| CROWNPEAK TECHNOLOGY UNVEILS TEMPLATE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM EMPOWERING BUSINESS USERS WITH COMPLETE DESIGN CONTROL OVER WEB SITES
Real-Time Redesign Tools Aimed at Non-Technical Users and Developers Alike, In Major Breakthrough for Content Management Market MARINA DEL REY, Calif. (March 12, 2002) - CrownPeak Technology, the premier hosted content management provider, today introduced a new high-level template management system that provides business users with the ability to change the look and feel of an entire Web site via a browser interface. At the same time, the company announced a completely browser-based development environment, targeted at professional Web developers [see companion news release, "CrownPeak Technology Unveils Developer Access To Hosted Software Application," issued today]. As the latest feature addition to the Advantage CMS™ content management tool, this template creation and management interface enables business users - for the first time - to modify templates, preview the resulting changes, schedule those templates live, and redesign the site on the fly. Because output templates are managed as assets in the system, multiple new look-and- feel options can be created, previewed, run through workflow, offered for collaboration and scheduled live. More basic changes to an existing template -- like adding a new text field or swapping out graphics -- can be performed through a drag-and-drop interface. More complex actions, like adjusting navigation or setting a new layout, can be performed via a "helper" interface, or directly with the template's HTML code. "Our new offering is, bar none, the most powerful tool available for changing the look and feel of a site without the need for technical staff," said Jim Howard, CEO, CrownPeak Technology. "This opens up a world of possibilities to organizations, who can now manage the layout and look-and-feel as easily as they can the site's content. We believe this leapfrogs the market - not simply as an outsourced offering, but when compared head-to-head against any CMS application on the market. "The ROI is plain -- if you roll out a new site once a year, the content management system is paid for," Howard said. "If you change your site three times a year because of product cycles, it'll pay for itself three times over, taking speed of return to dizzying proportions. On that basis, this stands alone in the market. "We are releasing clients from being hostage to the template," he said. "In other systems, templates are coded in esoteric languages and have inherent relationships with the database. In those systems, you need an engineer to make changes to the template, and then make changes to the database in order to execute even small adjustments to a site's navigation structure and look-and-feel." By managing template changes through workflow, CrownPeak clients typically perform a site redesign while others in the client organization continue to use the system to manage and update the site. The redesign can be previewed, approved, and scheduled live -- the only offering on the market to support such real-time redesigns. As an enterprise-level system, Advantage CMS also features a complete developer environment to enable more sophisticated and complex interactions. Based on Microsoft's Active Server Pages (ASP), this environment gives developers access to all the power of a complete programming language. To enable custom logic on an input form, or to establish a connection with another application, for example, a developer could add this code into the template. In this way, CrownPeak is enabling business users to perform the full gamut of simpler interactions without involving technical staff - and without compromising the power and sophistication of the underlying system. "Although it may seem surprising for a hosted application to be establishing a market leadership position, on reflection it makes perfect sense, " said Steven Gentner, CTO, CrownPeak Technology. "Because we're creating software that needs to live in only one environment, we don't have to worry about being forward and backward compatible with various operating system and database combinations. We can concentrate on rolling out features." Advantage CMS has is highly interoperable with other systems and applications. Connection options available to developers include SOAP, XML, FTP, Web Services, SMTP and ODBC.
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