Kentico CMS

Our Core Findings:

Usability: 5/5 Stars – Easy to use.  Your content administrators will love Kentico.

Scalability: 4/5 Stars - Your developers will like the potential to grow with Kentico. They have a level of access to the code base that similar .NET based products don’t offer.

Built-in Functionality: 5/5 Stars  - Building a professional functional site has never been easier. Period.

Marketing Tools: 5/5 Stars – SEO tools, Blogs and scalable things like web parts and business forms give marketers the things they need.

Price: 5/5 – Why pay 10-30,000 USD for a CMS that does less and does it less efficiently than Kentico? (aka Ektron)

The Kentico Details:  A CMS Product to Consider

Most companies these days don’t want to have to wait for a website guru that knows HTML or other web languages to make every little change on their website.  These bottlenecks are frustrating and take ownership away from the marketers and sales professionals that need to derive value from the web site.  Active content creation, site management and social media integration are now highly desirable marketing activities that must be pursued.

Thus, it’s not surprising that many in-house marketing and sales teams now want to “own the website”  themselves and get basics tasks done quickly without having to lean on IT for basic things.  For sure, IT and outside agencies may be needed to implement, deploy and build custom functionality – but the core marketing activities, for instance, must be completed by marketers. It remains the job of internal IT professionals to help ensure the solution is stable, secure, scalable and, ultimately, usable by those folks that should be updating it.  Hence, choosing a CMS is a big decision.  A mistake can be very expensive.

Kentico is one of the hottest CMS products on the market today.  With a low cost of ownership, excellent features and phenomenal customer service, Kentico met or exceeded all of MyTechHub’s review criterion.  Hands down, it’s our favorite .NET CMS solution we’ve ever used.   Developers will like the ability to quickly build sites, edit all HTML source code,  and the open extensible architecture.

This certainly was our experience as well.  Using broken out HTML, we were easily able to build a test site with a full design in Kentico in less than 2 hours – with no prior experience.  For the record, it took us one hour to configure and install Kentico on a .NET server (we’re php people).. Comparatively,  the experience of building a new site was much more pleasurable than building in Sitefinity or Dot Net Nuke.

We were frustrated by many other Kentico reviews we found on the net – as they were largely written by developers for developers.  Yet, developers just develop, what about the marketing folks that are supposed to be using the site every day?  Kentico offers a very rich solution set to marketers, including:

• User friendly interface
• WYSIWYG Editor
• Popular, Built in Modules
• Low Price

We found the WYSIWYG editor to be very easy to use and functional.  The overall user experience was well designed. With the main screens, including: Content, My Desk,  Tools and Administration it was fairly easy to quickly navigate around the CMS.  For sure, the  Tools tab will take some getting used to – but its all still fairly intuitive.

Our bottom line:  Kentico is a great tool at a great price.  Your marketing team should love it, coupled with some content administrator training it should dramatically alter how they manage their website.  Highly recommended.

Kentico Resources at a Glance

1) Kentico Devnet

2) Wakefly

3) Johny Code

One Agency Chooses Kentico

Thanks to my friends at Wakefly for bringing Kentico to my attention. After sifting through the many CMS solutions available, Wakefly chose to use Kentico’s Content Management System for their clients.  In addition, Wakefly had a long history of working with php based CMS solutions like Drupal and Joomla and .Net based solutions like Dot Net Nuke, Ektron and Hubspot.

“Through careful evaluation of the many options, Wakefly chose Kentico’s CMS because of its ease of use and functionality,” said Director of Search Marketing Jeff Demers.  “A good example of how Kentico’s CMS solutions function to help clients is the Lumension.com website.”

Lumension required seamless integration of content from the website to their customer relationship management systems and a methodology that could reduce the time needed to get content online.

The implementation of Kentico CMS reduced the bottlenecks within their IT department, streamlined content publication and produced a common branding across the entire website.  By using forms and templates, data collected on the site was uploaded directly to the CMS and was made immediately usable by their organization.

