMS to look out for in 2017.
Solodev is currently offering a 14 Day Free Trial of the Solodev Web Experience Platform. This includes an instance of Solodev on an Amazon EC2 server as well as 50GB of storage, 2GB of memory, as well as email and chat support. You can also purchase <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/seller-profile?id=8e11c912-6253-41b8-b065-bf32bd27911b" target="_blank">Solodev on the AWS Marketplace</a> with plans starting at $99/month.

Ensuring customer success every step of the way

mike-johnston

Solodev’s cloud infrastructure put them on the map at Amazon Web Services re:Invent 2016 beginning with the release of the new Solodev Web Experience Platform, when they were announced as one of twenty AWS partners to join AWS SaaS Subscriptions program shortly after becoming the world’s 1st Enterprise CMS available On-Demand. In addition to winning our People’s Choice Award for “<a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/solodev-cms-winners-of-the-best-cloud-cms-award-now-available-in-the-aws-cloud/" target="_blank">Best Cloud CMS</a>” of 2016, Solodev launched their first iteration for Windows on the AWS Marketplace. The combination of these major strategic moves has positioned Solodev as both an innovator and thought leader in enterprise cloud computing in the CMS space.
<iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/i3w-GC_KXjc?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe>
Before taking a deeper dive into Solodev’s Cloud Infrastructure, let’s look at a few of the core benefits of hosting your website in the cloud with Solodev and AWS:
<ul>
<li>Deploy content to customers anywhere in the world quickly, with no need to build a data center or find a co-location provider</li>
<li>Automatically scale capacity up and down as your business requires</li>
<li>Improve resource utilization and pay only for what you use</li>
</ul>
Now let’s take a deeper look at Solodev’s state of the art cloud architecture.
<h3>Scalability</h3>
Solodev utilizes several tools to help your website scale along with your business. Solodev employs <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/autoscaling/" target="_blank">Auto Scaling</a> to maintain application availability and allows you to scale your server capacity up or down automatically per conditions you define. Auto Scaling can also automatically increase the number of server instances during demand spikes to maintain performance and decrease capacity during lulls to reduce costs.
Solodev utilizes <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/efs/" target="_blank">Amazon Elastic File System</a> (Amazon EFS) that provides simple, scalable file storage in the AWS Cloud. With Amazon EFS, storage capacity is elastic, growing and shrinking automatically as you add and remove files, so your applications have the storage they need, when they need it.
On top of scaling your website and file system, Solodev users benefit from <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing/" target="_blank">Elastic Load Balancing</a> that automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple Amazon servers. This enables Solodev users to achieve fault tolerance in their applications, seamlessly providing the required amount of load balancing capacity needed to route application traffic.
<h3>Global CDN</h3>
Solodev utilizes <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/" target="_blank">Amazon CloudFront</a>, a global content delivery network (CDN) service that accelerates delivery of websites, APIs, video content or other web assets. It integrates with other Amazon Web Services products to give developers and businesses an easy way to accelerate content to end users with no minimum usage commitments.
<h3>Availability</h3>
A major benefit of being in the AWS Cloud is their multiple availability zones around the globe, as well as server redundancy for each layer of the technology stack, customers can attain extremely high levels of availability. For example, a high capacity event that could potentially degrade site access can trigger extra web servers operating round-robin, including reserve capacity in the second availability zone; a fully redundant file system in the second availability zone that is constantly syncing; master-master replication for database pairs; and a secondary load balancer in a redundant environment.
<h3>Security</h3>
Security is integral to the Solodev Platform and is embedded into every architectural layer. Firewall systems and IP-based restrictions protect their perimeter network and prevent unauthorized access to customer systems. Solodev utilizes security-monitoring applications that monitor for unusual activity and constantly screen for possible or actual security breaches. In an actual security event, Solodev Security and Engineering team members are alerted to promptly isolate any issues.
Additionally, to ensure the highest quality software environment, Solodev performs ongoing vulnerability scans and penetration testing. Solodev stands by the infrastructure supporting the their platform – any vulnerabilities are reviewed and patches are applied according to documented timelines and the severity of the vulnerability. To prevent unauthorized users from accessing a customer’s instance, Solodev also offers granular permission settings.
Solodev is currently offering a 14 Day Free Trial of the Solodev Web Experience Platform. This includes an instance of Solodev on an Amazon EC2 server as well as 50GB of storage, 2GB of memory, as well as email and chat support.

