Alterian Upgrades Content Manager Enterprise

Last week, Alterian, an international provider of integrated marketing platforms, unveiled version 5.9.5 of its Content Manager Enterprise technology, an upgrade the company claims will provide additional benefits to organizations that wish to build "engaging, highly relevant and accessible websites," according to the press release. Alterian is the company behind Alterian Content Manager, a content management system used by more than 500 customers worldwide.

Version 5.9.5 has been launched as part of Alterian's CMS strategy, an effort that aims to deliver innovation for today's Web content management tools. 5.9.5 will allow business users to alter websites without the help of Web technicians, says Arjen van den Akker, director of marketing in continental Europe and web strategy for Alterian. The company claims this product will allow businesses to take ownership of their online presence.

The Alterian platform combines campaign management, Web content management, email and social media monitoring tools. Alterian works with over 150 marketing services partners, system integrators and agencies to "create relevant, effective and engaging experiences...that create value and reinforce commitment to their brand," according to the company.

The press release lists 5.9.5's key features as follows:

• "An advanced standards-compliant accessibility checker - allowing Web content to be validated using over 200 checks against the latest W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). The WCAG documents explain how to make Web content accessible to people with disabilities;
• Improved features for sorting and ordering items both inside the editorial interface as well as on published websites, allowing business users easier control over relevance and order of published content items;
• A number of features typically performed by power users, have been added to the editorial interface to allow these users to carry out specific tasks without the need to switch to the administrative interface;
• The Web-based editorial interface has been augmented to include even more features than before, such as a new graphical workflow representation, more advanced searching and assigning specific access rights on websites' branches."

Van den Akken says that web content validation is an important feature, particularly in the countries where fines are imposed on companies that fail to comply with content guidelines.

"[If] you're blind," he says, "if the output of the Web site is not compliant with the accessibility guidelines, you won't be able to browse the Web site. There are more than 200 checks that make sure what the editors do is in line with those guidelines."

Alterian has also included advanced search capabilities, allowing editors to perform queries in the system to look for existing content similar to what they are set to produce. Editors can then store those queries as specific daily tasks, providing them with an alternative to redundant content searches.

Enhancements were also made to Page Studio, which is "a unique piece of functionality of Alterian Content Manager that allows users to design Web pages based on pre-built blocks of functionality without the need to have any technical or HTML knowledge," according to the press release.

"These days people want to include a Google map area, a Twitter feed, or a news item...without needing to go to the information technology department," says van den Akken. "With Page Studio editors are able to do all these things themselves. They can pick from a big list of prebuilt components that they can simply plug into the page."

Page Studio now provides users with the technology to automatically generate configuration forms for components that need specific parameters, undo & redo functionality, and Smart Cell Placement which anticipates where users want to drop certain components on the page, according to the press release.

Alterian will launch Content Manager v7 in the autumn of 2010. The press release says the product will bring together elements of Alterian Content Manager Corporate & Enterprise Editions into a single product stream, as well as "offer new additional, highly differentiated functionality."

For more information on Alterian Content Manager version 5.9.5, please visit http://www.alterian-content-management.com/

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