The OrchestraCMS Blog

The Unification of Marketing - Web Content, Publications and Email.

In the era of the web, marketers have a standard dilemna common to much of an organizations IT infrastructure. Tool fragmentation. Online marketing affords many powerful tools.  But like so much of IT, they're not integrated.  Like software development, much of the goal of consistent messaging is having the ability to reuse content across multiple delivery channels.  Like traditional IT, there are multiple systems used to deliver content, multiple user interfaces to learn and content that must be copied and even reformated between systems.  Web CMS, Email Marketing, Landing Page applcations etc.

Some integrations exist, but few of those systems were designed from the ground up to deliver content from a single repository and a single interface to the web, publications and email with the power of an Enterprise CMS.  Why should creating website content mean moving that content to a new system to create publications or emails? ...That's what we thought.

We also thought that web content management systems, like OrchestraCMS, have a much more robust ability to create rich content than traditional email automation platforms. OrchestraCMS already stores content separate from templates, allowing reuse across multiple web channels (public, portal, intranet, extranet). OrchestraCMS allows complete freedom to design templates to whatever specifications are required, providing rich design, innovative interactions and deep integration with Salesforce.com data, processes and analytics.  Why not provide two more channels through which our customers could publish that content? Why not provide the flexibility to include different template types, to enable different looks across all of the available channels.

Introducing OrchestraCMS Publications and Email Distribution.  As with all things OrchestraCMS, we believe everything starts with great content, delivered through designs as individual as all of our customers, to the best web channel for the application - public, secure Enterprise portal, intranet, extranet.  Now we add the ability to easily assemble that great content into a publication that can be published to your website, portal or intranet, and delivered to your customers through email, based on subscription and/or customer preference, instantly, or on a schedule.

With the same visual ease that characterizes the OrchestraCMS user experience today, our customers will be able to quickly assemble content into publications on templates with the same limitless design as our standard CMS templates and push them through email with the same or unique look at feel, from their own set of templates.  Same content, same interface, integrated platform. OrchestraCMS.

No copying content from one system to another. No compromise on the design of any of the templates. One system to learn, one content library to manage and package anyway you like.  And with the new Analytics Edition included in Salesforce.com Spring 12, powerful analytics that bring email, publications and websites together on a single dashboard.  That's the power of 100% native on Salesforce.  That's the power of integration.

For the beleagured marketer, the application is the same, the look is the same and you can leverage separate native Salesforce Approval processes to accommodate any business process for any of those channels.  Just select the content, select the template, publish or submit for approval.   Create Publications that customers can subscribe to from your website and simply create a publication for the subscription.  It will be published at the right time and and email of the publication received by your customer at the time of their choosing, from their subscription preference.

We think this is the new defintion of Customer Engagement Management, where both the Marketer and the Customer win.  In the era of the Social Enterprise, we don't think this is an option.  We think this is the only option - win/win.

Let us know what you think in the comments area below and watch for some great examples of customer implementations in upcoming posts. 

Disrupting Content Management Systems - User Driven Interfaces

With the pundits and CMS rags all proclaiming some version of the end of Web CMS as we know it, we'd like to say, "We agree completely!". Standalone CMS systems have run their course and are giving way to fully integrated business platforms with a fully integrated CMS.  Such is the model on which OrchestraCMS was built.  This 'new' thinking is where we started 3 years ago when OrchestraCMS was conceived.

Fast forward to today.  We don't think the commentators have gone far enough in their proclamations.  There is another aspect of traditional Content Management Systems that has kept content authoring, publishing and managment out of the hands of the content creators - aka business and marketing users. Ease of Use.

Ease of use has been traditionally defined with terms like GUI, Drag-and-Drop (yes, we use that one), etc.  But the interfaces are still generally generic, complex and full of features. Users love asking for and IT vendors just love to deliver more and more features. Until one day, it's all too hard to use.  The user runs for something simple - good enough - leaving their loyal vendor wondering what went wrong.  A classic "Innovators Dilemma" problem.  We don't think either of those two choices have to be made in isolation.

Enter, OrchestraCMS Custom Content Templates and Workspaces.  The end of end user complexity, while maintaing the full featured, integrated CMS underneath.

