Episerver Releases Digital Experience Cloud Fall 15
Episerver, a provider of digital content, digital marketing, and digital commerce solutions, rolled out the Fall 2015 release of the Episerver Digital Experience Cloud, offering new and converged functionality from Ektron and Episerver.
Key to the Fall '15 Release is the product convergence promised in January when Episerver merged with Ektron. Already Ektron concepts, such as the Digital Experience Hub (DXH) and eSync Content Staging and Review, have come together with Episerver capabilities, such as Digital Commerce and the Find search relevance engine in the Spring '15 release.
Fall '15 convergence addresses creation and deployment of more sophisticated forms, Instant Templates, and comprehensive project management tools. New capabilities include the optimization of commerce campaigns, a Microsoft SharePoint and Office 365 connector, commerce implementation reference architecture, and proven tools to streamline the move from earlier releases.
Through the Quick Forms feature, Fall '15 gives digital practitioners a forms engine and forms builder with drag-and-drop functionality. Marketers can now customize the presentation, conditional formatting, and even pre-populate and personalize forms with data from other marketing automation platforms through the Episerver DXH.
Designed to support digital development, the Instant Templates capability, based on the Page Builder and Master Templates functionality of Ektron, empowers content editors to create re-usable templates from within edit mode. Users can now leverage a library of reusable components (i.e. blog entries, news items, videos, etc.) to create content once and use it across multiple sites, audiences and channels.
The digital commerce campaign functionality enables marketers to organize commerce activities into campaigns and assign unique business rules, define discounting and promotion logic, and apply key performance indicators (KPIs) to each.
Projects functionality provides team collaboration and project management tools to coordinate, streamline, and manage content development activities. It offer visibility into all content projects in progress, along with the ability to comment and collaborate with colleagues, assign workflow, track revisions, and preview and publish content.
Fall '15 includes a SharePoint connector for accessing and working with SharePoint content libraries from within the Digital Experience Cloud via a drag-and-drop approach and offers broad support for the latest Microsoft release, including SharePoint 2013, SharePoint Foundation 2013, and Microsoft Office 365.
Also featured in the Fall '15 release is the Quicksilver commerce best-practice reference implementation framework to help organizations get up and running on the digital commerce capabilities of the Episerver Digital Experience Cloud. Quicksilver's robust reference architecture includes shopping cart, check out, search, and indexing pre-configuration.
"We're working to diminish the difference between the creative concepts our users have and their ability to execute them," said James Norwood, chief marketing officer and executive vice president of strategy at Episerver, in a statement. "Too many vendors spend too much time talking about features and functions, often forgetting the people these things were intended to benefit. At Episerver, we never will. We believe technology should empower people: people who develop, people who create, and people who communicate. Our promise is that technology, when done right, should make you feel like you have super powers. Quite simply, Episerver gives you the tools to make your work easy, effective, and rewarding; no special suits or helmets required."