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Ektron Asks, What Do You Want Your Website to Do?

Ektron has announced the release of Ektron CMS400.Net v7.5.

v7.5 comes packed with a few new punches, adding an extra dose of Web 2.0 schmoozing to the existing Web CMS. Yes, there’s support for blogs and wikis. And yes, there’s social networking and forums.

In other words, you get everything you prayed for when you unwrapped CMS400.net 7.0.

The offering is built on the Microsoft platform, with .Net as its base. It supports PHP and CFM and it has a new version of the original web editor (eWebEditPro v5.1 +XML).

We took a quick look at the new features in Version 7.5. Here are some of the more titillating bits:

Social Networking

They call it the Social Networking Framework. It let’s you do all things on your internet or intranet that a site like Facebook does (except you can’t give your buddy a beer).

Visitors can create workspaces (or MySites, for you SharePoint lovers), invite friends to join, and send emails and alerts. You can also search for other users, share photos, join discussions, and everything else your company is still trying to decide to allow internally.

Web 2.0 Toolbox

Yes another Web 2.0 toolbox. Blogs, wikis, tagging, forums. Need we really say more?

Document Management

It’s a new document management engine. You can version and apply workflow to your documents. Audit trails are available to monitor changes. And you aren’t just limited to managing documents; you can also manage other file types like photos and zip files.

Probably some of the coolest improvements come with working offline and synchronizing later on. Of course, the engine includes integration with the Office toolbar.

Search Enhancements

The search functionality has been expanded to include blogs, people, maps, documents, calendar and forums. They have also added functionality such as synonyms, suggested results (did you mean [enter inane suggestion here]?), ranking and more.

Forums

The forum functionality has been improved to include things such as:

• Automatic Restricted Word Replacement
• Upload and Attach Capabilities
• RSS Subscriptions
• History
• User Rankings
• Terms and Conditions Disclaimer
• Print
• Emoticons
• Taxonomy (select / move cat + go back)

Photo Server

Visitors have the ability to upload photos to their new personal workspace using drag and drop technology. Photos can be mapped and rated and you can share them with your friends and family.

These are just some of the new features in this version. We didn’t go into all of them, and we also didn’t go into the list of content management capabilities (although they don’t list any improvements to content management from the previous version).

It look a lot like Ektron is trying to compete against SharePoint. They now offer much of the same capabilities.

Will they be able to steal some of that market share? Will anybody?

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