Ektron CMS400.NET Feature List

3-Tier Architecture

Ektron is the first enterprise .NET web content management vendor to deliver a 3-tier architecture. In a 3-tier configuration, no Ektron software exists in the web tier, meaning CIOs and IT architects looking for maximum scalability, reliability, and security can now deploy Ektron in a manner consistent with enterprise software deployments.

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508 compliance

Section 508 of the United States federal Rehabilitation Act (and the similar W3C "User Agent Accessibility Guidelines") require federal agencies to make information technology accessible to the disabled. Government websites in the US typically must be 508-compliant. To comply with these regulations, CMS400.NET lets users access toolbar functions through menus. This eliminates the need for a mouse. In addition, CMS400.NET supports section 508-compliant data tables, whose key elements are the caption element, the summary attribute, and headings. To allow users to create section 508 compliant data tables, a menu option displays section 508 data table properties dialog. Once the dialog is completed, the user clicks OK to make the table section 508 compliant.

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In-context analytics

Connect web analytics to your marketing team, turning web analytics insight into action. The Ektron Marketing Optimization Suite leverages your existing web analytics investment by integrating with the three most widely deployed analytics packages Google Analytics, Omniture SiteCatalyst and WebTrends, providing the context you need to make informed business decisions. Web analytics data is always just a single click away.
**Included in the Marketing Optimization Suite

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Browser-based Administration

Management of content distribution is simplified by an intuitive browser-based administration UI.  Developers and IT can easily create, launch, simulate, schedule, and monitor all deployment activities across all servers and tiers.  

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Collaboration

Content Governance and Compliance

Maintain brand consistency across your web presence. Empower your subject matter experts and designers to grow your site with the content that they need to have control over. Ensure that your sites meet both the needs of your audience and all regulations and standards that are in place.

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Content Management

Ektron provides a complete set of content management services for users, developers, and designers.  

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Content Targeting

The ability to engage, convert, and retain visitors is significantly improved by targeting messaging to customer segments. Armed with context, a marketer can build a personalized experience for each website visitor – based on behavior, location, demographics, profile, customer data, social graph, and more. The more relevant the information is to the site visitor, the more likely they are to take the desired next step. Visitor behavior is tracked from the first click, allowing marketers to immediately begin personalizing the site. The site becomes more personal with each interaction, including clicks, purchases, navigation path, and searches.

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Conversion Rate Optimization

Become a data-driven marketing organization by using A|B and multivariate tests to optimize conversion rates on your websites and landing pages.  Where marketing organizations in the past relied on speculation when designing campaigns, now they can rely on the data generated by real site visitors through the process of Conversion Rate Optimization. Test ideas like copy, layout, imagery, and calls-to-action to drive visitors to take action. The results generated through Conversion Rate Optimization can be stunning, with double digit (and higher) improvements in conversion.

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Customer Relationship Management

Personalize the website by matching the right content, offer, or promotion to a visitor based on any CRM attribute, for example industry, customer type, or opportunity stage.  Automatically connect Ektron forms to the CRM, providing sales teams with actionable, real-time data.

Designed for the Cloud

Use the Ektron Cloud Manager to rapidly deploy new websites and marketing campaigns to popular cloud platforms from Microsoft, Amazon, and Rackspace.  The Cloud Manager provides a simple interface where users simply select the number of cloud instances they need and the server locations they would like to target, and within a few minutes, the new site is live in the cloud.  Subsequent content updates can be published to the cloud in a matter of seconds.

Ektron Cloud Manager includes a new cloud-ready version of Ektron eSync, bringing its unique bi-directional content replication and differential deployment capabilities to the cloud. eSync automatically deploys only the files that have changed, dramatically increasing speed-to-web instead of replicating an entire web application.

Developer Friendly

Ektron’s WCM platform provides the scalability, extensibility, and power needed to develop complex, dynamic digital experiences. From a .NET developer’s perspective, Ektron is easy to understand. It’s built on the latest Microsoft .NET Framework, where developers use standard languages and development patterns such as HTML, CSS, C#, ASP.NET Web Forms & MVC, and JQuery. Ektron provides a library of over 80 .NET controls allowing developers to quickly add functionality and applications to websites. When developers need more flexibility and power, Ektron provides a complete SDK and API for development. Designers have full control over markup, allowing them to incorporate HTML5, Flash, AJAX, and emerging technologies into their web application. Ektron is the only .NET CMS with a true n-tier enterprise architecture providing unparalleled security, scalability, and reliability.