OrchestraCMS Custom Content Templates and Workspaces

A CEO needs to post a weekly blog. An HR Director needs to post a job listing on the company website. A Real Estate Manager needs to post a listing for a new apartment for sale. A Marketer needs to post  and event registration page for the next marketing event.  To these individuals, the blog post, the job posting, the new apartment listing and the event registration page are, by their definition, a single piece of content.  A discrete function. As vendors, we know about the complexity of media types, references, re-use etc.  But to the business user, their perspective is different and completely in context of their role, not the CMS user interface.

OrchestraCMS introduces Custom Content Templates (CCT). With CCTs, we can create individual user interfaces, taylored to the context in which the end user operates, without complex programming or modifying the core CMS. In fact, an organization can have as many CCTs as it likes. Content Authoring, Publishing and Management in the end user's context.  Today, we have customers working in CCTs for the functional requirements described above.  So the CMS interface to the CEO is simple with an easy to use form to be filled out creating the blog post. A native Salesforce approval process, fully integrated into OrchestraCMS, manages the review and publication of the post.  The CEO, just sees and fills out what's needed.  No pages and navigation to create. Just fill in the blanks and go.

But we're taking that one step further.  With OrchestraCMS Workspaces, we can further customize the CMS user's experience by presenting only the functionality they need within the CMS interface. Our CEO needs a button to create a blog post, a button to preview it and a button to submit it for review and publishing.  And she only needs to see the blog posts she's created (or collaborated on. But that's for another post).

The End of the Publishing Bottleneck

In larger organizations, the publishing process can often be cumbersome and is almost always complex.  A small group of marketing/IT folks capture content coming from across the business and integrate it with the CMS for publishing.  With the publishing group much smaller than the rest of the content creating organization, a bottleneck is almost always the outcome. We often hear from Marketers and others that it can take up to 6 weeks to get a single page of content through an opaque approval process, into the online group and published to the web.  This is not moving at the speed of the business!

With the arrival of OrchestraCMS Custom Content Templates and Workspaces, OrchestraCMS now adapts to individual users, and their definition of content, allowing those at the most far flung corners of your organization to author and publish content, directly or through a native Salesforce Approval process, to the correct location on the Intranet, Portal, Public Website or some combination of the three, without the 6 week bottleneck. 

At Stantive, we're commited to helping content creators, from all parts of an organization, participate directly in the authoring, publishing and management of content across all of the web channels - public websites, intranets, portals and extranet applications.  

Today our customers have many OrchestraCMS users across their organizations, not just two or three in the online group.  Authors see their work published at the speed of their business after tracking the content through a fast and transparent approval process. The intellectual capital of their organizations are captured, edited and published across multiple web channels, and the online departments are focused on adding more design and functional value to their sites (and are much less stressed!).

We think that sounds like a CMS revolution in the age of the Knowledge Based Enterprise. Let us know what you think. We'd love to hear your thoughts and ideas!

...and this is just the beginning...

Mobile Meets Portal on Salesforce

We all know the stats. Mobile is hot.  Enough said.

Salesforce.com recently introduced it's Mobile SDK to enable developers to build great mobile apps to connect Salesforce.com.  It's a natural fit with the Social Enterprise vision, allowing Salesforce users to connect to their organizations and applications in new and dynamic ways.

For most Salesforce users, the services provided are focused on acquiring and managing knowledge about the customers to enable better relationships, resulting in better customer service, higher revenue and profitability. The relationships implied Salesforce's Social Enterprise vision are largely People to People.  Radian6, Data.com and the daily interactions stored in the Salesforce CRM and platform applications are highly focused on what we would characterize as the inbound flood. The problem is that all of this information is leveraged through what we call the outbound trickle.  

The trickle is based on the channels used to reach out or back to a customer - Customer Service Agents, Sales and Marketing interactions being the most common. While these are powerful channels, they don't scale well and are often overkill in terms of cost and complexity.  Often customers want to interact in a model of convenience, provided by self-service applications. The challenge has been the lack of flexibility to easily create the same kind of customized interactions as would be expected in person to person contact.

