DNN Evoq 8: Beyond Content Management
One of the stops on the CMS Critic North American Tour was at DNN Software, the company behind DNN Evoq Content.
DNN Evoq Content is used by over 2,000 businesses worldwide, including a number of Fortune 500 companies. DNN was also the 2014 Critics' Choice Award Winner for Best Small to Midsize Business .NET CMS.
The company recently launched DNN Evoq 8, “A CMS built for marketers to deliver today's modern web experiences.”
DNN Evoq 8 was released to bring additional focus to the following four key areas:
1. Content Personalization
Evoq 8 enables users to build personalization rules that tailor site content based on visitors’ profiles.
Rules can be based on geography, account registration (i.e. registered versus non-registered users), gender, age, recent visits, referral source, search terms and ad clicks.
2. Page-Level Content Analytics
Statistics on page views, referrers, unique visitors, and conversions are presented as an overlay on each web page, via data collected and managed by Evoq.
Making these stats more accessible means that any marketer, regardless of their level of proficiency with analytics, can immediately understand how content is performing, without navigating away from the page in question.
3. Centralized Access to Cloud-Hosted Content Repositories
Evoq 8 includes built-in connectors to Box, Dropbox, Amazon S3, and SharePoint, making it easy to access any piece of content or digital asset from a single window.
This capability allows marketers and content producers to use their preferred content storage service or use multiple services, without moving files, duplicating effort, or wasting valuable time.
4. Advocate Marketing
Evoq 8 enables marketers to activate the brand advocates already on their webiste by rewarding them for sharing content on their personal social networks.
The advocacy marketing capability is integrated with Evoq’s native gamification engine, and engages customers by issuing challenges, tracking challenge completions, and awarding points, badges, or other designated incentives.
Now, although these four areas have been impressively enhanced, there's a lot more to DNN Evoq 8 that goes beyond just new features and functionality.
Beyond Standard Enterprise Content Management
After the recent DNN Evoq 8 video walkthrough, Mike Johnston made a very interesting observation about the nature of DNNs latest release:
“Let me tell you folks, this is one impressive looking piece of software. They have completely done away with the dashboard (in the manner that there is no longer a back end admin interface to log into) and moved into a more “website builder look”.
The good part being that there was no loss in functionality so I consider Evoq 8 (and you can quote me on this) a website builder for Enterprises.”
A website builder for enterprises? Now that's an angle worth exploring.
Simplicity and ease of use was definitely high on the priorities list for DNN Evoq 8.
It's the removal of the traditional dashboard that has shifted the focus towards front end content editing, which in turn resembles that website builder experience.
Users can log in and immediately begin working on the page they're viewing. The sidebar offers up contextualised administrative functionality, giving the user the tools they need depending on the type of content appearing on the page.
DNN Software's CEO, Navin Nagiah, gave further insight into this newly crafted user experience during his interview with Mike Johnston:
“Our eventual goal is to make it so that, when somebody starts using the software, they [already] know how to use it. No training, no user manuals, no videos to watch, nothing. The software has to speak to the user.
We want to take the same user experience that you have in consumer apps and devices, and apply it to the business world. So Evoq 8 is an important milestone, but we are going to get even better as we go forward for the releases this year and next year.”
Perhaps the most interesting element of the above quote is how Navin Nagiah implies that DNN Evoq 8 is but a stepping stone towards an even simpler user experience, which we will hopefully see manifested in future DNN releases.
For now though, marketers can enjoy DNN Evoq 8 for what it is; an enterprise-grade powerhouse of a website builder.
To find out more about DNN Evoq Content 8, visit their website. Also, be sure to explore more of DNN Evoq Content through our CMS Directory.