Sitecore today announced availability of a new version of its Content Management System software.
Sitecore CMS 6.6 offers enhanced mobile support to build engaging mobile web interactions and applications, advanced targeting and segmentation of customers, and a premier development environment with native Model View Controller (MVC) support. These new features provide greater flexibility to quickly create personalized customer experiences.
“The latest version of our software provides the tools that developers and marketers require to consistently and continuously engage with customers through any interaction channel,” said Darren Guarnaccia, senior vice president, product marketing, Sitecore. “We have enabled our developer community to work with the latest development technologies while offering marketers enhanced ways to use customer behavior data to better segment and target marketing campaigns. The result for businesses is a consistent, engaging customer experience that helps create customers for life.”
Catering to the Small Screen
According to a February 2012 Forrester Research, Inc., blog entitled “Mobile Internet Users Will Soon Surpass PC Internet Users Globally,” more than half of the world’s population owns at least one mobile device and the global penetration of mobile Internet users will exceed that of PC-based Internet users in 2016.
Businesses need a way to understand how website and marketing campaign content and offers will appear on the multitude of devices in use including iPhone, Android and Windows smartphones. Sitecore’s device simulator shows marketers how content will appear on mobile devices and in different browsers. It provides an accurate view, via screenshots, on how the website will display using the browsers and devices selected.
In addition, Sitecore mobile software developer’s kit (SDK) facilitates the development of native mobile applications and supports Apple’s iOS platform. The embedded browser allows marketers to leverage their Sitecore powered content, while tapping the powerful user experience of native mobile applications.
Premier Development Approach
Sitecore now offers native support for ASP.NET MVC to complement its existing support for web forms based architectures. By natively supporting both in its platform and allowing use interchangeably, customers have the flexibility to use the right approach for any task while achieving all the modern development benefits of using MVC design patterns.
ASP.NET MVC includes many features that enable fast development for creating sophisticated applications that use the latest web standards and Sitecore customers can start to incorporate these new capabilities without extensive site redevelopment or migration.
Advanced Targeting for Multichannel Campaigns
Marketers are often challenged with targeting campaigns to segments of their audience for better engagement. With CMS 6.6 marketers can create a list of visitors that match certain criteria by defining one or more conditions to define a segment. Segments allow for dynamic evaluation rather than having a static list of visitors, and can be built from both demographic and behavioral data. Segments can also be built from both demographic information as well as behavioral data. Marketers do not need to be CRM experts to target campaigns to specific audiences and segments can be built on any of the web, email or CRM details that have taken place.