Deploy scalable, cost-effective websites in minutes using Solodev

<a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/exploring-the-solodev-web-experience-platform/" target="_blank">Yesterday we kicked off Solodev's featured week with a high level overview of the new Solodev Web Experience Platform.</a>
Today, we're going to do a deep dive into the platform. Solodev made major strides in their product roadmap this year from being just another player in the enterprise content management space to disrupting the space by becoming the world’s first enterprise content management system available on-demand in the Amazon Web Services Cloud.
On top of their move to the cloud and all that entails such as unparalleled levels of security, scalability, and reliability, Solodev also shifted its focus towards empowering marketing teams to use Solodev to target customer segments with tailor made content.
Solodev also rolled out a new short code language to make web development in Solodev easier for the non-technical user. Other features rolled out include its own website analytics application as well as Solodev Experiments which allow you to A/B test pieces of content against one another. Last and certainly not least, 2016 marked the first year Solodev released a Windows flavor of their flagship product. The combination of these major strides makes Solodev a serious contender in the enterprise content management space in 2017.
Now let’s take a look under the hood…
<h3>Enterprise Features</h3>
Solodev includes enterprise features such as multisite management, granular permissions, content scheduling, staging, and publishing, approval workflows, versioning, digital asset management, and just about every other standard enterprise CMS feature on the market. Like all aspects of Solodev, however, they have made major strides in their enterprise product feature set as well, improving existing features and adding new features such as:
* Native Analytics
* CodeMirror to enhance “in CMS” coding
* Templating Language (Short Codes)
* Theme Importer
* Drag and Drop Form Builder
* Improved SEO-friendly URLs
* Solodev Experiments for A/B Testing Content
* Table Schema Editor
* New Meta Tags for Social Media
* Redesigned Dashboard
What sets Solodev’s enterprise features apart from their competition isn’t the mere existence of their feature set; it’s the way they implemented their features both old and new to improve their ease of use and maximize the desired effect of the function of every feature. Moving on…
<h3>Custom Applications</h3>
One of the coolest things about Solodev is its application development framework, which utilizes “modules” to enable you to build literally any custom web application you can think of.
The role of an application or “module” in Solodev is to manage how data entered into the module is displayed on your website. Modules are extremely powerful and creating your own is fairly easy due to Solodev’s extensive documentation and optional short code language. Solodev allows you to customize which entries are included, how the entries' information is displayed and what information you want to be displayed on your website.
Solodev also provides short codes that you can use to print this data on your web pages. Again, this is all thoroughly documented and Solodev is kind enough to provide the sample code that powers their most popular enterprise modules, which you can customize to fit your needs.
<h3>Develop Websites Faster with Solodev</h3>
The staple of the Solodev <a href="https://www.solodev.com/" target="_blank">Web Experience Platform</a> is a templating system that speeds up development time by preventing the need to duplicate HTML code during web development. When you build your website in Solodev, you build what are called “page templates” such as your home template, sectional, and content templates, etc. When adding web pages to your website, you can simply use these page templates and insert new content into drop zones within those templates. In essence, you can build a 50,000 page website and only actual code three templates in a matter of a few hours. Solodev is definitely at the frontier of streamlined web development within a CMS platform.
As a standalone CMS for the Enterprise, Solodev has everything you need and perhaps a bit more. What makes Solodev particularly unique from a web design perspective is its “blank canvas” philosophy where it doesn’t restrict you or force you to compromise on design. If you know HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, you can begin coding your website within minutes of purchasing Solodev directly in the platform. And as if that wasn’t cool enough, Solodev is one of the only web development platforms that actually allows you to see what you are building as you are building it.
Solodev is currently offering a 14 Day Free Trial of the Solodev Web Experience Platform. This includes an instance of Solodev on an Amazon EC2 server as well as 50GB of storage, 2GB of memory, as well as email and chat support.

The Genesis of the Personalized Web Experience

It’s time to kick off another featured week, this time with Solodev, winner of our People’s Choice Award for “Best Cloud CMS of 2016”. Solodev is a cloud-based enterprise-grade <a href="https://www.solodev.com/" target="_blank">web experience platform</a> designed to empower organizations and developers to build beautiful websites and deliver amazing digital experiences.
Launched in 2006, Solodev is well established in the content management space, serving clients across the globe in a wide range of verticals.
As new trends and practices have emerged in the CMS space, the Solodev team has carefully constructed its latest software release with two major points of focus: the digital experience and their new cloud infrastructure.
Solodev’s latest release comes with a marketing toolbox to help marketers and content authors tailor the <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/inside-the-machine-of-the-digital-experience/">digital experience</a> to the end user. Additionally, Solodev is now fully optimized for the entire Amazon Web Services product suite, giving users the ability to rapidly deploy websites with unparalleled levels of security and scalability. As they pivot towards the cloud and digital experiences, Solodev continues to add to its existing functionality and pave the way within the enterprise WCMS industry. Solodev also released their first flavor of their platform for Windows adding to an already lengthy list of achievements in 2016.
Over the next five days we will be reviewing the three pillars of Solodev:
<ul>
<li>The Solodev Web Experience Platform</li>
<li>Solodev’s New Cloud Environment</li>
<li>Solodev’s New U.S. Based Enterprise Support Offering</li>
</ul>
The Solodev Web Experience Platform
Solodev is a platform that boasts interactive page building, built-in analytics, landing page creation and management, a framework to easily build custom applications, and the ability to deliver the right experience to the right audience at the right time through content targeting to different customer segments. But perhaps most importantly for big brands, Solodev has the security and scalability that comes with being housed in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud.
Enterprise Content Management in the Cloud
Solodev’s move to the cloud allows brands to leverage Solodev as a SaaS (Software as a Service) solution. That means once you’re signed up your brand will have everything it needs to kick off its large-scale web project, instantaneously. Solodev delivers robust support for elastic load balancing, auto scaling, global CDNs, and disaster recovery – keeping customer data safe and secure across Amazon Web Services global network of state-of-the-art data centers.
AWS provides a cloud-based experience with world-renowned infrastructure and rapid content delivery. Solodev hasn’t tried to re-invent the wheel here; they’ve used the best technology to support their platform. It’s that simple.
Thanks to that intelligent decision, Solodev users benefit from:
<ul>
<li>Scalability
<ul>
<li>Elastic Load Balancing</li>
<li>Auto Scaling</li>
<li>Elastic File Storage</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Global CDN
<ul>
<li>AWS CloudFront</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Availability Zones</li>
<li>Security
<ul>
<li>24/7/365 Monitoring</li>
<li>Server Redundancy</li>
<li>Network Firewalls</li>
<li>IP-based restrictions</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
<a href="https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/" target="_blank">*Click here for a map of Amazon Web Services availability zones</a>
The benefits of Solodev’s AWS Cloud Infrastructure don’t stop there, though. The sheer amount of server availability zones across the globe puts your website close to your audience, no matter where they are in the world.
Furthermore, Solodev is capable of scaling up resources at any time (like, during peak hours or peak season), before scaling them back down again during quieter periods. And what’s more is, you only pay for the resources that your sites uses. Now that’s intelligent.
Superb Support Options
Solodev offers an unparalleled online knowledge base packaged with hundreds of pages of documentation and how-to-guides and videos to guide you through using the Solodev Platform. Solodev also rolled out an online support ticketing system that is available to all Solodev users. This is further backed by an industry leading web development blog that equips readers with the knowledge they need in order to build better websites, particularly on the Solodev Platform.
And if all of that isn’t enough, Solodev released a new offering called “Solodev Launch” that can provide dedicated launch teams to augment your internal IT department “a la carte” with your online project development needs.
Getting Started with Solodev
Solodev offers three subscription plans for brands to get started with their platform. Plans start from $99/month as shown below.
<ul>
<li>Small – Single Server Instance ($99/month)</li>
<li>Medium – Single Server Instance ($399/month)</li>
<li>Cluster – Multi Server Cluster ($1,830/month)</li>
<li>Enterprise – Multi Server Cluster (Call 1-800-859-7656 for details)</li>
<li>Enterprise – On-Premise (Call 1-800-859-7656 for details)</li>
</ul>
*For more information on Solodev Pricing, visit their pricing page.
To learn more about Solodev, check out their website at <a href="https://www.solodev.com/" target="_blank">www.solodev.com</a> and their <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/products/solodev-cms/" target="_blank">Solodev CMSCritic Listing</a>. And of course, be sure to stay tuned for more featured coverage during this Solodev featured week.

