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FatWire Delivers More Ease of Use with Upgraded CMS

FatWire has announced the release of FatWire Content Server 7.5, extending the company's core web content management solution with some notable features.

Within the past few months, FatWire has released upgrades to all its major products in anticipation of this release. Back in August, I wrote about the unveiling of their Content Integration Platform, which is a critical element in their ability to tap into some of the efficiencies now possible with Content Server 7.5.

FatWire offers products that span the range of web content management activities:

Content Server (core product and platform)

TeamUp (collaboration and community)

Engage (personalization and targeted marketing)

Analytics and content integration platform (integration with legacy systems)

Site preview and the business-user interface enhancements are the result of customer feedback, according to FatWire President and CEO Yogesh Gupta; "Business users keep saying, let us do more."

That is exactly what FatWire has done with Content Server 7.5. With business users wanting to do most of the content management themselves, they needed a user interface that could support their entire business process in a customized way. Business users now have a dashboard tailored specifically to their own content management process. Using the Content Integration Platform, business users can manage their process for the web across all existing legacy systems. So, wherever the content may be (Documentum, file servers, etc.), business users can control how and when that content is published with updates occurring automatically when new versions of that content are available.

The new business user interface ties directly into site preview capabilities. Using tags with a "go-live" date (as well as an expiration date) business users can preview the site as it will look on a given date. So, for example, if you can imagine a major product announcement that will happen on a certain date, there are a lot of changes that need to happen to the website -- updated content, changes in the templates for look and feel, etc. Based on the website's personalization features the view someone sees on the "go-live" date can also be different. Business users needed a way to answer the question "Show me what the site will look like on the "go-live" date". That is exactly what site preview allows them to do. Using time-based versions of the site, users can not only see what the site will look like on future dates but also be able to do a side-by-side preview of date based versions. This feature would come in very handy for business applications like a marketing campaign, product launches, site redesigns, or even internal communications.

It is important to note that site preview is not intended for historical viewing for audit or legal purposes. While the content management portion of the system can tell you what version of content was the production/approved version at a historical point in time, you cannot preview the historical website.

The third key feature is real time publishing. This is all about making the publishing process easier and more efficient. The goal is to reduce costs and improve efficiencies particularly for the technology staff. In today's business the need is for getting more done with fewer resources. real time publishing is about simplifying the job for both the business users and the IT staff supporting the content creators.

Using a dashboard view, the new capabilities give deployment staff full control over content publishing at a very detailed level. Because enterprise deployments of Content Server often span dozens of satellite servers (caching servers) spread across geographic regions and countries, error prevention and process recovery is key to ensure successful deployments and a consistent version of the production website.

When I met with Gupta he explained, "We made deployment failsafe. Deployments can be restarted at any point which has increased efficiency more than tenfold." Large amounts of content can now be deployed in less time in a way that is transparent. In addition there is a feature to do on demand publishing of small sections of a site to handle "breaking news" and similar critical, instant deployments.

Also included in this release is enhanced search for both the content management environment and the live website. According to Gupta, "FatWire was designed to do dynamic websites since day one unlike many other content management repositories. It is built to scale both in terms of performance and usability. Recently FatWire participated in a benchmark test where it had to scale and deliver 30-40 million personalized pages a day. It passed with flying colors."

Where search is so important is in usability. Besides scaling for performance, the system needs to scale in a way that business users can find and manage content that may range in the thousands to millions of content elements. You just can't scroll through and browse thumbnails to select an image file to link to when there are thousands of images. Using metadata and advanced search, FatWire is able to search across repositories to meet this need.

FatWire pricing is based solely on server and CPU, not number of users. Pricing for Content Server 7.5 starts at $40,000.

About FatWire

Founded in 1996, FatWire Software provides industry-leading web experience management (WEM) solutions that enable organizations to deliver a rich online experience to users and to simplify management of their web presence. FatWire is headquartered in Mineola, N.Y. and serves over 500 customers from offices in 10 countries.

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