This week at LeWeb, Web CMS vendor Kentico (news, site) announced that it will be releasing CMS 5.5 R2 in the middle of next week. This latest update comes with support for both SharePoint 2010 and Microsoft Azure.

With Kentico releases we have come to expect significant changes. When it released v5.0 in January it focused on providing web content management for enterprises with high page volumes,resulting ina system that can mange 100,000 pages and a million site members. The release of Kentico CMS 5.5 in May brought support for mobile websites, Facebook Connect and Open ID.

With R2 of v5.5 only two points up the scale you probably wouldn’t expect too much. However, along with SharePoint 2010 support this newest version also includes Microsoft Azure support for a single instance CMS installation.

Kentico CMS sees the cloud as an important step for our customers and Microsoft Azure as the ideal delivery vehicle. The release ohttp://www.cmswire.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt.cgif Kentico CMS 5.5 R2 provides single instance CMS customers an opportunity to move their CMS systems to the cloud.” said Martin Hejtmanek, Kentico CMS CTO.

ASP.NET and Azure

While Kentico admits that the ASP.NET and the Azure version have a couple of differences, it points out that as of the next major release --v6.0 -- they are aiming to provide two packages that follow the same development route.

On the development portal, Michael Neuwirth, product management for Kentico CMS, said the Web CMS vendor set out as its main goal the development ofa standard Kentico CMS and its Windows Azure version without splitting the development.

Learning Opportunities

The purpose of this was to produce two different versions -- Azure and ASP.NET -- that would be exactly the same. While this is largely achieved in R2, Azure is still limited at the moment by:

  • Support for a single instant only
  • No support for features/operations which require direct access to the file system
  • Manual setup and deployment into Windows Azure

That said it is still nearly the same as the standard version; the interface is the same, the experience is the same and the price is the same.

Version 6.0

With version 6.0 all these problems will be resolved, Neuwirth says. Version 6.0 has completely rewritten file-system support so Kentico CMS 6.0 recognizes if it is running on Windows Azure or on the standard Windows server platform.

Users will also get an automatic installation to the Windows Azure cloud, which will be part of the standard Kentico CMS installation. We don’t know yet when v6.0 is coming out, but R2 is out next week.