Exploring the Solodev Web Experience Platform

Ghost, the popular WordPress alternative, has some interesting news this week. They've announced a new $45,000 developer program to help build and develop new exciting publications. As part of this new initiative, here's what they are offering:
<blockquote>
We’re looking for 3 passionate teams to work with for the next year, and help them create the web’s next important destinations for great journalism. As well as significant financial support, we’re offering up our full engineering team to help build and release the technology which they need.
</blockquote>
Here's how it works and why I think it's going to be a very smart move for Ghost. Rather than attempt to fill their CMS with features based on what they think publishers need, they are going to build and fund 3 great publications of the future, and build their technology around their needs.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/journalism914x0-is.jpg" />This, in my opinion, is one of the most intelligent intitiatives I've seen in quite some time from a CMS development group. Just like with a customer, this will enable them to find those small, niggling things that can end up making their product invaluable for future consumers. It's a brilliant way to target your product towards a specific niche; in this case journalistic endeavours; and really focus in on excelling in one niche area.
I've always found Ghost an interesting alternative platform to traditional blogging software and now I think they are on the right track to become one of the best for publishing. I'll be paying close attention to their successes.
To learn more about this new endeavour, check out <a href="https://blog.ghost.org/journalism/" target="_blank">https://blog.ghost.org/journalism/</a>

Ghost Announces Ghost for Journalism

Epicor Software Corporation, a global provider of <a href="http://www.epicor.com/industries/default.aspx">industry-specific enterprise software</a> to promote business growth, today announced that it has acquired privately-held docSTAR, an award-winning developer of document management software based in Schenectady, New York. The transaction closed on Jan. 3, financial terms were not disclosed.
The acquisition brings docSTAR collaborative cloud-based enterprise content management (ECM) and automated accounts payable (AP) solutions to the Epicor enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions portfolio. Founded in 1996, docSTAR has over 20 years of experience delivering solutions that enable organizations to increase productivity, reduce cost and transaction cycle times through business process automation.
Today, nearly 2,000 organizations in North America rely on docSTAR solutions—available as a cloud hosted service or on premises. docSTAR enables customers to streamline business processes with smart enterprise content management, document management, automated accounts payable and electronic forms technology that integrates with third party ERP solutions. docSTAR solutions are suitable for a number of industries including insurance, financial services, healthcare, real estate, manufacturing, legal, non-profit, education and the public sector. docSTAR customers include <a href="http://www.docstar.com/customer-success/allison-marine">Allison Marine Contractors, Inc.</a>, Crescent Crown Distribution, the <a href="http://www.docstar.com/customer-success/cleveland-indians">Cleveland Indians</a>, <a href="http://www.docstar.com/customer-success/mohawk-fine-papers-inc">Mohawk Fine Papers, Inc.</a>, and the <a href="http://www.docstar.com/customer-success/united-way-greater-knoxville">United Way of Greater Knoxville</a>, to name a few.
“The acquisition of docSTAR supports our strategy to strengthen and expand our cloud offerings to continually enhance customer experience and the value we deliver to our customers,” said Kathy Crusco, chief operating and financial officer, Epicor. “docSTAR brings valuable knowledge and experience in the development and implementation of cloud-based document management software, with a successful track record integrating its solutions with leading ERP offerings. A near term focus following the acquisition will be on extending docSTAR integration to Epicor ERP.”
With the close of the acquisition, former President and CEO of docSTAR, Tom Franceski, will lead the document management business at Epicor as general manager reporting directly to Crusco.
“We are excited to join forces with Epicor, a recognized leader in the global ERP market, as we share a commitment to enhance the customer experience through cloud offerings that automate business processes and promote growth,” said Franceski. “The increased scale gained as part of a global organization will enable us to further technology innovation to deliver greater value to customers.”

