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If you're looking for a content management system, you have two choices: you can either spend well into six figures for a software solution or you can rent a hosted product. A hosted product has low start-up costs, but it severely limits how you can access and customize the product. Right?

Not anymore.

CrownPeak, the provider of an already popular hosted content management system, has introduced CrownPeak Advantage ES, an "Extended Suite" of tools that give its hosted product all the abilities of an installed system.

While this is a major step for content management, it shouldn't come as any surprise to CrownPeak users. The company has a history of responding quickly to customer needs, and has a long list of features available as add-ons, many targeted to specific areas like publishing or government. With Advantage ES, the company is again responding to customer requests, this time the request that the product make its developer tools and APIs accessible, so that IT workers at the companies using CrownPeak content management can customize it and make it more responsive.

This release effectively gives people using CrownPeak the same view that the product's own developers get, and the same abilities that they'd get with any hosted solution. Programmers will enjoy the built-in wizards that make certain customizations much faster to create. One big advantage is that programmers can now make use of the APIs, a large segment of which are exposed, to tie CrownPeak to other applications. That means you can set CrownPeak to refresh your intranet, extranet, or Internet pages whenever particular data is updated in your database.

CrownPeak's CEO, Jim Howard, calls this the third generation of hosted content management tools, and notes that CrownPeak is the only hosted solution that has this ability and can go head-to-head with installed products.

Now in its fifth year, CrownPeak has grown quickly and has built up a list of hundreds of clients that use the company's content management system for all kinds of public and private sites. The company is based in Los Angeles and has around 20 employees.

In addition to its hosted content management, CrownPeak also provides a no-fuss intranet-in-a-box product for companies that need to set up an intranet quickly.

What CrownPeak Offers

CrownPeak's content management system is completely turnkey and should be up and running in four to six weeks after purchase. The monthly cost starts at $3,000, and you'll also pay a one-time implementation fee when you first begin of between $10,000 and $20,000. That fee gets you template creation, a workflow system, and training for both administrators and end users. The content management system is designed to be easy to use, so that once your staff is trained, they can easily train new hires on how to use it.

Price and ease-of-use aren't the only reasons to turn to CrownPeak. Your users will like the related linking engine, which can automatically suggest other documents related to the one being displayed. It uses a semantic analysis engine to pore over all your documents and create links. You'll also like the many preconfigured templates that are available, including ones for calendar systems, polls, and a digital image archive.

With Advantage ES, CrownPeak now works like any installed content management system. This image shows the developer's environment with an input template open.