Archive for the ‘SaaS CMS’ Category
CrownPeak CMS Gets URL Shortener, Goes Social Media-Friendly
CrownPeak recognizes the importance of URL shortening for social media and social networking, while retaining the ability to measure that content through web analytics tools.
The news release of the CrownPeak URL Shortener allows CrownPeak CMS users to take advantage of the automatically generated short URLs, or modify them manually to create a customized URL. Voila, and we are social media-ready.
A job that can be done by services like bit.ly and 3.ly, is now handled within the CMS itself to generate CPeak.us and alike URLs.
More on CMSWire.com
OmniUpdate Gets New Higher-Ed CMS Integration Partner
Yes, one of those “strategic partnerships” was announced between hosted Web CMS vendor OmniUpdate and Noel-Levitz, higher education web design and development firm.
Under the mantra of “holistic approach” to website development and web content management, the two aim to bring OmniUpdate’s CMS, OU Campus, closer to those in hi-ed.
OmniUpdate is well known for its affection for higher education, with many of its customers being in this vertical. The joint effort is focused on helping hi-ed clients build websites using OU Campus as the CMS of choice.
Last we’ve heard from the Saas CMS vendor was when it released version 8.6 of OU Campus with improved editorial usability. In 8.5, it was mostly about proper garbage disposal and controlling those random delete-all bouts.
Like Day Software, OmniUpdate also courts the Serena Collage unfortunates wanting to migrate away towards brighter days of web content management.
Cross-posted on CMSWire.com
Parsing Gartner’s 2009 Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management
This year, Web content management (WCM) was promoted to the Magic Quadrant level in Gartner-land. Previously, only Enterprise CMS vendors were MQ-eligible. The firm says the MarketScope approach was no longer suited for “dynamic, evolutionary trends’” happening in the Web CMS space.
Gartner hopes that the report will help those with a CMS short-list in hand to make the right decision. While it may not answer all the questions on your WCM mind, it’s one way of looking at the market and the players.
Aside from giving nods to several WCM vendors, Gartner came up with a list of Key Trends for WCM.
As far as the main trends for WCM 2009, the report highlights the following:
- Better product usability for non-techies
- Growing open source CMS popularity, albeit occupying less than 4% of the market
- Growing interest in SaaS CMS
- Personalized, contextualized and targeted content delivery
Subject to interpretation, Magic Quadrant gives a view of what is happening in the WCM market. Should it be the only guide in your CMS vendor selection process? Probably not.
Will the two bullet points (in true analyst fashion) on vendor’s Strengths and Weaknesses help you create that short-list? Maybe not. But it could be a good starting point. You can read the full report here.
More on CMSWire: Parsing Gartner’s 2009 Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management
Autonomy Interwoven Takes Web CMS and Optimization to the Cloud
Imagine a combination of SaaS CMS, Web analytics, A/B and MVT testing, and optimization of landing pages — sounds like a novel idea? Hardly.
Although every vendor wants to make us believe they are the first ever to step on the surface of the hosted Web CMS/analytics Moon, we know that others have approached this endearing to marketers subject before. The SaaS Web CMS provider CrownPeak released a similar offering — CrownPeak Landing Page Manager — back in April.
Nevertheless, here’s Autonomy’s announcement about a new product designed to enamor marketers and allow them to build and test website landing pages in a hosted environment. Expanding on its existing cloud initiatives, Autonomy Interwoven takes another bite at the pie that integrates online testing and web content management (leveraging Interwoven’s TeamSite and LiveSite).
The Autonomy Optimized Landing Page product allows users to get the best of both worlds in one interface: web content management and multivariate testing (MVT). This combination of technology is usually used to optimize campaigns (pages) after they’re created. The goal here is simple, yet often hard to reach – lead conversion.
More on CMSWire: Autonomy Interwoven Takes a Bite at SaaS CMS, Landing Page Optimization
Surreal CMS Wants to Lure Away CushyCMS Customers
Looking at Surreal CMS one wonders whether this web content management provider is coming from a James Bond-like background, or is under some sort of a perpetual NDA. The absolute lack of product version numbers or release notes makes it all quite umm… surreal.
Our intelligence forces have intercepted a message via a little-known transmission channel called Twitter that there was a new (unnamed, unnumbered) version of Surreal CMS released. And now we can share some super minimal (rest must’ve gotten scrambled), almost top secret details with you.
CushyCMS is very similar to Surreal CMS. There are pros and cons in both systems, but, architecturally, both try to deliver SaaS-like content management systems for SMBs and designers, web developers.
Given the similarities, Surreal CMS decided (just like others in the space) to include a migration “path” from CushyCMS in its latest release. Customers can transfer existing CushyCMS sites “without having to change anything on your website.” One step that’s needed is to add your websites (S)FTP credentials to the CMS and enable your web pages as you normally would.
More on CMSWire: Surreal CMS Wants to Migrate Away CushyCMS Customers
Digitalus CMS Cuts Down Confusion, Risk in Templating
For boutique content management vendors like Digitalus CMS, flexibility comes comparatively easily. There are no multiple corporate hoops to jump though, and development cycles seem to be moving a bit faster (which can also turn into a double-edged sword).
Not long ago, I looked (in detail and with a fair portion of constructive criticism) at Digitalus 1.5. The vendor informs me that they’ve heard and made templating changes in the newest version of the product — Digitalus CMS 1.8.
It seems the chances of breaking the entire front end are now minimized.
As I mentioned before, the template structure and templating tasks weren’t the easiest in v1.5. It was clunky and, quite frankly, dangerous. Pretty much anyone working with Digitalus 1.5 templating could very easily break the entire front end of the site.
While the v1.5 approach could’ve been a good way to follow traditional/default structure of the Zend framework, it was a pain for designers having to work in multiple various directories in the CMS.
Digitalus says that the design section and content templates that were added in v1.5, did not make it into v 1.8 in an attempt to alleviate confusion. Will that work better for designers and editors? Will they feel like there’s less freedom now?
New templating approach is not the only piece of news from Digitalus. Very recently, Digitalus started offering its content management system as a hosted option on their own servers managed by HostGator. The offering is called Digitalus Platform, and sounds almost like a SaaS CMS product.
More on CMSWire: Digitalus CMS Cuts Down Confusion, Risk in Templating
Irina Guseva
