EPiServer Releases CMS 5 R2 Packed With New Tools

By Irina Guseva | Published Oct 7, 2008

EPiServer, a Swedish Web CMS vendor, announced the introduction of multiple new features for its content management system EPiServer CMS 5, including the mobile industry solutions (think the iPhone here), new environment support and improved usability for editors.

EPiServer CMS 5 R2 is yet another step in the evolution of this Web CMS that promises to speed up the development of web sites and make it easier to manage and update them.

EPiServer’s CEO Peter Larsson said: “We have a very active user community group in which all of our partners and customers participate — and these new features and tools have been developed in direct response to their comments and requests.”

The new tools available through this second installment of EPiServer CMS 5 can be divided into the following four categories.

Building Websites for Mobiles

Given the increasing importance of the mobile industry, EPiServer is evolving its CMS technology accordingly: with the iPhone and Web 2.0 support.

EPiServer has worked with two partners, Mobiletech A/S and Mobizoft AB, to provide a rich and engaging mobile experience including mobile rendering, video conversion and payments. The iPhone support is available as open source templates enabling the system to be viewed from an iPhone.

Improvements for Editors

EPiServer is committed to make the product easy to use. In R2, the images can now be prepared directly in EPiServer CMS, so that web editors no longer need to work on them in other applications before moving onto the web page.

In addition, new dynamic content features enable external data which appears in many places on the website — such as financials or legal text — to be updated throughout the site.

The new Page Type Converter makes it easy to merge pages of different types, or change other page types.

The R2 also sports improved forms functions that make it easy to put together a survey, for example, very quickly.

Enterprise-Specific Features

Five standard reports are now available, including non-published pages, published pages, modified pages, expiring/expired pages and an overview of simple addresses.

External data, such as an archive of articles at a media company, can be integrated and displayed in a website using EPiServer CMS. The data will appear as a native EPiServer CMS page. This enables structured data stored on another document management system to be converted to a webpage in EPiServer and viewed.

EPiServer can now be installed onto a server by non-technical staff through a simple step-by-step installer. Sounds a bit risky, but as long as sys admins are around to fix any potential problems, all should be well.

New Environment Support

EPiServer CMS now supports Oracle, Windows Server 2003 and 2008 — as well as XP and Vista — Visual Studio 2008 and 2000 Express, and ASP/.NET 3.5 SP1 or later. This enables developers and editors to choose the software they are most comfortable with to build and manage their websites.