Kentico

Kentico Survey Says: Interest in Smartwatches is on the Rise

Over two and half years ago, I wrote that wearables would be the next "disruptive innovation" but acknowledged we're not there yet. Once the right company with the right design comes along, this new market will take off just as fast as when Apple introduced their first iPad. Despite Apple introducing their smartwatch, I still sit on the sidelines waiting for the right wearable to convince me the time to buy one is now.

Kentico 8.2: New Features in Collaboration and Ecommerce

Kentico, a provider in Web content and customer experience management,  just released a new version of their content management system, Kentico 8.2. This new version provides several new and improved features with the primary focus on collaboration and ecommerce. Kentico 8.2 also offers improvements that the software developers believe will help businesses launch and manage digital marketing campaigns faster and easier than previous versions.

Kentico 8.1 Connects with SharePoint, LinkedIn, and Store Managers

This week, Kentico Software announced the release of Kentico 8.1. According to the company, Kentico 8.1 features a variety of new enhancements that bring greater website performance and ease of use to the digital marketing activities of today’s digital agencies and professional marketers. With new “Buy X, get Y” discount capabilities, Kentico 8.1 promises to offer customers new ways to maximize their online sales.

JaxReady Emergency Preparedness Mobile App built on Kentico CMS

Yesterday, a press release submitted by Kentico Software regarding JaxReady came across my desk. JaxReady is a smartphone app created by the City of Jacksonville to keep local residents informed in the event of a natural disaster and is built on the Kentico CMS. Over the years, I've worked with a number of emergency managers and almost everyone of them will tell you that the biggest difficulty they face as EMs is having the general public take interest in emergency preparedness well before a disaster hits. 

Kentico Plants a Tree for Every Bug Found by Their Clients

Nashua, New Hampshire, USA – Kentico Software (http://www.kentico.com), the Web content management system vendor, announced the re-launch of their Trees for Bugs initiative. Company employees will plant a tree for every software bug reported in each latest version of Kentico CMS for ASP.NET.  The company also promises to fix all reported bugs within 7 days.

Trees for bugs logo”I’m proud to say that although our product gets more complex, we are constantly eliminating the number of bugs in new versions. We have also been successful to keep our promise and comply with the 7 days bug fixing policy since its announcement back in 2009.” said Martin Hejtmanek, CTO at Kentico Software. “Our efforts became an indivisible part of Kentico's commitment to deliver a stable platform for managing websites, on-line stores and social networks.”

“Kentico has always been committed to provide high-quality user experience to our customers and partners. While we test our software extensively, it’s important to make sure that we encourage our customers to report any bugs they find. Based on the feedback on our initial program, which was only related to the 4.1 version of Kentico CMS, we decided to keep it for all upcoming CMS versions, starting with the current 5.5 R2 release,” said Petr Passinger, PR Manager at Kentico Software. “From now on, we will plant a tree for every bug found in each latest version of Kentico CMS.“

The Trees for Bugs initiative is well explained in the following one and half minute animated video:

The current number of bugs, and therefore the number of trees that will be planted, can be seen at the re-designed Trees for Bugs website: http://trees.kentico.com.
 
The homepage of the Trees for Bugs website shows a graph that represents distribution of bugs/trees between individual development teams. With almost 6,000 active customers in 84 countries, the website provides country standings in the “Bug-Finding” discipline.

Each planted tree is dedicated to the person who reported the bug and labeled with their name. The tree is also listed in the tree gallery and its location is marked on a map.

Kentico CMS 5.5 R2 Brings Enterprise 2.0 Intranet Solution

Nashua, New Hampshire, USA, December 15, 2010 – Kentico Software, the Web content management system vendor, announced the general availability of Kentico CMS 5.5 R2. This new version of their flagship enterprise CMS provides enhanced Intranet support, Document and Project Management,  integration with Microsoft Office through WebDAV protocol, Workgroups,  Sharepoint 2010 Connector and Windows Azure support.