Epicor Acquires Leading Document Management Software Provider docSTAR and Expands Cloud-Based Solutions Portfolio

The Danish social Intranet company Colibo Inc. has just raised its first major venture funding from a series of prominent investors alongside the Danish Growth Fund. Colibo is injected with an investment in the DKK double-digit million range – funds that are to be used for establishing the company in the US and UK and the further development of the company’s Social Intranet solution, Colibo. Colibo has been on an amazing growth path. The first Intranet solution was installed in 2014, and Colibo has gained significant market shares in Denmark in just a short period of time. Now, the Colibo-solution is to be released internationally, and the company is to be established in the US and UK.
+70,000 users in more than 14 countries
Colibo is a user-friendly and dynamic Intranet alternative for companies and organizations that otherwise would have used Microsoft Sharepoint as their digital workspace solution. The Colibo solution has more than 70,000 users across 14 countries, and customers include The Danish Broadcasting Corporation, Central Denmark Region, Kosan Crisplant, Clipper Group and several Danish municipalities.
Social Intranet tools raise productivity with up to 25 %
According to McKinsey Global Institute analysis1, companies can raise productivity of their administrative staff with up to 25 % by using social Intranet tools, making the knowledge of the organization searchable and by basing the company on a communication platform that supports social workgroups.
Colibo is a spin-off of Mediaworkers – a digital agency, recently awarded the fast-growth company prize for the second consecutive year, and who has brought Colibo all the way to Series A venture through independent financing.
“We are very excited about raising capital as well as gathering a team of investors with solid international software experience. Likewise, we are now able to execute our product roadmap for Colibo, catapulting our software to rank among the very best in the world”, says Mogens Sejer Iversen, CEO and Founding Partner of Colibo.
Mogens Sejer Iversen is now handing over the CEO position in Mediaworkers to Henrik Sejer Gelineck Berg, currently the the company’s CFO. However, Mogens Sejer Iversen continues as head of Mediaworkers Group – the underlying holding company that (among others) is the sole owner of the successful games studio Funday Factory.
Prominent investors ensure the next growth phase Stig Hølledig who is known from the software unicorn Sitecore, is among the Colibo investors says about the potential with Colibo: “Globally, we are facing a growing number of companies who are going to replace their old Intranets with more dynamic digital workspaces over the next couple of years. We are closing this market demand perfectly with Colibo. At the same time, we – the investor – are very impressed with the significant value the solution provides including very satisfied customers representing some of the most demanding organizations in the country,” Stig Hølledig says.
To learn more, visit http://colibo.com/

Innovative Danish software-startup raises millions in venture funding

It looks as though the popular project / task management software, Trello, has caught the interest of a buyer! Atlassian, makers of JIRA and Confluence (amongst other things), have announced their purchase of the popular service.
Trello is something I've personally used for quite some time on CMS Critic and I'm excited to see what improvements we can expect from this purchase. It's my hope that rather than absorb the service and discontinue it, that Atlassian expands on the great offering that's already there and builds it into something even more amazing.
According to a <a href="http://blog.trello.com/trello-atlassian" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">recent blog post</a> from Trello CEO, Michael Pryor:
<blockquote>
“..you can expect Trello to become even more awesome and more fun than it is today. We’re as committed to our original vision and brand as we were on launch day but we now have more firepower to fulfill that mission. We will continue operating as a standalone service, and we will continue to integrate deeply with all of the tools available out there that help people collaborate (and you can look forward to some great integrations with HipChat, Confluence and JIRA).”
</blockquote>
Thankfully, according to Atlassian Co-founder, Mike Cannon-Brookes, it looks as though for now they do intend to maintain Trello as a stand alone service:
<blockquote>
If you currently use Trello as either a free or paid user, you can rest assured that we will continue to offer Trello as a standalone service. We’ll be working with their product team to help them accelerate development efforts. If you are an Atlassian user, I encourage you to set up an account on Trello and check out how it might work for your team.
</blockquote>
To learn more about the acquisition and both companies plans to proceed, read the following posts:
<a href="https://blogs.atlassian.com/2017/01/atlassian-plus-trello/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://blogs.atlassian.com/2017/01/atlassian-plus-trello/ </a>
<a href="http://blog.trello.com/trello-atlassian" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">http://blog.trello.com/trello-atlassian</a>

