* CrownPeak's hosted CMS service
A few issues ago, I wrote about a hosted content management system/Web site solution for schools. Not surprisingly, the benefits of having a specialist company host and manage your CMS infrastructure are equally applicable in the commercial world. One vendor addressing that market is the subject of today’s newsletter.
The company is CrownPeak Technology and it offers a complete Web site design, construction and management service, as well as its CrownPeak CMS service.
I had a discussion with CrownPeak’s CEO, Jim Howard, and he made some interesting observations about CMS implementations. He pointed out that according to a Jupiter Research report, some 30% of all CMS implementations fail. Part of the reason for this, according to Howard, is that an effective CMS can’t be defined by a rigid and complex workflow system.
When companies attempt to create such systems using a $500,000 CMS with a further $200,000 of development, the result is often nearly unusable and the high capital cost makes it crucial for the company to either use the barely functional system or abandon it because it will be hard to justify further investment.
Because a hosted service such as CrownPeak’s is a different scale of investment – typically starting at $3,000 per month and a further $10,000 to $30,000 for end user and administrator training – then it isn’t hard to make changes when the workflow model is realized to be incorrect for the client’s purposes. Howard says that many of its customers start out with overly complex workflows that get ripped out and replaced within about three months.
This is actually much more important than you might think because it is a process that has to happen repeatedly throughout the life of a company as the company evolves. In the course of that evolution, the way that companies conceive of and express their products and services will usually change at a faster rate so a CMS supporting the company’s expression had better be flexible and adaptable.
CrownPeak’s CrownPeak CMS (there’s a “Quick Tour” link on the overview page) is a browser-based system that supports copy/paste or drag/drop from any common desktop tool. It also provides in-browser spell checking and “point and click” linking that is generally considered by reviewers to be one of the best-designed CMS user interfaces available.
Underpinning this is a customized workflow for each project that can be adjusted using a simple interface and can be applied to assets as well as pages. The workflow system also allows for adjustments on the fly, has integrated e-mail (including content entry and approval via e-mail as well as publishing as e-mail).
There’s task management, real-time chat, sticky notes on pages and images, documents branching for a/b testing, and versioning with infinite levels of “undo.” There’s also intranet and extranet features such as catalog management, phone books, directories, calendaring, bulletin boards, blogs, and integration with portal tools and directory services.
Add to that multilingual content management, embedded full-text and meta-data search, and a report writer along with a developer’s API and a catalog of integrated third party services, and you have one of the most ambitious CMS platforms around for a price that is considerably less than an in-house implementation and is a lot more flexible.
