Hosted Cms News & Articles

Web CMS outfit Clickability (news, site) adds an integrated development environment to allow customization and flexibility for its on-demand CMS product.

The XML content management system vendor DocZone (news, site) which was bought out last year by Really Strategies (news, site) has just added another pricing scheme to its SaaS offering for publishers and technical writers, by offering them the option to pay-per-page.

Under the new pay-per-page option, users will be given full system capabilities for editorial and production with access to all features, the amount they pay is based on the number of final pages produced.

And really that’s not bad when you consider that DocZone Publisher is an "all inclusive" Web-based editorial and production system that supports the creation, management, translation and single-source publishing of content.

Powered by the open-source Alfresco CMS platform, DocZone Publisher includes:

• An authoring tool for distributed teams accessed via a browser
• Easy and efficient search and query of all content
• Numerous content management abilities including versioning and access control
• Workflow management
• Language translation tools.

When Really Strategies bought DocZone in July last year we speculated that by combining the two most price efficient solutions on the market -- Web CMS from Really Strategies and SaaS publishing from DocZone --  users could be looking at considerable economies for the future.

This new pay-per-page scheme would seem to bear that out with the only question now being what other pricing packages we will see in the future.
 

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).
 

Crisis, what crisis? Almost every Web CMS vendor who has to or chooses to publicize their 2009 financials is reporting growth and bright future. Some are even going public. OmniUpdate (news, site) joins this joyous bunch and says 2009 was a success in its higher education focused web content management segment.

Last year was marked for OU as a year of record sales revenues. Other 2009 highlights include:

• 28 new clients
• Existing customers increasing/renewing their service levels/terms
• 12 product releases with 16 additional capabilities and feature enhancements (e.g. multi-language preview, global find and replace, garbage can, Serena Collage conversion tool, Live Delivery Platform and others)
• Onboarding of integration partners
• Ability to deploy OmniUpdate's CMS -- OU Campus -- either traditionally or as SaaS

As with all privately-held companies, the amount of financial information being released is limited. For buyers looking to evaluate Web CMS products for higher ed verticals, record sales is probably a little too ambiguous to indicate the overall viability and stability of the company.

While growing revenue is good news, we’ll continue to watch OmniUpdate and update you on where these folks are headed.

Web content management got a lot of attention in 2009. The old way of doing things was declared over and a new way of thinking declared necessary. Many things changed, from the economic environment to the way Web CMS products are being built and deployed.

What we started seeing is that systems can't just slide by with basic functionality, or traditional deployment models. And one of the things we did before skipping out for our holiday break was to talk about the current trends in web content management.

Here's a recap:

• Platform vs Specialization: We are seeing the division of WCM platforms and vendors offering specialized WCM point solutions. We are also having great discussions on the beloved WCM acronym and where its future lies.
• Integration of Web Analytics: The needs to provide engaging user experiences is more important than ever before. But do we really need our analytics solutions to be tightly integrated? The debate is on.
• Tightly Integrated Search: We've always had some kind of search within our WCMs -- or at least we should have -- whether it was part of the solution or third party. But now the move towards tighter integration is upon us.
• Cloud Hosted vs SaaS: The battle for the cloud: is the best approach cloud hosted or SaaS? Some vendors will straddle the fence, while others will stand their ground.
• Integration of Social Media: Lots of social media functionality in WCM systems, a little bit of WCM in social computing apps. Are the two converging? Or just battling for prime time real estate?

You can read the full article Emerging Trends in Web Content Management to get more detail, but we are curious to know:

Dries Buytaert of Drupal (news, site) hopped up on his soap box today to announce the launch of Drupal Gardens into private beta.

Drupal Gardens is a hosted version of the content management system with aim to please. As Buytaert put it, “Think of it as Wordpress.com or Ning, except that it comes with the power of Drupal. Equipped with multi-user blogging, commenting, forums, custom content types, and advanced user management, Drupal Gardens should be a great tool for organizations that want to build social sites."

Voila:

Needless to say it's a pretty big move for the platform, and it will certainly be interesting to watch how it does next to popular alternatives.

Sick of losing sleep over installations or upgrades? The team plans to release more registration codes during the next few months, so make sure to request on here.

 The open source Aussies are coming, this time with MySource Matrix as a fully supported SaaS CMS which includes all the features of its full web content management system parent.

A new simple hosted web content management system that has been in private beta for the past three years and which focuses on usability and simplifying processes has just been release by Arizona based Ixpleo.

CrownPeak (news, site) offers a new host of marketing tools to help refine and target marketing strategies for websites and content.

Halogy's CMS (news, site) is now out of beta, but remains free to use for the rest of the year. So, what's new in version 1.0?

Billed as a content platform for Web developers, here comes BitsyBox offering data stores, easy editing and a content delivery network in one hosted Web CMS.

Seems increased competition with Google is making Microsoft look twice at its pricing for online services such as SharePoint (news, site) and Exchange.

The company has reduced the monthly rates for its Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) which includes SharePoint from US$ 15 to US$ 10. They also dropped the monthly subscription for Exchange Online from US$ 10 to US$ 5.

In addition to the price reduction, BPOS is also available in Singapore, and soon India. BPOS will be available in over 36 countries by the end of this year and there are a number of new high profile organizations using the service. Trials are slated to begin in Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Czech Republic, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Israel, Malaysia, Mexico, Poland, Puerto Rico, Romania and Taiwan.

It's this adoption that is pushing the price of the online services down. According to Microsoft specifically, "“rapid customer adoption, global scale and improved efficiencies from new software such as Exchange Server 2010."

Microsoft is committed to adding new capabilities to the online services every 90 days. In October, they increased their support to 30,000 users and added some new admin capabilities.

At the SharePoint Conference, they also announced SharePoint Online for External Websites and are still working on pricing for Office Web Apps.

Is it all enough to take on Google and the increasing adoption of Google Apps for Business?

Products in the simple CMS arena should be light, focussed, but still leave the user with a positive feel. How does now out-of-beta Viviti stack up?

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.