eZ Publish Review - A Look at the New Features for Publishers

eZ Systems has announced perhaps one of their biggest releases to date with an incredible suite of new offerings that turns their eZ Publish platform into an even stronger contender for publishers and producers of digital content. eZ Publish 4.7, or “Etna”, has begun the transformation of this web content management platform into a full customer experience management platform. Today, we take a look at this new product in our eZ Publish Review.

As part of this launch, they have also enabled the ability for customers to have eZ Publish served from the cloud with a new offering via their partner, Ixonos. This will enable the eZ Publish suite of applications to be served from a Red Hat Enterprise Stack.

What's new?

Smart Site Analytics with eZ odoscope

The first of their many offerings is the introduction of a new smart site analytics tool called eZ odoscope. This tool is essentially an analytics dashboard that highlights clickstreams of visitors pathways and journeys through a site and provides a filterable heatmap of their click behavior.

With this new tool, customers now the ability to:

• examine web behavior with visitor clickstream and pathways
• apply filters to website visitors and create new user groups to monitor
• analyze pathways across multiple media and different devices
• design the dashboard for different users and functional views
• build and distribute statistical reports for distinct stakeholders

Another part of the tool is the odosMap, which gives you a complete view as to how users are navigating their site with a representative flow.

Of course, everyone loves heat maps and they offer those too!

A full breakdown of what eZ odoscope can do can be found here: eZ odoscope

Real Time Content Trending and Optimization with eZ LiveViewer

One of the coolest new tools in the suite is the new LiveViewer, which is effectively a dynamic infographic of how content on your site is being used.

It is described as follows:

The realtime info-graphic analytics allows content managers to visualize usage trends of the complete content repository within a configurable recency time period. eZ Live Viewer allows immediate actions to take place as best suits business needs. Users can enter straight into editing mode, push content to another block on the page, add high trending stories to other websites in the network, act rapidly with push notifications like social media or email alerts to build more traffic and then watch for changes in consumer response.

If, as a publisher, you are not drooling over this next picture, we'll be surprised. Check this out:

See? We told you you'd love it.

Full features of the new eZ LiveViewer:

 

• Real-time article-level visualization of website audience
  • Actual audience
  • Historical info
  • Trends
• All this information on one screen
• No clicking and scrolling
• Easy-to-interpret
• Customizable, color-coded categories

Additional information can be found here: eZ LiveViewer

eZ Exceed- a new extension for faster and more efficient editorial workflow.

This new extension is described as follows:

The user interface is built for speed, with a top toolbar that covers all actions. Simply browse around your site, editing from the toolbar or directly from the page.

A sheet slides in, ready for you to edit. When working with media and related content a new interface sheet fluidly slides on top, making it easy and faster to work with complex content.

This extension also improves the process of working with images on the site. When editing an image, a sheet slides into view to enable edits site-wide. Making an image crop? It can now be applied across the entire site, if needed. eZ Exceed can also be configured to store your media on a CDN.

Improved communication between team members.

Your editorial team can now communicate more effectively than ever. Users can send personal or group messages relating to content by clicking the chat icon from the toolbar, typing their message and hitting send. Collaborators will receive a notification, allowing them to open the applicable content item and start working instantly.

As you can see, the eZ Systems team have put a lot of thought and work into this extension, simplifying the editorial process and making the experience more enjoyable.

Additional information about eZ Exceed can be found here: eZ Exceed

That's not all, however. Some additional features included in this release:

• automated layout and design optimization with advanced multivariate testing.
• enhanced auto-save, service dashboard, flexible content staging and delivery and team room functionality.
• a new offering called the eZ App Factory that generates 3 app versions- iPhone, iPad, Android.
• enhanced and improved adaptive technology solution for publishing content to mobile devices. Automatic rendering of content to small screens ensures that the reading experience on smartphones and tablets is optimized.
• a connector integrating eZ Publish with the e-commerce engine from Magento.
• geo-location of content delivery.

Needless to say, this is a big one. Check it all out on their website: eZ Publish