Latest Hosted CMS News & Articles

When I saw the headline of the Forrester article proclaiming the death of the enterprise CMS suite, I couldn't help but both be pleased with myself, and feel a little sorry for the analysts. After all, I scooped them and proclaimed the exact same thing a little more than three weeks before.

Countless industry studies have been published confirming something many of us already know — content volume and diversity are increasing rapidly in organizations of all sizes. This rapid expansion along all dimensions is driving enterprises to adopt content management solutions to gain better control and visibility of their information. Increasingly, many of these organizations are selecting cloud-based platforms to flexibly handle content growth without the complexities of managing a highly available environment. Microsoft hopes that at least a portion of this growing market will select Azure to power their deployments. Will they?

Has it really been two months since QuarkXPress 9 came out? You know what they say, one good desktop product deserves a server version. Or something like that. Nerdy cliches aside, Quark (news, site) is back in the news with the release of QuarkXPress Server 9.

The DAM Lowdown was off last week, but that didn’t stop the DAM news. This week we have highlights from NAB 2011, another acquisition by KIT Digital, product and people updates from ADS, a new iPad app for Hollywood production and more Quick Hits.

Vasont ST (news, site) launches this week with new mobile-focused features for the XML-based content management system.

Publishing content management provider Really Strategies (news, site) has announced the availability of RSuite Cloud, a cloud-based print, web and eBook production solution that supports 70 languages. The product capitalizes on three of what are expected to be the biggest technology trends of 2011: Cloud computing, content management and globalization.

UK-based SubHub (news, site) has released a new cloud web content management system built on Drupal 7. The company, which specializes in enabling non-technical customers to establish monetized content sites, has offered website building and content publishing since 2005 using a proprietary CMS. The new solution, SubHub Lite, drops the custom CMS in favor of the popular open source CMS platform Drupal.

Halogy's CMS (news, site) now offers a version for download to go with its free SaaS edition.

OmniUpdate (news, site) — the makers of the OU Campus Web CMS primarily targeted at the higher education market — released version 9.3. The highlight of which is the ability to publish content to Twitter.

Web CMS vendors’ affection for web engagement is spreading faster than I can say WEM. SaaS CMS provider Clickability (news, site) is heading that direction as well with the release of Website Marketing Acceleration (WMA) module.

I have given up trying to figure out if there is a limit to the number of products that can co-exist in the hosted web cms landscape. Just when you think the category is saturated, along comes an offering like Osmek looking to differentiate itself from the myriad of competitors.

Continuing on with their Software-as-a-Service adventure thanks to a partnership with Parallels, Bitrix (news, site) has announced that it’s working on a new initiative for delivering their Intranet Portal through a SaaS deployment model.  

If you don’t remember when CrownPeak (news, site) added their own testing, targeting and measurement tools last November, then don’t worry. They’re adding similar tools — again — but this time it’s via integration with Omniture (news, site).
 

CrownPeak (news, site) announced its integration with the [updated] new Website Optimizer Experiment Management API (based on Google Website Optimizer) [/updated], claiming to be the first content management vendor to do so as one of three “inaugural partners.” This integration is "a new API program that will provide users with an integrated solution for Web content management." Sounds a tad confusing, doesn't it?

Truth be told, quite a few other CMS providers — including the direct SaaS competitors like Clickability, Ingeniux, Marqui and others — have already dabbled with Google Optimizer integration. But let’s take a look at what CrownPeak had done and how it might be different from the others.

Editor's Note: Leave it to Google to provide some clarity ;) According to the big G, this is a "new Website Optimizer Experiment Management API…  [that] allows for the creation and management of experiments outside of the Website Optimizer interface." So, pretty much everything we talk about below in regards to tapping into the existing API, less coding steps and a more native within the CMS integration still seems to be valid.

New Web CMS Soapbox tries to differentiate itself in a crowded market. Having been developed organically as the system that its creator used to develop websites for others, it is available now as a hosted service for all to try. 

Halogy (news, site) adds extra social modules to its hosted CMS for free, a change from its previous plans to charge for them.

Many in the content management industry (and beyond) seem to be slightly obsessed with the buzz that the “cloud” is. The opinions can be quite polar, but for now we’ll concentrate on those embracing virtualization.

In today's interview, Emmanuel Garcin, VP and GM in North America for open source CMS provider Jahia (news, site), shared his thoughts about cloud trends and told us how Jahia is going about it with the newest release of Jahia Cloud.

Did you ever think Zipcars were a more flexible option than, say, Hertz? Jahia is transferring this principle to web content management (+/- one JVM).

Just realized you need a website up and running fast? Bridgeline Software (news, site) has the answer for you. They have created a new web content management solution called iAPPS Rapid Site — the ability to get a website, intranet or web application up and running in 5 weeks, in 5 steps.

Interested? Read on.

CrownPeak (news, site) 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.

Some of the uses of CrownPeak’s new URL Shortener include:

• Web and social media content publishing with CrownPeak CMS ability to automatically publishe content directly into some popular social networks.
• Web analytics integration (with CrownPeak Analytics, WebTrends, Omniture’s Site Catalyst, etc.) can be used to track both regular and short URL-ed pages with a breakout of the traffic.
• URL illustrations for highlighting available content in CrownPeak CMS Social Networking Tools for further dissemination and re-use.

Being a module of the SaaS CMS, The CrownPeak URL Shortener is available to all current customers as part of their existing SLAs with no extra licensing fees.