Cloud Connected

Thoughts and Ideas from the Gitana Development Team

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CEM - shuffling deck chairs on the titanic

Going back 15 years, we’ve seen the core of providing websites shift across various types of “platforms” - from Web Content Management (WCM) to Enterprise Content Management (ECM) to Customer Experience Management (CEM).  Every iteration involved another set of technologies, and associated migration headaches.

Each expansion also consumed more and more of the resulting presentation tier.  At first, this was mostly a good thing as no standard mechanisms existed to facilitate efforts.  However, in the last few years alone key frameworks have arisen to tackle this job much more effectively, such as:  EmberJS (2007), AngularJS (2009), and Backbone.js (2010).  Suddenly, the templating systems embedded within a CMS platform were not only unnecessary - but were actively getting in the way of good website design - much like a certain iceberg.

Cloud CMS allows you to fly over this barrier with an API-first approach.  No more shuffling deck chairs - sorry Leo.  We’ll take it from here…

image

With Cloud CMS, you’re free to select any presentation framework and build your customized look-and-feel that focuses on both your content, as well as your customer.  No meddling in the page delivery, no unsupported add-ons, no unnatural or customized CMS configurations - just a pure API driven solution, done right and provided natively.

Create Once, Publish Everywhere!

One of the things that our customers love about Cloud CMS is that it lets them create content once and easily publish it to all of their mobile and web applications. It reduces the amount of work required to create fresh and interesting content and saves them time and money in the process.

Our goal is straightforward. We want to provide all of the things that small business owners need on the backend to give their users a seamless experience in creating, editing and publishing content. With Cloud CMS, you don’t have to build this stuff yourself or integrate it. It’s all there, ready to go from the moment you sign up.

We provide a complete collaborative suite of software including applications, forms, desktop integration and workflow. Business users can create content right away. You can define custom content types, lists and pages. And you can invite team members to work alongside you as content is moved from curation to publication.

Content API

Cloud CMS provides the first pure content API for cloud-connected applications. Our API (REST) is delivered over HTTPS and can easily be integrated into your iOS, Android and HTML5 applications.

We provide quick start projects to help you get on your way. We also provide clients for various platforms including Node.js, Android, Java and JavaScript.

Hosted Applications

Cloud CMS provides an web server tier that lets your business deploy hosted applications for dev, test, QA and production. You can run your application infrastructure this way, on the Cloud CMS hosted tier, or you can host on Heroku, Engine Yard and others. This hosting can consist the entire application or custom APIs specific to your apps.

Instant Preview

One of the truly unique and productive features of Cloud CMS is Instant Preview. With Cloud CMS, you can instantly preview any content changes that you’re working on in real-time, so as to see what those changes might look like if there were live. This lets your business users see changes as they might appear on iOS, Android, the web or a responsive mobile application – the same data formatted in many different ways for different devices.

We’re really excited about how Cloud CMS has grown. Over the past 3+ years, we’ve had a chance to dig in and build what our customers have asked for. We think you’ll find it to be a really exciting platform that is incredibly feature rich, low cost, and well-designed.

To learn more about Cloud CMS or request a trial, please visit our web site at http://www.cloudcms.com.

5 Reasons why Cloud CMS is Totally Awesome

Cloud CMS is the only Content Management System that was built from the ground up for the needs of mobile devices and applications.  Our goal is to provide the fastest, easiest and most cost-effective way for businesses to curate and deliver content to their applications, running anywhere in the world, in any language and at any time.

In the last article, I talked about the general lack of mobile strategy within the business world.  Mobile apps are so new that most businesses have had to react to get something/anything out quickly.  As a result, there are a lot silo and standalone applications out there.  There are some disadvantages to this:

  • The cost of building standalone applications is paid in full.  Ideally, the cost of building the “next” application is lower or incremental provided that you’ve utilized a good technology and content platform.

  • The correlation of marketing information from one app to the next is low.  They often have different data stores, different data models and so any data collection is highly manual and costly.  Thus, there is lower value to marketing.  And almost no real-time value.

  • There is poor content reuse between apps.  The content you build for application #1 may not be deployable to application #2.  Or, to do so would require additional integration costs (data conversions, copying, etc).

  • The back-end infrastructure and authoring tools need to be rebuilt each time.  For example, the approval process for new content needs to be replicated and reimplemented each time.

If you find yourself in this situation, then chances are that Cloud CMS is a good fit for your business.

With Cloud CMS, we give you the authoring and publishing tools you need so that you can just plug right into your existing apps and go.  Our authoring tools let you control the full content lifecycle from creation through approval and publication out to one or multiple applications or channels.