That's where OrchestraCMS comes in.  OrchestraCMS lives directly inside the core Force.com platform, leveraging all of the power and data housed in your Salesforce.com organization.  All of the flood of information coming in, can be organized, consolidated and delivered to your employees, customers, partners and community through our 3 core web channels - Enterprise Portals, Intranets and Public Web Sites.  User preferences, marketing preferences, trending social conversations, transactional information or results from the latest sales call, can be harnessed to deliver a completely unique experience for each site visitor.  We don't pretend that this is a complete replacement for traditional person to person contact.  But it does allow those customer interactions to scale, and the highly individualized user experience moves the web channel a long way toward parity with traditional personal interactions.

Exponentializing Reach

When mobile is added to our native Enterprise portal, additional capabilities such location based services and custom content are delivered directly to their smart phone or tablet.  In one case, one of our customers runs their business on Salesforce.com with 40 employees.  They service over 30,000 customers.  We built their customer portal to provide a rich, customized user experience based on the services their customers were utilizing.  We extended key portal services to their customer's mobile device, using Salesforce.com's Mobile SDK, to ensure that they could access those services wherever they were. One portal, delivered to multiple device types.  When services are added to the portal, they're automatically available on the mobile device.  When new portal content is added by their marketing and customer support representatives, it automatically appears on the appropriate user's mobile device, based on their use of a service and personal preferences.

Customer service is now focused on more complex and intimate issues, while the portal has expanded the reach of customer service to all of our customers.  Not a single new employee was required to dramatically scale customer service. This customer does not have a single IT person on staff.  The power of the Cloud realized.

Connect with us to find out how Stantive can help you deliver the next generation in web engagement with your customers and partners.  There are over 5 million customers and partners of our customers accessing compelling content and services everyday on OrchestraCMS.  We'll help you complete the Social Enterprise vision.

Implementing a Data Driven Menu Using jQuery and OrchestraCMS

I recently read an excellent wiki article by Dave Carroll discussing how to create a fancy data driven menu on the force.com platform that was prompted by a rather angry post about not being able to do this on the platform which can be found here.

http://iwritecrappycode.wordpress.com/2009/12/07/visual-force-blows/.

Here's the link to Dave Carroll's wiki tutorial.

http://blog.sforce.com/sforce/2010/01/implementing-a-data-driven-menu-using-jquery.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+SforceBlog+%28Force.com+Blog%29

The technique in Dave's post is very similar to the one used in OrchestraCMS but if you use OrchestraCMS you don't need to write any apex, visualforce, or create any custom objects. In this post I'm going to show how you can easily create the same sexy data driven menu in OrchestraCMS. All you need to know is html, css, jquery and a bit of OrchestraCMS. In addition the menu will be version controlled.

The first step to create the menu is to install the 30 day free trial of OrchestraCMS and setup a Force.com Sites site. I won't go through the setup of sites or Orchestra, I'll defer to the OrchestraCMS Developer guide which goes through the installation process.

Once you have Orchestra installed and setup the next step is to create an OrchestraCMS template. To do this go to setup > develop > pages  and click new. The visualforce page editor will open up. Give your template page a name. I called mine MenuTutorial.  All OrchestraCMS templates use the same standard skeleton, this tells Orchestra that the visualforce page is one it can use as a template. The source is shown below.

<apex:page id="t" controller="cms.CoreController" standardStylesheets="false" showHeader="false" sidebar="false">
    <apex:composition template="{!page_template_reference}">
        <apex:define name="header"></apex:define>
        <apex:define name="body"></apex:define>  
    </apex:composition>
</apex:page>

Copy and paste the skeleton into you visualforce page. You can now add standard header html in the header apex:define tag and standard body html in the body apex:define tag. We'll create a very simple template. To define drop zones in the template we use orchestra panel components. There are some specialized panels that limit what can be dropped in a drop zone and more general ones that are more flexible. We'll use a SingleClassStyledMenuPanel to identify where the single menu item with content template ClassStyledMenu can be dropped and we'll use the general Panel component for the body and head. To add the zones simply add the components to the template. The template should now look as shown below.

