Wednesday 2 May 2007

Internet World 2007 - CMS (Content Management Systems)

We have developed our own CMS at Esendex. This was born out of the frustration of not finding a solution that met a requirements in the market. These requirements are:

  • Friendly URLs, not the usual 'content.php?id=1234' which means nothing to either search engines or humans
  • Multi language support
  • Static site mirroring, from our central site to satelite hosting around the world
  • Integration with our existing application platform

It looks like our search maybe over. If the demo and chat I had with the Neal Perry and his colleagues from EPiServer is anything to go by.

EPiServer CMS

The EPiServer system is a CMS focused on delivering web site content, but it's killer feature for me is that it's a set of Microsoft .net libraries that can be embedded into existing ASP.Net sites. Given that our web site, applications and web services are all based on the .net framework you can see that this could be compelling. Further, our in-house team has developed everything you see and use on www.esendex.com. So we have a team with the skills and the will to do the integration, allowing us to maintain a seamless web experience.

We then got onto discussions about the 'warm web-site' where interactions are tracked and categorised allowing content and service to be tailored to the individual. Customer service and sales agents to contact people live, while they are interacting with the site, knowing what they've been looking at or having an issue with. This also allows the web site to adapt it's content to the the user. So if a user generally looks at information on APIs, they can be shown more detailed, tailored information as they explore the site.

So the demo will be downloaded and the support evaluated. Here's hoping the search really is over.

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