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The success of Ektron's CMS400.NET content management product is evident in how much Ektron has built out the product since it launched in the second quarter of 2004.

In the spring of this year, Amherst, NH.-based Ektron added document management as an add-on to the company's content management offerings.

This summer, Ektron announced CMS400.NET would support Macromedia's ColdFusion, JSP, PHP, and ASP, as well as ASP.NET, allowing developers to continue to use their programming language of choice while taking advantage of a content management system. CMS400.NET could also be integrated into existing sites using those languages. In July, the product was certified as ".NET Connected" by Microsoft.

The latest enhancement to the .NET product is automated site replication, an integrated feature Ektron unveiled at Microsoft's Professional Developers' Conference earlier this month.

The use of staging or development servers is common at many organizations because few organizations let every author, designer, or Web contributor work on a production server for quality and security reasons. Changes made to content can then be approved before going live.

Ektron's approach is to integrate the process of mirroring a site on a staging server and synchronizing it with a live site with the CMS400.NET user interface. This way, it requires virtually no complex configuring of hard-to-use and expensive third-party applications.

According to Ektron, the integrated replication complements the virtual staging server found on all Ektron CMS applications.

"What it's done for us is, we had a virtual staging server, but a lot of organizations won't let people work in a production environment," said Bill Rogers, Ektron's CEO. While not unheard of in the world of Web content management, Rogers is proud of one aspect of the new feature in particular. "A mid-market player is now offering this type of functionality," he told Intranet Journal.

Automated replication not only allows review and approval of new Web content and edits, but it can also be used to test new features, such as forms, in a non-public environment. It can also provide failsafe site back-up and restore by maintaining a history of recent published versions of a complete site.

According to Rogers, CMS400.NET has accounted for 90 percent of all the company's sales since it was launched. It is compiled against .NET 2.0, which will be released in November of this year and will include almost double the number of classes and functions. This will mean more functionality for Ektron users in the future, Rogers said.

Integrated site replication in Ektron's CMS400.NET moves files from a staging server to a production environment without third-party software. Here the results are shown in the Ektron user interface.