<apex:page id="t" controller="CMS.CoreController" standardStylesheets="false" showHeader="false" sidebar="false">
    <apex:composition template="{!page_template_reference}">

        <apex:define name="header">
        </apex:define>

        <apex:define name="body">

            <div class="container">
                <div id="jqheader" style="margin:0px; padding:0px;">
                    <div style="height: 120px; overflow: hidden;">
                        <CMS:Panel panelName="header" panelController="{!controller}" panelHeight="120px" />
                    </div>
                    <div style="height: 35px;">
                        <CMS:SingleClassStyledMenuPanel panelName="topmenu" panelController="{!controller}" panelHeight="35px" />
                    </div>
                </div>
                <div>
                    <CMS:Panel panelName="column1" panelController="{!controller}" panelHeight="500px" />
                </div>
            </div>
            </apex:define>    
    </apex:composition>
</apex:page>

The next step is to add the stylesheets, images and javascript. This is the only tricky part since there is currently a minor bug in salesforce that causes an exception to be thrown when trying to access static resources in the local namespace from within an include in a managed package. The solution to this is to create a managed package for your static resources and install that managed package which you can then reference using it's namespace, or if you're in a developer organization you can set a namespace and reference static resources with the namespace you set.

I uploaded a managed package with the static resources so you can install my managed package to speed up the tutorial and avoid creating a new sf developer organization. Here is the link to install the resource package  

https://login.salesforce.com/?startURL=%2Fpackaging%2FinstallPackage.apexp%3Fp0%3D04tA0000000Q1o6

There are some minor changes to the stylesheet and javascript found in Dave Carroll's tutorial. Here's what the stylesheet for the OrchestraCMS version looks like:

body {
    margin: 0; padding: 0;
    font: 10px normal Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
    background: #ddd url(body_bg.gif) repeat-x;
}
.container {
    width: 960px;
    margin: 0 auto;
    position: relative;
}

#jqheader .menu ul.root-level-list {
    list-style: none;
    padding: 0;
    margin: 0;
    float: left;
    width: 920px;
    background: #222;
    font-size: 1.2em;
    background: url(topnav_bg.gif) repeat-x;
}

#jqheader .menu ul.root-level-list li.root-level-item {
    float: left;
    margin: 0;
    padding: 0 15px 0 0;
    position: relative; /*--Declare X and Y axis base for sub navigation--*/
}

#jqheader .menu ul.root-level-list li.root-level-item a{
    padding: 10px 5px;
    color: #fff;
    display: block;
    text-decoration: none;
    float: left;
}

#jqheader .menu ul.root-level-list li.root-level-item a:hover{
    background: topnav_hover.gif no-repeat center top;
}

#jqheader .menu ul.root-level-list li.root-level-item span { /*--Drop down trigger styles--*/
    width: 17px;
    height: 35px;
    float: left;
    background: url(subnav_btn.gif) no-repeat center top;
}

#jqheader .menu ul.root-level-list li.root-level-item span.subhover {background-position: center bottom; cursor: pointer;} /*--Hover effect for trigger--*/

#jqheader .menu ul.root-level-list li.root-level-item ul.level-1-list {
    list-style: none;
    position: absolute; /*--Important - Keeps subnav from affecting main navigation flow--*/
    left: 0; top: 35px;
    background: #333;
    margin: 0; padding: 0;
    display: none;
    float: left;
    width: 170px;
    border: 1px solid #111;
}

#jqheader .menu ul.root-level-list li.root-level-item ul.level-1-list li{
    margin: 0; padding: 0;
    border-top: 1px solid #252525; /*--Create bevel effect--*/
    border-bottom: 1px solid #444; /*--Create bevel effect--*/
    clear: both;
    width: 170px;
}

#jqheader .menu ul.root-level-list li.root-level-item ul.level-1-list li a {
    float: left;
    width: 145px;
    background: #333 url(dropdown_linkbg.gif) no-repeat 10px center;
    padding-left: 20px;
}

#jqheader .menu ul.root-level-list li.root-level-item ul.level-1-list a:hover { /*--Hover effect for subnav links--*/
    background: #222 url(dropdown_linkbg.gif) no-repeat 10px center;
}

#jqheader .menu .level-2-list {
    display: none;
}

And here is the OrchestraCMS version of the javascript.