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Document Management

Manage the entire document lifecycle with a complete set of document management services including versioning, workflow, and permissions. Manage documents in any format, including Microsoft Office, Adobe Acrobat, images, videos, and more.

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Employee Collaboration

Your intranet will not be a useful organizational tool unless it’s people-centric with social capabilities. By facilitating communication between your business and your employees as well as among employees themselves, you’ll make information distribution faster and employees more efficient. The end result is higher employee productivity thanks to better access to quality information, innovation through the sharing of ideas, and valuable knowledge transfer amongst users.

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Employee Communities

Social has changed the way users interact. Incorporate social capabilities into your intranet portal – whether that’s group spaces, user profile pages, activity streams and micromessaging, or corporate training videos. These social tools will encourage interaction and cultivate productivity among employees.

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Enterprise Ready

Support enterprise-class deployments through the most advanced .NET Web Content Management platform.   

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Enterprise Search

Ektron Search, powered by Microsoft Search Server or Microsoft FAST Search, is an enterprise search solution that helps site visitors find what they need faster. It is simple and flexible to configure and powerful enough to meet your needs. Customers will see an increase in performance when organizations can scale to hundreds of millions of content.

Framework API

The Ektron Framework API radically improves developer productivity through a highly consistent and discoverable set of functions and methods. When combined with support for Microsoft LINQ, developers can now design websites with a fraction of the code it took to accomplish the same work in the past.

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Location-based Marketing

The unprecedented growth of mobile devices like Smartphones and Tablets creates an opportunity for marketers to deliver location-aware content.  

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Intuitive Content Authoring

Ektron WCM allows users to make content updates directly on a page in a familiar, Microsoft Office-like environment. Authors simply navigate to a page, select a piece of content, and make their edits "in-context" of the page. During the editing process, the page appears exactly as it will appear when published.  Allow authors to add standard markup like bold, italic, and underline, or use CSS style sheets to enforce formatting site-wide.  

For more structured content like product pages and press releases, Ektron Smart Forms simplify content creation by completely separating content creation from its ultimate presentation, ensuring content is captured once and re-used consistently across the entire website.  Users simply enter in fill in the form with text, imagery, video and any other content types.

Marketing Automation

Marketing teams spend considerable time and effort segmenting customers and creating targeted marketing campaigns.  Marketing automation systems allow marketing teams to create marketing programs aimed at sending information and offers at the right time to the right audience. Utilize that intelligence on your website, re-targeting relevant messages delivered via email to website and mobile device users.  Speak to your customers with one voice across all digital channels.

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Metadata support

Metadata is data about data, providing additional information and context about content. For example, a text document's metadata may contain information about how long the document is, who the author is, when the document was written, and a short summary of the document. Ektron allows administrators to define any number of hierarchical metadata fields, allowing metadata to be defined at the site, folder, and content object level. Metadata fields can be made required or optional, ensuring that the most important metadata fields are always captured during the content authoring process. The addition of metadata can be enforced and go through an approval chain before the content is deployed.

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Mobile Delivery

Deliver websites to the widest range of Smartphones, Tablets, and Feature Phones. Automatically detect the site visitors mobile device and render the appropriate experience.

Mobile Shopping

50 percent of 18 – 64 year-olds are shopping on their mobile device. Whether they’re comparing products and prices, reading reviews, choosing the store to purchase from, or performing the transaction, more and more mobile users are turning to their device to help them in their purchases. Deliver personalized web experiences for mobile devices.

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Mobile Video

Using the Brightcove Video Cloud widget, easily deliver 

Multi-brand, Franchise, and Multilingual Franchise Sites

A company that has multiple brands would like each of their brands to have their own site. A franchise would like to roll out a site for each franchisee, and share content across each one as well as from the corporate site. And a global organization would like to roll out different sites for all the languages they market to. 

Site generator allows you to easily create new sites – easily choose your site design and your starting content to jump start the creation of a new site.

Multilingual Sites

Manage the creation and globalization of sites to speak with a single voice worldwide.  

