Stellent Furthers Leadership Position in Multi-Site Management with New Release of Site Studio
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Stellent, Inc. (Nasdaq: STEL), a global provider of content management solutions, released today at the AIIM 2006 Conference & Exposition a new version of its award-winning multi-site management application Stellent® Site Studio. Site Studio - a component of the enterprise-scalable Stellent Universal Content Management™ system - provides a software infrastructure for creating, maintaining and deploying multiple internal and external Web sites.
The new version of Site Studio further empowers Web site managers — often the Web site "audience expert” within a business unit or department — by offering in-context site assembly and organization capabilities through a new Site Studio Manager tool. Additional Site Studio enhancements include built-in usage analytics and an expanded search engine offering.
"Stellent coined the widely accepted industry term ‘multi-site management’ three years ago with our introduction of Site Studio, and we remain committed to continually advancing this award-winning technology in order to fully optimize the tremendous task of managing numerous Web sites,” said Dan Ryan, chief operating officer for Stellent. "A key aspect of this process is distributing Web site assembly and maintenance to business units, while maintaining centralized control of branding, layout and design. Our new Site Studio Manager tool makes it even easier for companies to strike this balance. Web developers remain responsible for creating site templates to ensure overall consistency, but Web site managers now have greater flexibility to be creative and directly modify more aspects of their sites to ensure their business needs and objectives are met.”
"Companies increasingly use Web sites for collaboration, communication and commerce, which is driving business units to take more responsibility for their sites,” said Lou Latham, principal research analyst for Gartner, Inc. "For many business people, the Web has been the province of the IT group. But IT wants out from under the essentially clerical duty of editing content and navigation, and business managers realize time and money are wasted by interposing an IT ‘middleman’ between content authors and audience experts and the Web. Consequently, we believe demand will grow for Web site management technologies that help facilitate an appropriate balance between IT control and business unit autonomy.”
In-Context Web Site Management
While many organizations enable business users to easily change text on a Web site, most users still have to involve a centralized Web development team to implement other simple changes, such as editing navigation or adding a new section to the site — creating yet another Web site bottleneck. The new Site Studio Manager tool enables organizations to more easily distribute control of day-to-day site maintenance to business units. It is a completely Web-based application designed specifically for Web site managers, and it leverages asynchronous JavaScript and XML (Ajax) techniques to ensure a rich user interface that is similar to applications with which business users are accustomed.
According to Forrester1, "…the capability gap remains wide between the best that thin client user interfaces (typically rendered through conventional HTML) have been able to offer and the capabilities of the rich desktop, despite numerous proprietary attempts to split the difference. Rich Internet Application technologies like Ajax promise to close that gap. … Ajax promises to be rich enough for the user interface needs of many, if not most, enterprise applications while retaining zero-desktop-deployment benefits of a pure browser application.”
Site Studio Manager empowers Web site managers with in-context site management features, allowing them to easily organize their Web site by modifying navigation; adding sections, such as those used for blogs; and selecting layouts from a pre-defined list of templates. The site managers simply navigate to the area of the Web site requiring modification, where they authenticate and begin rearranging and updating their site based upon security permissions. Web site developers can easily control and configure the appropriate amount of Site Studio Manager functionality exposed on a particular site. Additionally, to address the increasing importance of search engine optimization, Site Studio gives Web site managers the responsibility of ensuring the right keywords and search terms are available on each Web page and site.
Built-In Usage Analytics
The new version of Stellent Site Studio offers a tighter integration with Stellent’s repository analytics tool, Stellent Content Tracker™, making it easier to incorporate service and content usage analytics within Web sites. This functionality arms Web site managers with the necessary tools to better understand how their Web site is used, so they can make continuous, educated improvements to the site.
Site Studio now offers controlled access to Web site usage reports on the actual site and can display page "hits” directly on a Web site for site managers — helping them decide if navigation labels need to be updated or moved to a more obvious location. The tighter integration with Content Tracker also provides site managers with other useful reports such as "top searches” and "top accessed documents” by groups of users or format. Finally, as sites move beyond "brochure-ware” or "read-only sites,” audiences expect their behavior, opinions, needs and common requests to be incorporated within the site. Site Studio enables organizations to easily leverage usage analytics for searches and when building content lists in Web sites, enabling them to order and display articles by popularity or most accessed by a certain type of user, facilitating "smarter,” more usable lists and searches for users.
Expanded Search Engine Offering
With the new version of Site Studio, Stellent is the first vendor to offer multiple search engines within a multi-site Web content management solution. Organizations can now power search capabilities within their Site Studio Web sites by using FAST Search and Transfer or Verity, or from a number of database options, such as Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle or IBM DB2.
As the number of Web sites and content repository sizes increase, search becomes a more critical function for customers. Site Studio now supports a variety of search technologies, so customers may select the most appropriate, efficient search solution for their Web sites. For example, an extranet focused on enabling viewers to search for contracts and invoices (typically involving metadata-intense searches) may have different search requirements than a customer support knowledgebase where full-text search and robust multi-lingual support are most important.
Site Studio Accolades and E-Seminars
Since its introduction in May 2003, Stellent Site Studio has received multiple industry accolades. For example, shortly after its initial release, KMWorld named Site Studio a "Trend Setting Product of 2003” in the content management category. And recently, editors, writers and technology analysts from Government Computer News and Washington Technology selected Site Studio as a "Best of FOSE” winner at FOSE 2006 — the nation’s premier government technology event.
Site Studio also has been one of the fastest-selling products in Stellent’s history and is used by leading organizations, such as U.S. Department of Agriculture, Qwest Communications, Dallas Museum of Art, Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation, Seattle Public Utilities, HELIOS Kliniken GmbH and City of Aurora, Colo.
To learn more about Stellent Site Studio’s new features, register for an upcoming e-seminar at www.stellent.com/sitestudio77.
17.05.2006, Stellent GmbH