$(document).ready(function(){

    $("#jqheader .menu .root-level-list .level-1-list").parent().append("<span></span>"); //Only shows drop down trigger when js is enabled (Adds empty span tag after ul.subnav*)

    $("#jqheader .menu .root-level-list .root-level-item span").click(function() { //When trigger is clicked...

        //Following events are applied to the subnav itself (moving subnav up and down)
        $(this).parent().find(".level-1-list").slideDown('fast').show(); //Drop down the subnav on click

        $(this).parent().hover(function() {
        }, function(){
            $(this).parent().find(".level-1-list").slideUp('slow'); //When the mouse hovers out of the subnav, move it back up
        });

        //Following events are applied to the trigger (Hover events for the trigger)
        }).hover(function() {
            $(this).addClass("subhover"); //On hover over, add class "subhover"
        }, function(){    //On Hover Out
            $(this).removeClass("subhover"); //On hover out, remove class "subhover"
    });

});

Once you've installed the managed package with the resources add the following two lines to the apex:define head tag

<apex:stylesheet value="{!URLFOR($Resource.mtutorial__jqMenu, 'jqueryMenu.css')}" />
<apex:includeScript value="{!URLFOR($Resource.mtutorial__jqMenu, 'jqueryMenu.js')}" />

The final source for the template page is as shown below.

<apex:page id="t" controller="CMS.CoreController" standardStylesheets="false" showHeader="false" sidebar="false">
    <apex:composition template="{!page_template_reference}">

        <apex:define name="header">
            <apex:stylesheet value="{!URLFOR($Resource.mtutorial__jqMenu, 'jqueryMenu.css')}" />
            <apex:includeScript value="{!URLFOR($Resource.mtutorial__jqMenu, 'jqueryMenu.js')}" />
        </apex:define>

        <apex:define name="body">

            <div class="container">
                <div id="jqheader" style="margin:0px; padding:0px;">
                    <div style="height: 120px; overflow: hidden;">
                        <CMS:Panel panelName="header" panelController="{!controller}" panelHeight="120px" />
                    </div>
                    <div style="height: 35px;">
                        <CMS:SingleClassStyledMenuPanel panelName="topmenu" panelController="{!controller}" panelHeight="35px" />
                    </div>
                </div>
                <div>
                    <CMS:Panel panelName="column1" panelController="{!controller}" panelHeight="500px" />
                </div>
            </div>
            </apex:define>    
    </apex:composition>
</apex:page>

Click Save and launch OrchestraCMS. Select your site and click Select. Once you're in OrchestraCMS launch the setup tab and click Mange Page Layouts. Click the install link beside the template page you created.

Enter a label and description if you like and click install.

The template is now installed and ready to use. Now lets test it out by creating a page with it. Close the setup tab and create a new page by clicking on Create > Page.

Enter a name for your page and click next.

Select the template you just installed and click next.

Click Finish to launch the page editor. Now lets add the content to our page.

Click Add New Content.

Select Text > Text Block and enter a name. This will be the header text so I called it not surprisingly Header Text. Drag and drop it onto the top most panel.

Click the Edit Icon to edit the text. 

Enter the header text then select Actions > Save and Close.

Add a class styled menu to the menu panel (the menu panel is the second from the top) and then click the edit icon to edit your menu.

Select sub label position to be Outside Link - Below and leave the menu title blank.

Click Add and fill out the necessary details to add Menu items .

If you select an added item (it will highlight with a blue border when selected) and click add, the menu item will be added as a sub menu item to the selected item.

You can always reposition items after they've been added by dragging and dropping them. If you drag and drop inwards it will make the item a sub item of the parent.

Once you're done creating your menu click Actions > Save and Close.

Now you're ready to preview your menu. Click Actions > Preview.

You could now publish the page to make live on your live site. I've published mine and it can be viewed at the following address.

http://scott.morrisonlive.ca/CMSBETA__Main?name=Menu_Tutorial_Test

There you have it, sexy jquery menus with OrchestraCMS that are version controlled.







 

OrchestraCMS and Salesforce Sites - Making Beautiful Music. Together!