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Online Storefront

Support all product types, from single items, to complex products. Easily display, edit and change product information. Your marketers can easily input new products into your online storefront. Product entry forms help site managers maintain consistency and branding across their product pages and ensure they always go live with all of the necessary information in place.

When checking out, provide a secure, easy to use shopping cart that allows customers to accumulate a list of items to purchase. Purchases can be made by both anonymous and registered users, and registered users can name and save shopping carts for future purchases or as wish lists and registries.

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Order Fulfillment

Provide shoppers with a convenient way to fulfill their order. 

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Payment Gateway

Payment options are flexible with Ektron eCommerce. Configure customized integrations with any payment gateway and integrate with financial software.


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Progressive Enhancement

Progressive enhancement is a modern design technique that starts with a common set of content and functionality that appears across every device and screen type.  As screen sizes and browser-capabilities increase, developers can add more functionality and content to the page.  Using Ektron's built-in Device Detection and support for Responsive Web Design, developers and designers can easily experiences that adapt to different screen-sizes and browser capabilities.

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Rapid Deployment

As a solution accelerator, the Ektron eIntranet is a complete information distribution, knowledge management, and social business intranet portal, bridging the worlds of your employees, customers and partners. Ektron eIntranet combines social software and web content management in one enterprise application.

Being a full-featured intranet solution, the Ektron eIntranet is easy to deploy, use, and extend – on-premise, hosted or in the cloud. It will integrate existing business applications into a single application. With eIntranet, your support teams will be able answer a question once and push it out to everyone in the organization, updating information as and when needed. Managers can be instantly informed on the status of a project, a slipping deadline or a finished task. Employees will have the most current version of project content – schedules, documents, presentations – always at hand. Turn your intranet into an essential business application with the Ektron eIntranet.

Rapid Deployment of eCommerce Site

As a solution accelerator, Ektron eCommerce makes it easy for your customers and potential customers to find, learn about, and purchase your products. Ektron eCommerce will jumpstart the development of your commerce site. It’s built on the Ektron WCM platform, and can be extended to integrate with your core billing and inventory systems.

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Rich Internet Applications (RIA)

Manage rich internet applications (RIAs), agendas and more with this signature functionality and reuse the entered content across your site, multisite environment or other channels as you need. RIAs (like product selectors or physician finders) read and consume XML data. By using Smart Forms to generate this XML, you can efficiently control what is being fed to the application, keeping it relevant.

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Roundtrip Synchronization

Traditional deployment tools only work in work direction - pushing content from source to target.  With eSync, deployments can be configured to work bi-directionally, where content can be pushed or pulled from source and target.  For example, user generated content like blogs can be pulled from your production servers to your development servers, ensuring all servers remain in sync. 

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Search

According to Forrester Research, 45 percent of respondents in their Workforce Technology survey said they spend three hours or more per week searching for information. Providing employees with the right content when they need it is crucial to not wasting your company’s time or money.

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Search Engine Optimization

Automatically generate a search engine-friendly site, ensuring your site achieves the highest organic search rankings. Integrated URL aliasing ensures search engines know how to properly categorize every page.  An integrated SEO site checker will analyze the pages of your website to show you where you are succeeding and what additional elements will improve your SEO results.

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Separation of Content from Presentation

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Shopping Cart

A secure, easy to use shopping cart allows customers to accumulate a list of items to purchase.

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Site Generation Wizard

The Site Generation Wizard provides a simple interface to create new Websites.  Each Website is initially created using a pre-defined site wireframe and theme, ensuring overall brand consistency.  The wireframes determine the structure, pages, and functionality of the new site.  The theme specifies the design and look+feel of the new site, using CSS.  Once the new site is created, it can be easily customized using Ektron PageBuilder.

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Smart Forms

Ektron Smart Form templates simplify web page creation by separating content creation from its ultimate presentation. As well as making page creation simple, Smart Forms help site managers maintain consistency and branding across every page. Once a Smart Form is established, content providers simply enter in their text, imagery and any other material. Smart Form content is stored as XML, ensuring content is in the optimal format for reuse.

