Designing Web pages used to mean a staffer filling in a template. Now it’s more of an art, with pages needing to be changed regularly not only locally but also across geographies.
Waterloo, Ont.,-based OpenText Corp. has updated its Web Experience Management (WEM) publishing tool to give non-technical staff more tools to do this job more easily.
Version 1.8.5 has an improved user interface built on HTML 5, which the company says lets authors drag and drop content into place, place content into social media and better determine who is viewing content to better target corporate messages.
The previous version of WEM had been more geared to users with technical expertise, but the company saw the rise of social media and video meant the business user or content creator would be using it more often. These staffers “can’t wait for IT to do coding anymore. They need to be out there very quick –we’re in an instant gratification world now, especially for marketing and customer service.”
The new interface includes a dock at the bottom of a page for contextual editing. If a content author is editing a new page, they will only see functions in the dock they are able to perform. Administrators can limit certain functions (for example, a person can only edit a page and not create a new one).
“It’s an intelligent UI that knows who you are and what you’re trying to do,” said Maddox (pictured above).
Changes include the ability to deliver content to viewers through a segmentation and targeting rules engine. This helps marketers bring in capabilities from social media or other applications.
Pulling in customer data, WEM can control content assembled by demographics (location, time of day), historical data (from customer previous purchases) and situation (by pulling in social media that match a customer up with people who are searching for similar items).
WEM now integrates with OpenText Media Management for delivering rich media content.
The upgrade also includes what the company calls “omni-channel” delivery capabilities, which means it integrates with social networking Web sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. So, for example, an organization’s content can be delivered to social Web sites, and it can pull RSS feeds from other sites.
The upgrade will be available June 28.
OpenText [TSX: OTC] also said that four more companies have joined its WEM partner ecosystem.
They include Lionsbridge, a translation services provider; Elastic Path, an e-commerce solution provider, Clay Tablet Technologies, which connects content management systems to translation providers; and Monetate, which specializes in personalization and marketing optimization.