We are unique in our ability to do this.  By going back to the drawing board several years ago, we sought to build a CMS for Mobile which worked really well, kept costs low and simply got the job done.

Here are 5 reasons why Cloud CMS is totally awesome:

No Coding

With Cloud CMS, you don’t have to hire developers or write Java/C#/PHP classes to extend your platform.  Things are just easier.  You don’t have to traverse an endless number of XML files or pull your hair out trying to customize the user interface.

Alpaca Forms for jQuery

Our platform is entirely built using JSON and JSON schema for content modeling.  We use the jQuery Alpaca Forms engine so that your forms are clean,crisp and instantly adjustable by anyone.  We also provide a forms builder so that building new content types is a visual pleasure.  Drag and drop.  Click and deploy.

No Restarts

Cloud CMS lets you deploy your content without server restarts.  In fact, you don’t have to worry about servers at all.  We handle all of the IT infrastructure for you.  You just click on the “publish” button to deploy your content, your UI changes, your new content type definitions and much more.  Everything is completely dynamic.

We want you to think about your content.  Think about your end user.  Don’t waste your time suffering through the technical nightmare of legacy CMS systems.

No Schema Required

You can toss any kind of content you want into Cloud CMS.  Drag and drop it in.  Or create some JSON and plug in any properties you want.  Cloud CMS will deal with it.  It’ll index everything for full-text search and instant query.  It’ll extract text from your PDFs, images and Word documents so you can quickly find things.

No headaches.  You don’t have to worry about managing schemas.  Cloud CMS can be used in a completely painless, schema-free way.  Why?  Because we are all-in on JSON.  From the REST controllers through to the database.  We use MongoDB as our JSON data store under the hood.  So we’re lean.  Speedy.  And ideally suited for mobile.

Of course, we do have schema support.  You can elect to introduce it anytime you want.  You simply model your types, properties, constraints, validation logic and even cross-cutting aspects using JSON and JSON Schema.  You can plug in custom behaviors for your content with server-side JavaScript.  It’s all at your leisure.

In a nutshell, we don’t force you to know 100% of everything about your system up front and then penalize you when you need to make changes.  After all, there are new content sources and new schemas every day.  Yes, life moves pretty fast.

Curate and Collaborate

Last century, the main idea with Content Management Systems was to “push” content from the business out the consumers.  Well, all of that has changed.  Today, the consumers “pull” the content they want down onto their mobile devices.  They choose what apps to install, what to read, and so forth.

Oh, and they also write.  A lot.  The so-called consumer is no longer listening.  They’re talking.

In Cloud CMS, curation is the process by which content originated from outside the business is brought in, cleaned up, rejected or approved, put to use and acted upon.  Cloud CMS lets you pull in content from a variety of third-party sources including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, GitHub, Vimeo, YouTube, Quora and SalesForce.

You might, for example, set up an ingestion process that queries for Tweets around a specific topic.  They get pulled in and Cloud CMS rules run on top of them, filtering for, say, a certain zip code or demographic.  Any matches are routed to your team via workflow so that you can manage the process.  You take action.  You might write to those authors, invite them to collaborate alongside you, or use their information to produce your own content that you then publish out.

Cloud CMS lets you collaborate with the world.  We turn CMS upside down and displace the assumption that those who know best are working for you.  They probably aren’t.  They’re somewhere out there.  Cloud CMS lets you collaborate with them to produce better content for a better application experience.

Publish to your Apps

Cloud CMS provides all of the infrastructure needed to power your mobile applications.  We are a fully-loaded Mobile Backend as a Service (MBaaS) complete with pre-integrated CMS, user/group management, real-time analytics, personalization, backup/restore and much more.

As such, within the Cloud CMS authoring experience, we let you pick from the mobile applications you’ve configured and deploy to them by clicking “Publish”.  Your content is routed into delivery channels and made available to the selected mobile apps.

As those mobile applications are used, real-time information flows back into Cloud CMS to inform you of the user experience.  What content is working?  How are people experiencing your content within the applications?  What leads are being generated and how are user sessions flowing within your business, app by app?

In addition, Cloud CMS lets you connect to a variety of third-party systems including Twitter, Facebook, GitHub, Vimeo, YouTube, Quora and SalesForce.  This lets you publish your content out to where the users are.  Into the right communities and into the right audiences.

All with the click of a button.

Get Started

We invite you to visit our web site and take a look at Cloud CMS today.  Sign up for a free trial or register for our Newsletter.

Keep your eye on this space for more exciting news!

Michael