Ektron Releases Version 8 of CMS400.NET, Unapologetic About Innovation

By Irina Guseva (@irina_guseva) Oct 30, 2009

The long-awaited and rather-delayed release was prematurely leaked a little while ago, but now it’s all official. Ektron CMS400.NET version 8 is live and brings a slew of new features, including usability enhancements, integrated web analytics, API changes, first attempts at CMIS support and new social media capabilities.

In addition, Ektron (news, site) reports growth this year and plans a takeover of the enterprise-level market.

Going After the “Big Guns”

With the reported 35% growth in overall revenue in 2009, Ektron is planning to expand even further.

As Ektron’s own “big guns” — Tom Wentworth, VP of business development, David Scalera, director of enterprise Sales, and Eric Darbe, director of marketing — told us, the vendor is positioning itself as an enterprise-level solution provider. Before you get all confused, what Ektron means here is not turning their Web CMS into an Enterprise CMS, but providing enterprise-level functionality like collaboration and some document management to large organizations.

Ektron plans to exploit new market opportunities in the Enterprise CMS segment, “while addressing the entire CMS spectrum.” We all realize that the product itself may not necessarily be a full-blown ECM product, but Ektron says “the technology is enterprise-ready today.”

Ektron views itself as an out-of-box CMS for the mid-market, as well “not just a software provider, but a solution provider” capable of delivering extensibility, complexity and scalability in the enterprise.

According to the Ektron folks we talked to, they see a stereotype and misconception in the industry in regards to un- and under-deployability of mid-market vendors in the enterprise market. Hence, Ektron wants to dive into that space and help customers understand all the complexities that come with a CMS implementation, while focusing on business applications and large organizations.

“It’s not a software problem, but a marketing and messaging problem,” was the conclusion. It will be interesting to see how Ektron does in this new adventure.

In other news, Ektron recently started to deliver Professional Services natively with about 50 people working in PS. In the past, Ektron was known as one of the CMS vendors that deal with customers primarily through an implementation/reseller/SI/partner network. While taking the relationships with customers to this new, direct services level, Ektron says it will supporting channel partners and provide product-level best practices and SME.

Social Media Features in Version 8

Version 8 brings an expanded social media kit in the areas of internal collaboration with tools like activity streams featuring privacy settings and notifications sent via SMS or e-mail.

ektron v8 notifications.png
Activity stream notifications under Edit Profile

Activity streams are, essentially, a micromessaging feature allowing for display and automatic sharing of user activity (such as comments, replies, photo uploads, status updates, blog posts, etc.) on a website. With this form of social messaging, either intranets or public-facing websites can utilize the Facebook/Twitter-like functionality from Ektron’s CMS.

ektron v8 activity stream.png
Ektron v8 activity stream