Ektron Releases New Products and Major Update of the Ektron Web Content and Digital Experience Management Platform

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• USA - English

NASHUA, N.H., July 11, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Ektron today announced the immediate availability of two new products, the Ektron Digital Experience Hub and Ektron Cloud Manager, and a major update to the company's web content and digital experience management platform, Ektron 8.6.  These Ektron solutions offer unprecedented features to manage and deliver relevant digital experiences to customers across all online channels.

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"These are important new releases for Ektron customers," said Bill Rogers, Ektron founder and CEO.  "The combination of Ektron 8.6 with the Ektron Digital Experience Hub represents the next stage in the evolution of our product beyond web content management to complete digital experience management.  Ektron Cloud Manager extends the dynamic delivery of Ektron-powered websites and marketing campaigns into the cloud, enabling content authors to achieve their business goals without concerns about the impact on website hardware or IT resources."

Ektron 8.6
Ektron 8.6 is a major upgrade to Ektron's flagship web content and digital experience management platform, focused on improving the content creation and management experience for authors, developers, and designers.  Key benefits include:

• Radically simplified content authoring.  Ektron 8.6 includes new support for an advanced HTML5-based editor, offering unprecedented WYSIWYG functionality for content authors
• Improved support for mobile devices.  With the Ektron 8.6 adaptive image resizing feature, content creators can dynamically re-size images based on device screen size, especially useful in responsive web design
• Intelligent content synchronization.  Ektron 8.6 eSync enhancements assure dependent files are simultaneously synchronized with associated content
• Greater flexibility and performance with search.  Ektron 8.6 offers a deeper integration with Microsoft Search Server and Microsoft FAST, providing an "Amazon.com-style" search experience.  Ektron 8.6 also uses Ektron's "best-of-breed" approach allowing other search engines to be used through a provider model
• Enhanced support for URL redirects.  Maximize search engine optimization and ensure visitors can always find site content, even when pages are deleted or moved

"Ektron 8.6 contains a number of important new features for both Ektron users and developers.   The new content editor in 8.6 is easy-to-use, powerful, and blazing fast.  I've used a number of Web CMS editors over the years, and the new editor in 8.6 is the best I've experienced.  For developers, Ektron provided a number of important enhancements to URL aliasing and added support for mobile and responsive web design. This is a terrific release from Ektron, and I am looking forward to upgrading." – Ken McAndrew, Senior Web Developer at C-SPAN

Digital Experience Hub
The Ektron Digital Experience Hub (DXH) is the first product in the Web CMS market to answer the need of delivering comprehensive, personalized experiences across websites, mobile devices, and social networks.  By integrating industry-leading CRM, marketing automation, and web analytics solutions with the Ektron platform, the DXH provides these key benefits:

• Increased business efficiencies.  The DXH offers pre-built integrations into enterprise systems including connectors for Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics, Marketo, and Microsoft SharePoint
• Automated form publishing.  Simplifies the collection and use of form information between the website and applications such as Salesforce.com and Marketo
• Unified customer experience management and marketing campaign optimization. Through the Digital Experience Hub, marketers can provide a coordinated and meaningful customer experience across all digital channels and create a coordinated view of the customer across marketing systems
• Support for Microsoft SharePoint.  Integrate existing SharePoint content, workflow and management capabilities into the Ektron solution

"Delivering coordinated and engaging experiences across channels has always been a challenge that required that the 'siloed' view become a single view of the customer that all platforms could act on.  Rather than our having to create a custom solution for each technology and implementation, the Ektron Digital Experience Hub makes developing a seamless cross-channel experience much easier." - Rolf Kraus, Vice President, Content Management, Portals and Collaboration Practice at eDynamic.

Ektron Cloud Manager

The Ektron Cloud Manager allows Ektron customers to launch websites and marketing campaigns in the cloud, reducing an organization's need to rely on expensive on-premise hardware or support from busy IT resources.  Key benefits of the Ektron Cloud Manager include:

• Wizard-based cloud provisioning.  Ektron Cloud Manager provisioning enables authoring of site content within an on-premise environment for deployment to a cloud-based platform
• Hybrid deployment.  Mix and match cloud instances with traditional on-premise Ektron instances, ensuring sensitive content remains local while still benefiting from cloud delivery
• Optimal performance. Deliver sites at unlimited scale.  Users can easily configure the optimal server environment and location for maximum performance
• Cloud Platforms. Support for Microsoft Windows Azure and Amazon EC2

"In the competitive landscape of website development, speed matters," said Nicole Denil, Director Americas ISV, Windows Azure Incubation at Microsoft.  "Microsoft is excited to see Ektron support the Windows Azure cloud.  The global scalability and reliability of Windows Azure can give Ektron customers great benefit."

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Availability
The Ektron Digital Experience Hub, Ektron Cloud Manager and Ektron 8.6 are available now.

About Ektron
Ektron simplifies the creation, management and delivery of digital experiences for global organizations that are looking to drive revenue growth and improve customer satisfaction. Headquartered in Nashua, N.H., with offices in Australia, Canada and the U.K., Ektron has thousands of customers including: Dell, Las Vegas Sands, Microsoft, NASDAQ and National Health Services UK. For more information: www.ektron.com.

SOURCE Ektron