Trello Is Being Acquired By Atlassian

Best Video Experience

Give your audience the best video experience

#000000

Many business owners and executives have only recently began hearing terms like ‘Web Experience Platform’, or ‘Enterprise Web Content Management’. These platforms allow businesses to build and manage their websites and mobile apps in a central location and make content edits/updates. They also provide robust digital marketing, lead capture, automated email marketing, site analytics, e-Commerce, amongst other features and functionality.
Maybe you have no idea what a “CMS” is. Maybe “Digital Experience” means nothing to you. It’s probably because your web development or ad agency – or whoever manages your online presence – doesn’t want you to know. Why not? Because they want you to continue believing that only they can do what they do.
It’s difficult to explain web content management to people who are so used to having little to no control over their online presence. It’s like explaining the concept of the telephone to a 19th century Western Union messenger. It's commonplace that if an employee wants to edit content their website they would have to call corporate and the IT department’s turnaround time can range from that day of to several months. With a CMS or it's more evolved counterpart, the Web Experience Platform, you can login yourself, make content edits, build applications, web pages, and mobile apps, all on a permission-based system. This is such a relatively new concept in the mind of businesses that despite this offering, they still hold onto the legacy vendors they’ve used for so long, even though a CMS or <a href="https://www.solodev.com/" target="_blank">Web Experience Platform</a> negates the needs for all of those vendors.
That’s because it sounds too good to be true but in this rare case — it’s not. The irony is this, whatever you’re going to pay those other vendors for can be built or integrated with a single CMS platform. Once you have a robust CMS platform, you don’t need any more vendors or agencies.
So let’s break it down to its most elementary level:
TRADITIONAL MODEL
<ul>
<li>Hand coded websites which need to be manually updated by developers and graphic designers</li>
<li>Use of multiple agencies (website agency, design agency, SEO agency, ad agency, print agency, email marketing vendor, video agency, etc.) to maintain your online presence</li>
<li>Multiple websites to update one at a time</li>
<li>Poor mobile experiences on phones or tablets</li>
<li>Huge expenses to multiple vendors to maintain online presence</li>
</ul>
NEW MODEL
<ul>
<li>Mobile responsive beautifully designed websites</li>
<li>Multi-site management through a single login and interface</li>
<li>Direct content edits and updates without the need for the IT department</li>
<li>Singular expense for CMS that handles websites, digital marketing, and ecommerce and all that encompasses</li>
<li>Ability to serve up different content to different customer segments (web experience platform only)</li>
</ul>
In the traditional model, there was much more money to be had in our industry as software vendors could charge based on list items, services, huge annual license costs, private label offerings with inflated margins, misquoted hours, all of which piled up when there are dozens of vendors you barely know who don’t communicate with one another. Just to maintain your online presence you’d pay a dozen vendors a fortune every year without any way to track your return on investment. Agencies told you what you “needed” and then charged you for it month in and month out, year in and year out. When you wanted to swap out a logo you'd have to call someone and wait weeks for it to happen, let alone getting the logo made in the first place and paying the price for a color change. So many vendors carrying so many different responsibilities made it nearly impossible to accurately track Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
The traditional model made it very difficult to maintain a strong online presence with a unified and powerful digital brand behind it using the traditional model as many companies do, some out of complacency, some because of lack of understanding and most for fear of change. The new model is a dream for executives, middle management, marketers, content authors, and the foot soldiers of Corporate America. With a Content Management System, your company can now have control over their entire online digital experience from A to Z without dozens of vendors. Imagine the possibilities.
<h3>About the Author</h3>
Shawn Moore is the founder &amp; CTO of Solodev and the driving force behind the Solodev Web Experience Platform. A visionary leader, Shawn has strategically grown Solodev from inception to a successful company that services clients across the nation and has been named to the Inc. 5000’s fastest growing private companies for the past two years in a row.
Winner of several industry awards for Best CTO and CIO, Shawn Moore is changing the content management landscape with Solodev. With over a decade of executive experience serving as CEO of Solodev and COO for software company Helium Flash, Shawn has the industry knowledge and product passion that continues to drive the development of the Solodev Platform. He is a graduate of Stetson University and often speaks on IT related trends and topics at conferences and universities across the state.

Inside the Machine of the Digital Experience

Created by <a href="https://go.forrester.com/">Forrester</a>, an independent technology and market research company, the Forrester Wave on ECM, much like Gartner’s Magic Quadrant, analyzes particular vendors’ offerings within the document management and content management space.
Forrester is transparent about their methodologies for their Wave on business content services, relaying in-depth information on the processes of their research to prospective buyers.
Additionally, Forrester’s research for its Waves is predicated upon holistic processes, utilizing analysts, research associates, vendor response teams, and customer references to arrive at their findings.
The Wave is parsed into seven milestones: Getting Started; Creating Evaluation Criteria; Selecting Vendors, Inclusion Criteria, and Kickoff; Gathering and Evaluating Data; Scoring; Fact Checking; and Publishing. 
Although document management and business content management services are slightly different facets of information management, they are highly interconnected, and one can be understood through an analysis of another.
<h3> Document Management Points from the Wave</h3>
Forrester focuses more intently on ECM features within vendor solutions than Gartner, noting that core ECM features such as file check-in/checkout, role-based user permissions, file cycle management, and search taxonomy will remain integral to business content and document management services.
In accounting for future ECM trends, the Wave also notes that integration will become increasingly two-sided, or “bidirectional,” meaning that software innovation for programs like Microsoft Office and Salesforce will be increasingly designed to integrate with ECM solutions, whereas prior to this phenomenon it was only document management vendors engineering their software to integrate with third-party software like Salesforce and Microsoft Office.
This will prove beneficial for prospective document management vendors reluctant to buy ECM that does not integrate with software on which the organization already depends.
Forrester aptly refers to this phenomenon as “bidirectional integration.” This bidirectional integration will be an important component of an even broader phenomenon as Forrester sees it: the software landscape adjusting to ECM as ECM has previously adjusted for it.
For organizations interested in using document management and content for sharing, collaboration, and usability, the Wave provides valuable insight on several ECM vendors excelling in these areas.
To solidify the importance of sharing, collaboration, and usability, Forrester notes that stake holders such as regulators and customers are stimulating demand for IT professionals to work on documents and projects outside the geographic location of the walls of the office, making high powered collaboration and file sharing features more essential than ever. 
Additionally, Forrester identifies cloud-based ECM solutions as game-changers for early adopters in many industries—noting that although many organizations start with On-Premise ECM solutions to <a href="http://www.efilecabinet.com/content-management-systems-vs-document-management-systems/">be familiar with ECM technology</a>, it will be useful for prospective buyers to only consider cloud solutions across all industries moving forward. Forrester asserts that the cloud will be increasingly vital with time, and is here to stay, in large part, because of transactional content management.
Forrester also notes that this transactional content phenomenon entails business processes originating outside the organization and are fueled by third parties and customers, while
<h3> Limitations of the Wave</h3>
The Wave weights certain categories based on the research firm’s understanding of prospective buyers’ needs—raising questions about whether research firms understand prospective ECM buyers’ needs well enough to assess them.
On the other hand, some may argue that since Forrester’s customer is, in essence, the person reading their reports, they will take this person’s interest in technologies seriously, striving to provide the most accurate information possible. Furthermore, one may wonder whether Forrester solicited consumer opinion to determine the true needs of prospective buyers.
These trends only further illustrate the trend toward the <a href="http://www.efilecabinet.com/the-consumerization-of-content-navigate-the-change-through-ecm/">consumerization of document management</a> and content management services.

