Whether or not you are using our Web Client in the browser of your choice, or the Smart Client on your desktop, our product is built with the business user in mind and make it easy for regular users to create and manage content.
A big test of any CMS implementation is not it's success on the launch day of your website, but "how will this site be maintained", "how will I empower my users and enable them to adopt the solution and continue to keep this great website alive?".
Alterian Content Manager (ACM) has ease of use baked in - with two clients; our unique Smart desktop client and our rich web client that enable easy user adoption with little to no training, an integration to Microsoft Office and Page Studio that gives content authors some control over the pages.
Smart Client
Smart Client is a desktop application that is intuitive to use, for those already familiar with using Microsoft Office products and is aimed squarely at the non-technical business user. Being on the desktop and integrated into this environment unique positions Smart Client to accelerate its adoption by the contributing community. Put simply; people love to use Smart Client.
Some of the unique features of Smart Client:
- Grab an image, drag it into the repository
- Drag a content item out on to your desktop and edit in Word
- Click on an image in ACM and edit in Photoshop, save it straight back in to the repository
Web Client
With an eye on the innovative a focus on making products that are embraced by business users, we set about recreating the Smart Client experience through the browser resulting in the Web Client.
In doing so we are the first major Web Content Mangement vendor to embrace new techniques (such as AJAX) in web page development to give a very dynamic interface in a both Internet Explorer and Firefox with no browser plug-ins or downloads.
This approach enables the user to drag and drop items, right click to perform actions and to get dynamic updates from the server without refreshing the whole page. It really is like using an MS Office application - in a browser!
Page Studio
ACM’s Page Studio feature takes gives non-technical users the ability to manage more than just the content and structure of their sites. Page Studio enables everyone to design their own brand-consistent page layouts via a user-friendly, configurable palette of options. Users can:
- Determine the layout of an individual web page or set of pages
- Choose precisely where images and text fields are placed on the page to suit the content
- Select from categories of extra ‘components’ to enhance the page even more
- Configure each component specifically for a page
Microsoft SharePoint and Office Integration
Many users are more comfortable using standard Office products, many users like to collaborate before the formal process of content contribution starts and many organisations have great content locked up in silos of SharePoint repositories.
ACM enables users to work in that familiar Microsoft Office environment, with users able to author and edit content in Word, to pull content from SharePoint lists and to approve items through Outlook.