Making Content Workers' Lives Easier with CMS 6 R2

Not only does CMS 6 R2 come with a powerful new personalization feature out of the box to help you target content to your key audience segments, it also contains a lot of improvements aimed at making it even easier for editors and occasional editors to achieve their goals.

It's no secret that the second release of EPiServer CMS 6 is primarily aimed at all those people that work in the system to produce, manage and publish content. Because - after all - your site is only as good as the content it provides, and in order to provide quality content you need a good work environment for those working with it. The built-in personalization functionality takes editors and marketers a good step towards making sure the right content goes to the right audiences - but we've also improved the process of creating that content.

Auto-save

A big step on that road is the introduction of auto-save functionality when editing content. Comfortable content editing in a browser has always been a big challenge for the entire WCM industry; browsers were designed to browse, not edit - and even though browser technology has improved over the years there is still some reluctance to put a lot of work effort into content inside a browser. Too many times have people had a browser crash or a connection go down, with the result that their work is lost. In EPiServer CMS 6 R2 we've tried hard to improve on this by introducing a feature that will automatically save drafts of all your work, while you are working. Should you accidentally lose your work, a notification window will allow you to restore it next time you log in.

Improved On-page Editing

One of the biggest improvements in my mind is for the largest segment of editors - the ones we call 'occasional editors'. People in your organisation that are not full-time editors, but rather subject matter experts that contributes their knowledge to a small part of the web site. In many cases these people use the system too rarely to ever feel really familiar with the classical edit-mode - and their main purpose is to create or manage content on a particular page. In order to save them a lot of time we've taken the simplest possible form of editing - on-page-editing and improved it quite a lot in order to bring full-blown WYSIWYG editing right to their fingertips where they need it the most.

Easier for Multiple Editors

Another common problem is when you have multiple editors working on the same content from different locations at the same time. You risk doing double-work - or perhaps having to merge your changes with similar changes done by another at the same time. For this release of the CMS we have introduced a notification feature that will automatically let you know if you are looking at a page someone else is editing at the moment.

Dynamic Content Improvements

In CMS 5 we introduced the popular feature of dynamic content that allows editors to insert small placeholders in their content, which when rendered can show any kind of more advanced content - such as a map, content from another page, rss feed a youtube video - or anything else your developers choose to include on your site. In CMS 6 R2 we enhance this feature - both by allowing you to personalize it and target it to different visitor groups - but also by providing you with an edit-mode preview of how it will look, making it a lot easier to work with.

We have also added new property types - such as a customizable drop down lists and checkbox lists, and done a lot of tweaks to the overall user experience - such as remembering your preferences and last-used locations when inserting links, made it easier to access the built-in image editing functionality and much more.

All in all, the R2 of EPiServer CMS 6 gives you the most efficient and user friendly experience ever, on the robust and scalable platform that is already providing success to thousands of large web sites around the world.

» Download EPiServer CMS 6 R2 (requires membership on EPiServer World)

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