Salesforce.com Sites was announced at Dreamforce in November 2009.  Since then, there has been a lot of activity and even some confusion around what Sites is and what it means to Force.com users and developers.  Salesforce.com purports that you can build websites on Sites.  While this is 'technically' true, you have to know javascript, visualforce, apex (in many cases) and how to set up a domain etc.  That's just to get the pages built.  That doesn't include web templates, Flash (if you're so inclined), images etc. And it doesn't provide a system to manage content - a Web Content Management System.

So, while it's technical true that you can build your websites on Salesforce.com Sites, it would make Joomla and Drupal look easy by comparison - speaking from a business user perspective of course.

Enter OrchestraCMS from the STANTIVE Technologies Group Inc.  OrchestraCMS is a complete web content management system (CMS) built, 100% natively, on the Force.com platform.  It leverages Sites for domain, security, web caching and the other core features, but takes content creation and management and puts it in the hands of the business user.  To create content, pages, menus, forms etc., there is no need to utilize a developer.  OrchestraCMS is a very visual system employing 'drag and drop' functionality that literally lets you create content, pages and forms by dragging content from your library and dropping it into the appropriate spot on the page.

You can preview your pages, before they are published using our "TrueView Preview" capability that renders that page exactly as it will look.  Using our "Time Travel" capability, you can step through your site, minute by minute, from the day it was first published and into the future.  Our drag and drop Forms Generator automatically discovers all of the data on your instance of Salesforce.com and allows you to create forms in minutes.  All of this, with no developer required.

Millions of websites lay stagnant today because content management systems are too difficult to use for those tasked with managing and creating content.  Websites are also, typically, standalone platforms that require expensive and complex integration software to integrate with business applications. With OrchestraCMS, leveraging the power of the Force.com platform and Sites, all of the data your house on the Force.com platform is auto-discovered and instantly integrated. Stagnant, standalone websites are a thing of the past. Developers can do what they do best and content managers can move their website at the speed of their business.

Rethinking CMS: The Birth of OrchestraCMS

On Wednesday, November 18, 2009 at 8:00 am EST, we launched OrchestraCMS on the salesforce.com AppExchange.

Instead of being 'just another new CMS, OrchestraCMS is a fundamental rethink, grounded in a collective 25 years of developing on and using Web CMS systems.

First a Little Background

We've been a salesforce.com user, partner and, more recently a developer for over 7 years.  In fact, our company has been running in what is now called the Cloud for most of that time, so we're both early adopters and long time evangelists of Cloud Computing.  Last year, at Dreamforce, we witnessed the launch of a new feature on the Force.com platform called 'Sites'.  Effectively, Sites enables salesforce.com users to publish various aspects of their salesforce.com data to their web site. Much confusion has reigned over Sites since its introduction, and we'll help clear some of that up in our next post, but for now, suffice it to say, Sites is miles away from a web content management tool.  However, it does provide very important capabilities to enable OrchestraCMS.

STANTIVE got started by joining the pilot program for Sites deciding that our first move would be to migrate our entire website to Sites. Immediately we discovered the need to develop a Web CMS.  Our first CMS was crude, ugly, but very functional and our corporate website went live along with the Sites feature itself.  When our website hit the salesforce.com Sites Gallery, however, it sparked interest from salesforce.com and we were encouraged to continue developing our CMS, stating that a CMS for Sites was an application they wanted developed by the partner community.

Thus began our quest to rethink CMS.  Many readers will have seen a number of posts on this blog with titles beginning 'Rethinking CMS'.  We also reflected upon our past experiences, using applications that included Jooma and Drupal (both as users and developers) in addition to revisiting several large commercial CMS projects with our Enterprise customers.  The question that was core to our thinking was "If we could start from scratch, leveraging everything we've learned and experienced, and apply the latest development and platform technologies, what would a new Web CMS look like?

Focus, Focus

Our thinking resulted in a mission to solve two key problems:

1. Integration - traditional platforms are built on individual system stacks - operating system, hardware, CMS software, web server, database etc.  - often the LAMP stack.  This results in websites as standalone applications that need to be integrated with corporate applications creating increased cost and complexity. Cloud Computing has introduced the idea of a single, multi-tenant platform with many applications.  In this new ecosystem, integration is simpler since applications and users share a common platform and data infrastructure.  Leading the way in this realm is Salesforce.com's Force.com platform, arguably the best commercial grade Cloud platform in the market today.
2. Power to the Business User - traditional CMS applications, especially those from the Open Source Community, are written by developers for developers.  This is a community that tells the traditional user to 'RTFM' as a core support function using mantras like "Ask not what Drupal can do for you but what you can do for Drupal"!.  I've never met a user that even 'likes' the likes of Drupal or Joomla, and yet they are among the most popular CMS' today.  The website development process remains 99% the same as a traditional CMS, which means we're minimizing the impact on the development of traditional web templates .