Read this and other Kentico case studies here.

In order to ensure that companies stay ahead, achieve operational excellence, reduce downtimes and thwart costly repairs, the Protection Technology Group – a company founded on the ability to provide custom-engineered solutions for unique protection circumstances – advises companies to not just simply weather the storm but rather pinpoint a service provider that provide a full power and signal integrity solution.

Leading the Industry – PolyPhaser and Trantsector together provide system protection for communication and power lines including:  RF lightening protectors, power surge protections, Ethernet surge protections and other industrial surge protection and power conditioning solutions for AC, DC, and data/signal.  From lightening arrestors to secondary transient voltage surge suppressors and surge outlets, PolyPhaser and Transtector offer the best in surge protection in the industry.

Peace of Mind – For over four decades PolyPhaser has been the leader in providing RF lightning protection and grounding solutions to the wireless communication market.  Not only are they a global manufacturer of RF surge protection solutions, they lead the market with an innovative DC block and DC pass RF product portfolio.  They specialize in:

●      Coaxial RF Protectors

●      Data Protectors

●      Grounding Solutions

Customer Focus – Exceptional service, delivery and superior design have made the Protection Technology Group one of the most widely recommended resources for surge protection solutions.

According to The Protection Technology Group, meeting customer’s needs is paramount and, to that end, customers are at the center of everything the company does.  Innovative solutions enable customers to achieve the ultimate system performance.  For more information, visit www.protectiongroup.com.

In essence, Smartphones put a mobile computer in your pocket. They store sensitive customer and company data, download email, access key corporate applications and assets, surf the web and more. They are a lot like laptop computers.

And just like laptops, Smartphones are vulnerable to security concerns. They can easily be lost or stolen. They are vulnerable to data loss.

Increasingly clever hackers launch SMS, email and web-based attacks using phishing or other tactics to penetrate users’ mobile devices. Of course, worms and Trojans are always lurking and probing for opportunities to disrupt the workday. What are mobile device users to do — fret that the person sipping a latte next to them is actually trying to steal information as they chat with clients or colleagues?

All the talking, exchanging of information and storing of critical corporate documentation on Smartphones is, not surprisingly, keeping IT teams up at night. However, implementing large-scale security upgrades and enforcing security policies for thousands of mobile employees is no easy task. Few companies have the expertise across myriad mobile platforms and technologies to execute such deployments flawlessly.

That’s where a firm like Enterprise Mobile, with expertise in the major mobile technologies, can become businesses’ best friend. The company guides organizations through the intricacies of the mobility ecosystem, including devising optimal approaches to device management (including security) and application deployment. Working with outside experts such as Enterprise Mobile can smooth security deployments and application upgrades while giving businesses confidence in their mobile security posture.

“It’s imperative that enterprises employ the device management solution that’s right for their business, implementing the most appropriate security policies for the mobile devices their workforce uses,” said Enterprise Mobile’s Chairman and CEO Mort Rosenthal.

These simple words of wisdom are echoed by businesses. A recent InformationWeek Analytics 2010 Mobile Device Management and Security Survey revealed that 73 percent of enterprises will deploy or plan to deploy software for mobile device management to address security issues. This figure is up nearly a quarter from the 52 percent who were planning security-related deployments two years ago.

Oracle has developed a new breed of social, sales applications designed: to be more intuitive; to model common tasks sales representatives do every day, and leverage the knowledge and wisdom of collaborative-sales communities.

