Ektron 8.5 Enterprise Ready: New Architecture, Search & a Refined Interface

By Barb Mosher (@barbmosher) Jul 26, 2011

Both Forrester and Gartner have recognized Web CMS vendor Ektron in their respective Web Content Management reports, and both have said that Ektron still needs to prove itself enterprise ready. Today, that's what Ektron is doing with the announcement of release candidate Ektron 8.5. There are a number of major changes in this version, is it enough?

Getting Ektron Enterprise Ready

In Forrester's latest report, Web Content Management for Online Customer Experience (CXM), the analyst firm lists Ektron as a contender saying the Web CMS still needs to prove itself enterprise ready, but noting that Ektron has some nice capabilities that you don't see in other Web CMS products.

We could take that to mean Ektron is competing just fine in the functionality department, but needs to work on things like scalability and flexibility — important elements for enterprise software.

With Ektron's 8.5 release, these things have been the core focus, so let's review.

Ektron's Architecture

Ektron 8.5 introduces a brand new three-tiered architecture. As most know, a three-tiered architecture makes scaling horizontally much easier, as you are separating the web front end (WFE) from the middle tier where you find the Ektron CMS and the backend database.

A couple of points on this architecture:

WFE: There is no Ektron software on the web front end.
Application Tier: This is where the Ektron software resides alongside a new search engine (we'll get to that in a minute) delivered through the Windows Communication Framework (WCF).

What WCF does is allow Ektron to offer it's APIs as Web Services, which in turn means that you could build that web front end in any language you want: .NET, Java, PHP and more.

This is not new for a Web CMS, we've seen several others offer the same architecture. But according to Tom Wentworth, Ektron's CMO, Ektron is the first .NET Web CMS to offer this architecture among its direct competitors.

Ektron Web CMS v8.5 Introduces a 3-tiered Deployment Architecture

Adding in Microsoft Search

You probably noticed that Microsoft Search block in the above architecture diagram. Ektron has replaced the aging IIS Index Server with a real search engine, Microsoft Search Server. Out of the box, Ektron 8.5 ships with the free Search Server Express version, but there's a nice little upgrade path to Search Server or Microsoft FAST Search Server (purchase your licenses directly from Ektron to relieve yourself of the Microsoft licensing pains).

Using Search Server as the search engine for Ektron provides you a few nice capabilities, including:

suggested results/did you mean
faceted search
dynamic relevancy tuning
federated search

All important capabilities for a search engine today.

For Developers — A New Framework API

To support this new architecture, Ektron has developed a completely new Framework API. This API supports all the content management operations on all Ektron CMS objects. There's also a new developer website with code examples for both VB.NET and C#.

In addition, Ektron 8.5 also supports Microsoft LINQ, which means that developers who love to hate XSLT now have a new way to query for data and transform it for display. Ektron now officially supports .NET 4.0 and MVC. Lots of new things for developers to get excited about.