Understanding Document Management in the Forrester Wave Context

This much-debated topic requires further clarity that will, in turn, benefit both the platform provider and the buyer. Let’s start with a definition of each and compare the core differences between them that set them apart.
A CMS, technically a WCMS for Web Content Management System, is used to build, launch, manage, and host websites. In the case of CMS, the user experience is singular, displaying the same content and messaging to every user.
A <a href="https://www.solodev.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Web Experience Platform</a> is also used to build, launch, manage, and host websites. However, a Web Experience Platform delivers a different experience to every website visitor based on a plethora of data which is leveraged to personalize the user experience. With the ability to personalize content and deliver different user experiences to every customer persona, the opportunities are limitless.
Websites built on a CMS are focused on singular content and messaging while a Web Experience Platform can deliver unique web experiences with the content, medium, and messaging completely personalized to the user. Yes, content is still the operative term but it is no longer singular. In a Web Experience Platform, you have tons of content ready to serve up to a wide range of customer personas.
Currently, CMS companies are desperately scrambling to become Web Experience Platforms as they have noticed the tremendous benefit in doing so. Serving up personalized content tailored to the user, giving one user a different experience with your website than another, that is where the future of website management is headed.
As CMS companies scramble to pivot towards delivering tailored web experiences, existing Web Experience Platforms are far ahead of the game but not for long. It is likely that by the end of 2017 a majority of companies previously known as CMS providers will rebrand themselves as Web Experience Platforms. This will push the boundaries of programming languages, <a href="https://www.solodev.com/blog/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">web design</a>, and frameworks as well as the designers and engineers who use them, forcing them to adapt to the new standard in web development which will undoubtedly lead to new programming languages, frameworks, web design practices and much more.
Be wary of vendors that claim to be Web Experience Platforms. A lot of CMS companies are calling themselves Web Experience Platforms, even if they technically aren’t, and others are holding onto the CMS acronym while adding a Web Experience Platform, almost as an additive to the CMS. And everyone else is either a true Web Experience Platform or a CMS. You cannot be both at the same time, the entire purpose and vision of each product, despite being web oriented, is drastically different.
The Web Experience Platform, at times known as a Digital Experience Manager, will become the new standard as technology moves quickly and the entire CMS market migrates their focus to the digital experience. So if you’re looking for a website solution you now know the state of the union and can ask the right questions when looking for platforms to build and manage your website(s).
Begin with this question. Can you really deliver content tailored to the user? And I don’t mean an ad targeted at a certain user that takes them to a certain landing page. I mean someone visiting your website, and all of its pages, and seeing content specific to the customer persona they fall into.
For example, your company sells to marketers, developers, software executives, and agencies. So in the case of a Web Experience Platform, you create content for all of those customer personas and create a conditional structure to serve up the appropriate content based on the persona of the user which can come from several sources of data, namely behavior, cookies, browser history, viewing device, etc.
So reading this as a business executive you’re probably going to ask your IT or Engineering Lead tomorrow why you don’t have a Web Experience Platform. They probably won’t know what that is but tell them to step on it. Be there first, don’t join in at the last second because there isn’t a better time to switch as long as you find the proper vendor with a roadmap to increase the level of personalization the platform provides.
As an end user, a consumer on the web, guess what? Less closing out of windows, skipping through pages, and wasting time looking for the right content online— it’ll be tailor made and served to you. The effect of this shift will be felt across the digital world not just on websites but all digital devices as content becomes more personalized and the experience becomes the focus.
As a buyer, when debating whether or not to choose a CMS or a Web Experience Platform it's much like debating over whether to get a 2017 BMW 7 Series or a 1994 Honda Civic assuming they cost the same. Wouldn't you rather be driving the brand new BMW 7 series?
Web Experience Platforms are the next generation of Content Management Systems. Make sure your existing CMS has a product roadmap that leads to evolving into a Web Experience Platform and if not, find a Web Experience Platform that runs on all six cylinders.
<h3 style="user-select:auto">About the Author</h3>
Shawn Moore is the founder &amp; CTO of Solodev and the driving force behind the Solodev Web Experience Platform. A visionary leader, Shawn has strategically grown Solodev from inception to a successful company that services clients across the nation and has been named to the Inc. 5000’s fastest growing private companies for the past two years in a row.
Winner of several industry awards for Best CTO and CIO, Shawn Moore is changing the content management landscape with Solodev. With over a decade of executive experience serving as CEO of Solodev and COO for software company Helium Flash, Shawn has the industry knowledge and product passion that continues to drive the development of the Solodev Platform. He is a graduate of Stetson University and often speaks on IT related trends and topics at conferences and universities across the state.

