'Net Features : ektron

Connect Across All Digital Channels with Ektron

Michael Garrity — Mon, 16 Jul 2012 20:00:00 GMT

Web success in 2012 means far more than just having a good (or even great) website. With so many different avenues for consumers to connect with brands online, companies are all but required to optimize every one of their various Web properties.

Ektron, a provider of enterprise Web content management systems, has unveiled some major updates to the Ektron Web Content and Digital Experience Management Platform that adds a plethora of features to help businesses deliver their customers a relevant experience across all of their digital channels. It also launched two brand new supplementary products, the Ektron Digital Experience Hub and Ektron Cloud Manager.

The upgrade, Ektron 8.6, adds to the company’s flagship content and management platform and aims to improve the content creation and management experience for authors, developers, and designers.

Among the biggest enhancements to the platform are simplified content authored with support for an advanced HTML5-based editor, more support for mobile devices that includes an adaptive image resizing feature, intelligent content synchronization, greater support for URL redirects, and increased flexibility and performance with search thanks to integration with Microsoft’s Search Server and FAST products.

But, as previously noted, that’s not the only news out of the Ektron camp this week. The company also announced the immediate availability of the Digital Experience Hub (DXH), which provides comprehensive, personalized experiences for users across websites, mobile devices, and social networks by integrating customer relationship management (CRM), marketing automation, and analytics solutions with the traditional Ektron platform.

This product will help users increase business efficiencies with pre-built integrations into enterprise systems, automate form publishing, and unify customer experience management with marketing campaign optimization. It also offers support with Microsoft SharePoint to integrate existing content, workflow, and management capabilities.

Last, but not least, is the new Ektron Cloud Manager, which lets Ektron’s customers launch websites and marketing campaigns in the cloud. This product includes Wizard-based cloud provisioning that enables the authoring of site content with an on-premises environment for deployment into the cloud, hybrid deployment, the ability to deliver sites at an unlimited scale, and support for both Microsoft’s Windows Azure and Amazon Web Service’s EC2 cloud platforms.

All of these new offerings are meant to help companies provide a relevant content experience and meet the needs of potential customers regardless of where they come from. And when used in conjunction with one another, as they’re built to do, they become all the more beneficial.

Turn Your CMS Into a Newsroom

Michael Garrity — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 21:15:00 GMT

A new partnership between news distribution service PR Newswire and Web content management solutions provider Ektron has lightened the load for many Web publishers. The pairing will integrate PR Newswire's press release publishing and social media monitoring into Ektron's current platform to create "a more seamless news distribution experience."

Simplifying Content Distribution
PR Newswire Sync is an add-on module included in Ektron's content management system (CMS). Those working in communications and using the Ektron solution will be able to publish their press releases simultaneously on both PR Newswire and their Ektron-powered websites, a change that will help to diminish, if not totally eliminate, manual errors while also making work easier for those in charge of managing content on a corporate website.

PR Newswire Sync works by constantly monitoring an organization's PR Newswire account. This continual surveillance means that whenever a news release is published through PR Newswire, Sync will automatically take the content feed and publish that content on the publisher's site, with all links and formatting intact. It will even go as far as URL-aliasing the release's title, adding keyword metadata for search engine optimization and including a summarized version of the release to the organization's home page. In effect, it does three different jobs for a company's online content manager all at once.

Keeping an Eye on the Social Web
In addition to Sync, the company is also releasing the PR Newswire Listening Dashboard, its social media monitoring counterpart. This add-on allows users to monitor the conversations about their brand or company on multiple online and social channels by studying keywords and search strings. This allows Ektron's users to "better determine campaign success and adjust communications strategies based on the findings from the PR Newswire Listening Dashboard."

These modules can be attached to any website powered by Ektron. For more information about PR Newswire Sync and Listening Dashboard, click here.

Brightcove Widget for the Ektron CMS Platform

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 14:30:00 GMT

Online video platform BrightCove and web content management solution Ektron have expanded their partnership, enabling customers to incorporate branded video intot heir online properties and marketing campaigns through a new Brightcove widget.

“This is an exciting partnership that makes it easy for customers to take advantage of the most advanced online video platform and Web content management system in a fully integrated way,” said David Mendels, Brightcove president and chief operating officer. “Now thousands of marketers around the world can execute state-of-the-art video campaigns with the same efficiency as any other aspect of building and maintaining their websites and marketing campaigns.”

Ektron customers will be able to use Brightcove's media transcoding, management and publishing tools within the Extron user interface. Users can simply drag-and-drop a Brightcove widget into a site, page, or marketing campaign, creating a rich platform that can fuse text, audio, images and video into a transformative Web experience. Ektron also supports inserting Brightcove’s player embed codes manually for more customized video experiences.