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Social and Timeline Navigation

Social Navigation uses the input and from the community (including commenting and ratings) to “bubble up” the most useful content. The more people view, rate and comment on a piece of information, the higher it climbs in rankings. Allow visitors to sort through the information they find most useful by rating it. Timeline navigation allow users to explore a running timeline of their own – and their peers’ – activities to easily locate content. Everyone has experienced the frustration of not being able to locate content or information. “What was its file name again?” “Did I create a new folder?” Just as frustrating is to need a file from a colleague and having to wait until 1) they can locate it and 2) they email it to you or tell you where you can find it. With timeline navigation, users scroll through activity streams to view a real time view of their work history. Click on a file’s name right from the activity stream, open it, make edits, add new content, save the file, attend the next meeting, eat lunch and then come back and view the activity stream again to find whatever document was being working on during the past few hours, days or weeks. **Included in the Social Software Suite

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Social Bar

Connect your content to the social web and let visitors share your sites content on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and more.

The Ektron Social Business Tools module provides an interactive and user-friendly web toolbar that allows you to integrate a host of web applications directly into your website.  Promote your website’s content, while increasing time spent on your site and visitor interest. **Included in the Social Software Suite

Social Communities

Create vibrant online communities where your customers, partners, and employees can participate, share ideas, communicate with other fans, and experience your brand. Enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty, create loyal customers for life, and generate more revenue for your company.

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Social CRM

Capitalize on the social tools of the Web, including Twitter and Facebook, to enhance how you market, sell and provide support to your customers. Connect external customer conversions to internal sales, marketing, support, and product development processes to transform business productivity. Manage social engagement with the same tools you use to manage content. Collaboratively respond to customer conversations in external social networks and internal customer communities, proactively or reactively, and deliver better business results. **Included in the Social Software Suite 

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Speed Deployment Time

Traditional synchronization and file replication tools will package and deploy an entire site, slowing deployment times.  eSync performs a sophisticated analysis to understand which files have changed, ensuring that only modified files are deployed, speeding time-to-deployment and reducing risk.  All updates go live in unison across a set of geographically dispersed servers, regardless of the number of tiers or servers. 

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Subscriptions and Web Alerts

Ektron's subscriptions enable site visitors to sign up and receive Web alerts directly to their inbox. Engage visitors off your website with instant notification about precisely the information they are interested in and drive them back to your website to take further action. **Included in the Social Software Suite 

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Tag Clouds

Tag Clouds are a view of user-created tags on users, groups, and content. Content authors apply free-form tags, and the Tag Cloud will display all the tags across the community; the more popular the tag, the larger the font. Each tag is a hyperlink, allowing users to quickly view everything that has been categorized with the tag. **Included in the Social Software Suite 

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Taxonomy

Classify and structure content into logical groupings using taxonomies. Using any number of taxonomy trees, content can be categorized into structured parent-child navigation relationships. Content can be placed into multiple taxonomy nodes, allowing content authors to reuse content in multiple locations on a site. Taxonomies also apply to search results, allowing users to narrow search results using taxonomy facets.

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User Profiles

User Profiles give community members a home, acting as a connecting point to site resources and other community members. Each user has a personal profile, with their own status updates, blogs, documents, photos, and more. Users can create personalized dashboards, with access to data and applications that matter the most.

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Visual Page and Site Creation

PageBuilder revolutionizes page and site creation. It allows users, developers, and designers to work in parallel, empowering users to manage the entire page creation process without needing access to busy developers and designers.  Users simply enter text, images, video, and any other site functionality in a simple, intuitive, drag+drop interface. Designers layout a series of page wireframes ensuring site-wide brand consistency. Developers create site functionality as reusable "Widgets", which range from simple mini-applications such as images, content, and RSS feeds, to complex integrations with existing applications. 

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Web Analytics

Access to advanced, real-time analytics gives content editors and digital marketers the ability to measure results, see trends and optimize customer experience. Since you can't manage what you can't measure, send contextual website visitor information to your reporting tools to gain an advanced understanding of visitor engagement.

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Web Content Compliance

Make your web content more accessible by following the World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines. You set the level of compliance required and establish content publishing guidelines. Built-in checking validates all templates, content, menus, CSS and JavaScript.

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Web Services API

The Ektron Web Services API exposes the functionality of the .NET Assembly through the use of SOAP to HTTP, allowing developers to create pages that offer content to any Web-enabled device (and also to consume existing Web Services). Ektron's Web Services can return data separated from presentation and, in combination with XML support, let consuming applications retrieve XML data independent of presentation and repurpose it. This is often the right choice when integrating Ektron into an overall IT infrastructure.

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