The Difference Between a CMS and a Web Experience Platform

You have been thinking about launching a website for your business for ages. But you do not know where to start. 
You have been scheduling meetings with programmers and web designers for quite some time already. But somehow they still can not grasp the concept of your website. 
You would like to have a full control over your website once it is online. But coding, programming, and web development lie far beyond your area of expertise. 
But, but, but – what an annoying word, isn’t it? Have you recognized yourself in any of these sad situations? Then we have great news for you! All the situations mentioned have an excellent solution called <a href="http://www.motocms.com/website-templates/motocms-3-template/59995.html" target="_blank">Evolution Universal Business Website Theme</a>. Let’s examine this multipurpose template from MotoCMS.
With Evolution, Creating Your Website Turns Into a Game
Is there any chance you played with constructors as a child? Remember those interlocking plastic bricks you put together to built pyramids and such? If yes, then congratulations – now you understand the basic principle of Evolution. Simply by moving around the ready-made blocks, you can create the layout for any web page you want in a few seconds. This is achieved thanks to the build-in page editor that MotoCMS is so proud of. No coding skills whatsoever. No tedious hours trying to figure out how to change that one button you do not like. Seems too good to be true, doesn’t it?
Evolution contains one more fascinating feature that can interest both doctors and designers. Do you belong to one of these groups of professionals? Then you will definitely find two child themes of Evolution extremely helpful. These child themes are developed to completely minimize the time you need for the successful completion of your first website. The child page for medical establishments looks positive and refreshing. It helps your clients relax while filling in the contact form, subscribing to your newsletter, or reading about the services you provide. 
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/evolution-medical-child-page.jpg" />
The child page for designers boasts clear layout and user-friendly navigation. Its primary aim is to focus all the attention of your visitors on the visual representation of your completed projects. So, take the page you need and create a website just by moving blocks around. Why not becoming a programmer for one day to create the website you need (or have always wanted)?
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/evolution-web-design-child-page.jpg" />
Another important feature that makes Evolution one of a kind is its 16 ready-to-use pages. This set of pages is developed to facilitate the process of creating your website to its full extent. All the pages you would need to create a multi-page website are right there at hand. “Home”, “Contact us”, “Services” etc. – your job is just to pick the pages that fit your business project and put them together. Yes, this easy. Just like playing a game.
Evolution Guarantees : Your Website Looks Professional
Now you know how to build a website in a blink of an eye. But this may bring up one crucial question, namely – will this website look professional? And here is another great piece of news. Evolution is developed by the top professionals in the programming world. Thus it boasts amazing functionality and outstanding design. No one will ever tell a difference between your website and an expensive website done by a dozen of programmers. 
For starters, Evolution is 100% responsive. Why is responsivity this important? Well, visitors of your website may use different devices to view the content you offer. And all the visitors expect to enjoy the full functionality of your website. Thanks to the 100% responsivity of Evolution, your website looks the way it should on any existing device. 
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/evolution-responsive-design.jpg" />
SEO-integration is another professional feature of Evolution. When you opt for Evolution, you choose a full range of instruments to make your content SEO-friendly. And SEO-friendly content, as we all know, leads to high rankings on Google. And the rankings correlate with the size of your client base. With Evolution, enlarging your clientele does not seem as hard as it used to be, does it?
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/evolution-seo.jpg" />
Evolution also allows you to start a blog. It can be of special importance for businesses that are relatively young. But businesses that want to attract clientele as fast as possible can also use blogs intensively. Blog functionality gives you a chance to publish original content on a regular basis. And as you probably already know, this is one of the most effective ways to improve your SEO ranking.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/evolution-blog.jpg" />
With Evolution, You Have Full Control Over Your Website
Let’s imagine that your website is ready and successfully running online. Would you like to have full access to its functionality any time you want? Wouldn’t it be nice to update certain information when you feel like it, e.g. services list?
With Evolution, you can enjoy the full control of what is happening to your business website. It is up to you to decide when your online business needs a slight rebranding or an intensive marketing campaign. Only you decide when to add certain content blocks to your online project. For example, this can be a description of a remarkable event, like opening a branch office, to your “About us” page. To cut the long story short, with Evolution you need no outsourcing to adjust your web project to your current needs.
And in case you have a question or two about Evolution, you can always rely on the 24/7 MotoCMS Technical Support Team. This team consists of top consultants. They all would be more than happy to offer an optimum solution to your issue in the twinkling of an eye.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/evolution-support.jpg" />
So, enjoy the carte blanche that MotoCMS gives you with Evolution! 
To help you with launching of your online business even more, MotoCMS prepared a special gift for the readers of this article – an exclusive 30% OFF promo code: cmscritic30. Use it on the checkout to <a href="http://www.motocms.com/website-templates/motocms-3-template/59995.html" target="_blank">get your Evolution with a personal discount just right now</a>.

