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When we last heard from Stellent, the Eden Prarie, Minn.-based content management developer was consolidating its various applications on one server. The offering, which included collaboration, digital asset management, document and records management, Web content management, and compliance applications, was called Universal Content Management 7.0.

After spending more than a year in development, Stellent is back with Universal Content Management 7.5, which fine tunes a number of the pieces of the enterprise content management puzzle.

Stellent has always been active in the intranet and extranet markets (the company was formerly known as Intranet Solutions), and has long preached the benefits of multisite content management — using one content management application to manage your Web presence across several internal and external sites.

"More recently we do see a trend in customers trying to consolidate the content management products and vendors they have," said Dan Ryan, Stellent's executive vice president for marketing. "Multisite management has as much an impact on the intranet world as the Internet world."

The three major enhancements for Universal Content Management 7.5 involve meta data management, e-mail message management, and digital asset management.

Meta data is an important part of any application that manages content. Authors, revision dates, workflow, approval, and expiration dates all help keep a piece of content organized, but can also be overwhelming, especially to casual users of a content management system.

Stellent's new meta data management allows users to view meta data on context. Users see only the meta data applicable to them at a certain point in time. It's effectively personalization for meta data.

"We look at meta data as several layers," said Todd Price, vice president of product management at Stellent. "It's being able to control both horizontally and vertically, as well as apply certain rules."

Stellent says the new meta data management model will simplify deployments and end-user experience, and reduce the need for application customization and application management overhead.

With an increasing amount of content being generated within e-mail, and it becoming necessary to manage that content for both legal and business reasons, Stellent enhanced its e-mail management for version 7.5.

By integrating with e-mail clients like Lotus and Outlook, Stellent allows users to drag and drop messages and attachments directly from e-mail into Universal Content Manager content server. Meta data is extracted from e-mail messages when they are added to the content manager. E-mail messages can also be declared as records.

"We made our content server look like an e-mail sever," Price told Intranet Journal. Stellent's new desktop integration goes even further, making viewable in a browser or using WebDAV.

Stellent's content server can be integrated with e-mail clients to make it easy to drag and drop messages into the system.

Stellent hasn't updated its digital asset management (DAM) module in any meaningful way for three years, Ryan said, so it was due for some new functionality. The new DAM application can convert images from single source to a variety of formats, so they can be optimized for use on the Web, or in PowerPoint, etc. It has similar functionality for video files. The renditioning feature can be used for brand management, where it can help prevent users from choosing the wrong image size or resolution for a specific use. Ryan said Stellent has seen a real uptick in demand for DAM, and Stellent's focus is on outputting to users.

"A lot of people want to roll out DAM but no one wants to spend money on software for it," Ryan said. "They want it integrated with content management software."

Stellent's new DAM features allow renditions of an image or video to be saved from a parent, making the different sizes, formats, and resolutions for specific applications easy to find.