Last week, at Dreamforce 09, we talked to over 200 people about their experiences with CMS technology and the answer was the same.  Not one person - virtually all of them business users - proclaimed any satisfaction with their current CMS.  Cryptic and hard to use.  Constant patching. Costly to integrate with corporate applications.

The Bottom Line

According to IDC, the CMS market is set to almost triple in the next four years and no clear player dominates today's market.  To the credit of the Open Source Community, applications like Joomla, Drupal and Wordpress collectively hold the leading position over much larger commercial vendors.  This speaks to the power of innovations brought about by the contributions of thousands of developers.  OrchestraCMS is also community driven, as is Salesforce.com.  Additionally, the Force.com platform allows customers to 'Crowd Source' innovation by providing the means to easily and securely integrate applications and data on a single robust Cloud Platform that is optimized for business.  When a new application is added to a customer's Force.com environment, be it on the platform or integrated with a traditional on-premise application, OrchestraCMS auto-discovers it and allows a business user to present it to the world in minutes, usually without calling the IT department or web developer.  We believe this is as it should be.  It allows web developers and business users to focus on what they're good at.

If you're a developer, imagine what would happen if you could hand off that finished web masterpiece to a user, who virtually never calls you for support on the task of creating or updating content, and yet is doing so while respecting the integrity of your design.  If you're a business user, imagine being able to add, update or modify your content as quickly and simply as using a word processor, with the ability to preview your content exactly as it will appear when it's published. Imagine being able to move backwards and forward in time with a minute by minute view of what your website will look like and watching the impact of content changes with integrated Google Analytics.

In addition, imagine:

• never having to patch your CMS while product updates are provided automatically, three times per year, while you sleep
• not worrying about being hacked, with ISO 27001 security certification and over 100 external security audits conducted on the platform each year, as well as an thorough review of OrchestraCMS code by Salesforce.com prior to publishing on the AppExchange
• having your data replicated around the world every 30 minutes, providing automatic business continuity to your organization
• having a platform ecosystem with over 800 applications, endless customization opportunities and thousands of certified professionals to help you implement those innovations
• continuous platform innovation automatically available to you the day it goes live.  Check out Salesforce.com Chatter - social networking for business - coming to OrchestraCMS in Q1
• worldwide caching of your website controlled by you.  Your website will be as fast in Boston as it is in Beijing
• workflows and approvals that incorporate not just Web CMS publishing, but all other aspects of your business processes across CMS and your corporate applications
• 99.999% uptime over the past 2 1/2 years and transparent access to platform status

These are just a few of the capabilities that OrchestraCMS delivers, 'out of the box'.  Even if you're not a Force.com user, OrchestraCMS runs on the Force.com "Free Edition", allowing you to run your website in a more traditional standalone configuration, while allowing for extensive customizations and integration with the rest of your business applications, if and when you're ready.

We're excited about OrchestraCMS and our entry into a vibrant, innovative and growing market place - Web CMS.  Join the revolution by connecting with us in the OrchestraCMS community.  We look forward to your ideas, feedback and to working with you.  Our mission is to put the power of WebCMS in the hands of the business user, while removing the cost and complexity that so many users experience. After all, business users are the ultimate customer, with the greatest stake in the success of their website. Business users invest in website development and the technologies to host and manage their web content. Shouldn't business users be at the centre of every CMS application?

We'll be launching a new blog to focus exclusively on Web CMS issues and opportunities in the next two weeks.  Stay tuned. Meanwhile, we're already planning for our next release in February that will include Social Media for business and many other features that will increase the power and the ease of OrchestraCMS.

Give it a test drive and let us know what you think!

OrchestraCMS. Your business. Your web. In tune.^TM