Printer Friendly Version

On Tuesday, Stellent will roll out enhancements to its popular multi-site Web content management application Stellent Site Studio.

Eden Prairie, Minn.-based Stellent will launch the 7.7 version at the AIIM 2006 conference in Philadelphia, an expo that has praised Stellent's products in the past.

Three of the biggest enhancements to the application are: in-context Web site management leveraging asynchronous JavaScript and XML (Ajax) technology; built-in usage analytics; and an expanded search engine offering featuring FAST, Verity, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle and IBM DB2 technologies.

Site Studio's new features make it easier for companies to distribute day-to-day Web site assembly and maintenance to business units, while maintaining central control of branding, layout and design across multiple Web sites. Web developers remain responsible for creating templates to maintain consistency, but employees now have greater flexibility to be creative and directly modify more components of their sites -- including navigation.

The new user interfaces are key. "Depending on who the user is, or what Web site it is, you can expose a lot more functionality … There's a lot of granular control," said Michelle Huff, Stellent product marketing manager.

As for controlling content, a company's CEO, for instance, could now easily update his bio or photo on the company site and change other content, or a human resources employee can create new micro-sites, change names of sections, create simpler URLs, and more.

The expanded search capabilities are intriguing. As the number of Web sites grows and places for storing content increases, search becomes a more critical function for customers and in-house employees. Stellent says it is the first vendor to offer multiple search engines within a multi-site Web content management solution.

Site Studio also offers a tighter integration with Stellent's repository analytics tool -- called Stellent Content Tracker -- making it easier to incorporate service and usage analytics within Web sites. This functionality gives Web site managers the tools to better understand how their site is used so they can make educated improvements to the site.

For instance, a manager could create lists of company FAQs organized by the most accessed. If some obscure FAQ on the corporate intranet is never clicked on, it might be a time for change.

There are many ways to wrestle the usage analytics to produce data, Huff said.

"You might also want to see users who have not seen any type of content," she said. "If someone's never finding certain types of information -- maybe because it's not organized on the Web site properly or it's hard for them to find or it might be useless -- you might just need to get rid of it or update it to make it better for the Web site."

The role of usage analytics is growing, Huff said. "We're seeing them used more and more for different Web sites as well as collaboration. Definitely the whole advance of blogs and wikis points to the fact that Web sites are becoming a key way of interacting."

As for the big picture, Todd Price, Stellent vice president of product management, thinks more consolidation is coming soon in the enterprise content management arena.

"I'm sure there'll be more consolidation as the market matures, " Price said. "I'm not sure who's going to consolidate with whom. There are some partnerships being formed that make me think certain mergers will happen."

With Site Studio 7.7, users can organize lists based on popularity of a topic and many other functions.

Printer Friendly Version

Other Resources

from Intranet Journal

Intranet Journal Discussion Board Stellent Applies Its Rules to Records Management Stellent Brings Blogs and Wikis to ECM

from JupiterWeb

Latest ECM Match: Stellent Snaps up Optika (Earthwebnews.com )

from the Web

Stellent