Creating a Business Website Easy: Evolution from MotoCMS

WordPress is the most popular CMS out there. But, there are a lot of things slowing it down.
Maybe you’ve already noticed this on your own site. With heavy plugins, dense themes and millions of users, <a href="/wordpress-joomla-and-drupal-are-not-the-best-cms/">WordPress isn’t always the speediest platform</a>.
<img alt="make wordpress fast" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/speedy.png" />
The bad news is that a slow website can cause all sorts of problems. First of all, it’s a poor first impression. You want your visitors to associate your site with professionalism and speed – not a slow load time.
Some studies have shown that slow websites actually <a href="http://www.digital-velocity.co.uk/blog/the-impact-of-loading-speed-on-website-performance/">drive people away</a> and kill your conversions. If it’s really slow, Google may even drop your page rank.
The good news is that there are plenty of things we can do to speed things up.
1. Invest in a Fast Web Host
Web hosts come in all shapes and sizes, but most people make a choice based on cost. Problem is, the cheapest is rarely the best!
A cheap web host often means a ‘shared’ server. In other words, you’re sharing space and resources with countless other websites across the world. If one website on your shared server gets a flood of visitors, it might impact the speed of yours.
If you’re curious about how fast your web host is currently performing, check out this server speed checker tool. This will tell you how fast your web host <a href="http://www.bitcatcha.com/">server response time</a> is.
Google recommends a server speed of <a href="https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/insights/Server">less than 200ms</a>, so if your server is slower than that, time to rethink your web host.
2. Choose a Lightweight Theme
If your web host is the first place to look for extra speed, your theme is the second. The great thing about WordPress is the <a href="/5-places-to-find-epic-wordpress-themes/">many hundreds of themes you can choose</a> to design your site.
<img alt="make wordpress fast" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/themify.jpg" />But remember, anyone can create a theme and make it available online. There’s no guarantee that the theme has been coded efficiently. Some themes are incredibly heavy and dense with unnecessary code.
But, how do I know if a theme is lightweight? 
The first thing to check is the file size. Anything bigger than 2MB should really be avoided. You can also run the demo site through a load-speed checker to see how quickly it responds.
3. Think Carefully About Your Plugins
It’s easy to get carried away when installing plugins. Again, there are hundreds to choose from, and they’re all useful in their own way.
But remember, every plugin has to be dragged in and loaded up. That means every plugin adds a few milliseconds to your load speed. And, if they’re heavily coded or inefficient, they’ll take even longer.
Think carefully about which plugins your site actually needs. Which ones could you get rid of?
4. Shrink Your Images
We all want our photos and images to look fantastic online. But that doesn’t mean you need to use the full file size. Again, the bigger and heavier your images, the longer they’ll take to load.
<img alt="make wordpress fast" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/optimization.png" />In general, WordPress themes and browsers are rarely more than 1,000 pixels wide. So if your images are larger than 1,000px wide, you can easily shrink them without losing quality.
Consider the format too. JPEGs are generally lighter than PNGs because they’re compressed, so they’ll help speed things up.
5. Don’t Ignore Your Updates!
WordPress sends us tons of update requests, and it can seem annoying. But, trust me, they’re all important!
Updates are essential for keeping your themes, plugins and software secure and speedy. Each new update carries a performance boost. If you’re sitting on lots of pending updates, hit the upgrade button – it’s the easiest and quickest way to speed your website.
6. Install A Caching Plugin
If I could recommend just one way to shave seconds off your load time, it’s this.
Caching stores your website’s data on a visitor’s web browser, so next time they visit your site it loads immediately. In other words, they don’t have to wait for your website to fetch everything from your server every time.
It won’t help your site load faster for new visitors, but repeat visitors should get a slick and immediate response every time.
W3 Total Cache is one of the most popular but I personally prefer <a href="https://wp-rocket.me" target="_blank">WP Rocket</a> and consider it the best caching plugin out there, and it’s super simple to install.
7. Clean Up Your Database
If you write a ton of content and blogs, you might be surprised at how much WordPress is storing on your server.
<img alt="make wordpress fast" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/clean.png" />Every post draft, amendment, trashed article, spam comments and auto-saved versions are all stored forever. Unless of course, you change the settings. If you don’t fancy deleting all this by hand, you can use a plugin like <a href="http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-optimize/installation/">WP-Optimize</a>.
It’s like a spring-clean for your WordPress database, and it will clear out anything that’s slowing you down.
8. Use GZip Compression
Compression simply squashes your website so all the parts are lighter and smaller. That means it’s quicker to load when someone clicks on it.
Done correctly, you won’t lose any quality of functionality either so it’s a win-win technique. If your web host offers it, you might find GZip compression in your CPanel. If not, you can try a compression plugin like <a href="https://en-gb.wordpress.org/plugins/gzip-ninja-speed-compression/">Ninja Speed</a>.
9. Use a Content Delivery Network
You might not realise it, but geography plays a huge part in website load speed. Let’s say, for example, your server is located in the UK, but someone in Japan clicks on your website. It’s going to take a long time to send the information halfway around the world from Britain to Japan.
A Content Delivery Network (CDN) solves this problem by letting you place copies of your website on servers around the world. Now, when someone clicks on your website in Japan, the server closest to them will serve up the website. Much faster!
Personally, I like <a href="http://cloudflare.com" target="_blank">Cloudflare</a>, but there are plenty of CDN options out there.
Conclusion
Don’t let a sluggish website hold you back. A slow website can kill your conversions and make the wrong impression. These 9 tricks are simple and straightforward to implement, and you’ll notice a HUGE difference. Try it yourself, and feel free to ask any questions in the comment section below.

9 Easy Ways to Make WordPress Lightning Fast

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