“We have always developed Kentico CMS as a scalable enterprise platform for corporate websites, intranet solutions, e-shops and integration with social networks. Our main focus for Kentico CMS 5.5 R2 was to extend our intranet offering mixed with key Enterprise 2.0 functionality” says Petr Palas, CEO of Kentico Software. “Keeping our intranet solution in step with our CMS offering ensures customers can grow their website needs with their business; leveraging the consistent easy to use Kentico environment that includes multi-site management, and an industry leading ROI.” he adds.

Key features that round out the Kentico CMS 5.5 R2 intranet offering include Document and Project Management, Workgroups and WebDAV support. Project Management provides the users with ability to manage, assign and monitor projects and tasks. The new Document Management helps users to manage documents and their permissions directly from a website without access to the administration UI. With the added support of WebDAV, users can now directly edit documents without the need to save them manually to a temporary location and then re-upload them.

“With our partners and customer focus, we drove our development based on an extensive set of client scenarios. We validated our features with our partners and key customers like Shaw Industries Group Inc. to refine our key scenarios. Kentico CMS 5.5 R2 delivers a complete intranet solution with a ready to use Intranet Starter site and flexible Document Management. Kentico CMS 5.5 R2 cuts down the time and cost of any intranet portal development. This combination of features and functionality guarantees that the Kentico CMS Intranet helps our partners and customers successfully meet their business goals.” says Michael Neuwirth, Product Manager at Kentico software.

Kentico CMS 5.5 R2 extends support for SharePoint 2010 and includes Windows Azure support for single CMS installations.

More information about the Windows Azure support is available at: http://devnet.kentico.com/Blogs/Michal-Neuwirth/December-2010/Kentico-CMS-5-5-R2-has-been-released.aspx

Kentico CMS 5.5 R2 for ASP.NET can be downloaded as a free 30-day trial at http://www.kentico.com/Download.aspx.

Mailbag: What makes Kentico CMS Different

Last week, I announced the addition of three CMSs to CMS Focus. CMS Focus is my top 30 list of content management systems that interest me the most. Because I limit the list to only 30 CMSs, there are obviously a good number of quality Web applications that are missing from this list. A CMS that arguably should be on the list is the Kentico CMS.

Kentico's PR Manager recently sent me an email to make his case for why Kentico should be included in the CMS Focus list. I likely will not be making any new changes to my top 30 list until June, however I will definitely consider Kentico the next time I update CMS Focus.


Hi Bryan,

I remember that Kentico CMS hasn't quite made it on your CMS Focus list.

Today, I would like to briefly comment on the criteria for selecting CMS on the list you published:
 
1. First, the application has to add something I haven't seen in a CMS before.

In case of a Kentico CMS it’s a set of its features that makes it unique. There are plenty of CMS that offers source code, hundreds that have multisite and multilingual support, dozens with open and well documented API, some that are SEO friendly, few that are fully rebrandable... And now will there any remain if you add 200+ web parts and 36 modules to cover the needs for building either Corporate Web Site, E-shop, Social Network or Intranet (=simply to allow your web site to grow in any direction)?  How many CMS vendors have 7 days bug fixing policy? Highly responsive support is something hard to prove, but please go ahead and do some “Mystery Mailing”, I’m sure that our support team won’t disappoint you (evaluators have right for 10 support tickets – so really please try this).

Mailbag: Kentico CMS

My inbox is just full of emails from companies and people requesting that I take a look at their CMS. To be honest, it's a little overwhelming to have so many requests because although time is my enemy I really do want to respond to everyone. For now though, I'm currently focused on reviewing this year's finalists in Packt's Best Open Source CMS. In other words, I have a long waiting list of CMS to review.

However, there are a few of these emails that I don't want to just sit on my computer and go nowhere. One of those emails include a sales pitch for the Kentico CMS. Kentico is a CMS that hasn't quite made it on my CMS Focus list but possibly should be.