While traditional CRM offerings will continue to be a critical application for automating and optimizing sales operations, Oracle Social CRM Applications are intended for sales users rather than sales executives. They are designed to provide immediate benefits while eliminating some of the time-consuming elements associated with CRM, such as data entry. These tools are seen as keys to improving sales effectiveness by increasing sales through single-focused applications that are designed to be easy to use as well as mash-up and present data from disparate sources in visually-compelling forms. The goal is to solve business challenges and harness collective intelligence across companies or networks comprised of multiple organizations. The company’s Social CRM Applications include:

1. The Oracle Sales Prospector, which delivers a highly-graphical mash-up of internal and external data sources that help sales people to identify their top prospects. The recommendations use sophisticated analytics that identify buying patterns based on purchase history. It not only suggests potential deals for a sales representative to pursue but also the projected revenue, close probability, and time-to-close for each deal predicted.

2. The Oracle Sales Campaigns allows salespeople to create and share HTML e-mail campaigns and then track and measure their effectiveness. The idea is that collaborating on and pooling the best material available for a campaign benefits the entire sales team. It guides representatives to those campaigns that have been most effective in specific scenarios (e.g., initiatives targeted to prospects in a specific industry). In addition, this application reduces the amount of repetitive work that each salesperson normally would undertake in order to conduct his/her individual campaign.

3. The Oracle Sales Library creates a single repository of sales materials to empower users with Web 2.0 tools. Such tools include tagging, rating, and reviewing in order to determine which assets are the most effective. The aim is to empower an individual salesperson to be able to download individual slides or an entire presentation for meetings quickly and easily. Normally, a sales user must download an entire presentation from an internal portal before finding and selecting slides to his or her liking.

4. The Oracle Mobile Sales Assistant is a task-based mobile application that allows sales reps to access critical customer information while on the go.

5. A series of widgets communicate pertinent customer or sales information on the user’s desktop or within the portal of his/her choice. This frees the user from having to open a CRM application in order to access this information.

All these applications are built on Oracle’s standards-based Fusion Middleware platform to facilitate easy integration with other business applications and provide the scalability and security that businesses require.

• The company has BIGR®, the leading software-suite for biospecimen and biorepository management along with its disease-centric data collection and analysis systems containing models for more than 75 diseases.
• Information-technology teams develop new architectures and applications as well as integrate them with new and legacy systems.
• Software and other technologies offer solutions for biomedical research and healthcare entities.
• The firm hosts client applications and systems at its data-center locations.
• The caBIG® program is an enterprise-services provider offering quick access to applications through managed-hosting services.

HealthCare IT’s systems contain only data in health-care, clinical research, and biomedical research because the company focuses only on the IT and high-tech needs of the medical industry. Healthcare IT only focus is on this sector, so it can specialize and provide superior service suited to your needs. As a result, the firm knows that IT support is not a one-size-fits-all proposition and can accommodate any requirement of need of any client including fully-managed turn-key solutions, co-managed solutions (where we share responsibilities for certain tasks), and fully-custom solutions.

The country’s premiere health-care facilities use HealthCare IT including the National Cancer Institute, National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, University of Chicago Medical Center, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, Duke University School of Medicine, and Novartis.

HealthCare IT’s software systems are designed to handle the demanding workflows of today’s hospital, biomedical research and drug-development enterprises. BIGR® – along with its KnowledgeCaptureTM and DiseaseLinkTM Library components – support the needs of large-scale institutions in the medical field. BIGR® facilitates the collection and management of large, diverse repositories of biomaterials. BIGR® is a suite of web-based software, standard-operating procedures (SOPs), deployment and training materials, and supporting services that provide an information-modeling solution that enables structured, standardized, data annotation across a research and development enterprise.

Since 2001, BIGR® has been used to:

• manage more than 200,000 samples at multiple, biobanking sites
• support the enrollment of more than 20,000 donors and the collection of clinical data, using an annotation model supporting more than 75 diseases
• support diverse workflows
• track donor and sample status as well as historical and chain-of-custody events
• identify appropriate material for specific research needs, including molecular and tissue-based derivatives
• manage the storage and distribution of samples and data to more than 60 leading medical, biotech, and pharmaceutical institutions

When it comes to managing high-quality, highly-annotated biospecimen collections for diagnosis and research objectives, BIGR® is second to none.