CoreMedia 8 Helps Connect, Create and Control Omni-channel Digital Experiences

CoreMedia has announced the latest version of its web content management platform. And like most other former “WCM” vendors, it has finally moved away from the standard “web content management platform” nomenclature to the more relevant “digital experience platform.” Now for some that may seem like wordsmithing, but if you look closely at what CoreMedia offers, it’s been much more than a web content management platform provider for a long time now.

It has been two years since we’ve seen a new version of CoreMedia’s web content management platform, but along with continuing to improve it and it’s many parts, CoreMedia has been developing complementary capabilities – in particular CoreMedia LiveContext, which I wrote about in May of last year. CoreMedia has built a tight relationship with IBM WebSphere to bring content to WebSphere’s e-commerce platform.

Now we see CoreMedia LiveContext functionality directly within the CoreMedia digital experience platform. But that’s not all, so let’s go through the goods…

Doug Heise, CoreMedia’s Product Marketing Director, took me through what’s new and improved with CoreMedia 8 and he broke it down into three key areas: Connect, Create and Control.

CoreMedia Connects

CoreMedia enables omni-channel delivery of content that is both responsive and adaptive. This includes a connector to easily publish content to native mobile apps. CoreMedia also provides expansive personalization and social capabilities, so you can tailor your customers’ experiences any way you need to.

LiveContext, which provides the ability to connect e-commerce sites with content from a web content management platform, is now built into CoreMedia’s core platform (so you can purchase LiveContext on its own or as part of a bigger package). CoreMedia LiveContext provides two-way integration of content and works with any e-commerce system (not just IBM).

New moderation capabilities allow you to filter user-generated content based on things such as channel, region, etc.. making it easier to manage.

If you know CoreMedia then you know it offers what are called “blueprints”, which are a way to quickly spin up a new implementation quickly. CoreMedia 8 provides a brand new, re-built from the ground up Media Blueprint.

There were no major changes to its personalization capabilities, but CoreMedia has had some fairly expansive functionality for a long time, including segmentation, profiling building, contextual content delivery based on a wide-range of things like taxonomies, profile data, personas, segments, etc.. and it offers in-context previewing of different audiences, devices, and so on.

CoreMedia Creates

Creates is very much about the CoreMedia Studio which is where content creators, editors, managers spend much of their time. The Studio has been significantly enhanced, offering an interface that progressively discloses more information as you need it so you aren’t inundated with information that isn’t relevant to what you are doing. There are also some new keyboard shortcuts, and buttons suggesting related content to add to the content you are working with. Preview-driven editing has also been enhanced.

For organizations that want to enable some flexibility and creatively yet maintain consistency, the Studio can be configured to enforce a certain look and feel, yet provide some flexibility. The Page Grid editor has also been enhanced and is now easier to use, and rich media assets are easier to manage.

Most organizations collaborate closely on content development and CoreMedia 8 provides some new collaboration tools that support more ad hoc collaboration that isn’t suitable for traditional workflow models (although that is also supported). New is ability to create virtual folders where editors can drop content assets to share and collaborate on. Real-time updates and messages also support collaboration as does formal workflows for approvals and translations (which are XML based).

And for those organizations that create and manage more than one website (whether it’s for multiple brands, landing pages or regional sites), a new multi-site navigator enables you to easily move between sites and create derived sites from a master site. A new side by side compare view shows you what’s different in the content.

CoreMedia Control (for IT Teams)

Finally we look at new capabilities for IT teams because they need to be able to support the technical aspects of an organization’s digital presence. CoreMedia 8 is Java-based, built on open standards. It has a “grow as you go” model so you don’t need to buy everything out of the gate (this is a very common approach to digital experience platforms).

CoreMedia 8 has a new content security policy which supports the separation of editorial and delivery, support for IE 11, and improved user authentication.

Finally, CoreMedia can be deployed on premises or in a cloud-environment, and instead of waiting long periods for updates and enhancements, CoreMedia provides a continuous delivery model via Chef, ensuring that you also have the latest updates as quickly as possible.

CoreMedia 8 is Available Now

From everything I have seen, CoreMedia provides everything you need to create engaging personalized digital experiences. It doesn’t have the market presence that vendors like Acquia, Sitecore and Adobe have, but it is making inroads into the US market. Heise indicated that CoreMedia has been gaining momentum over the last four months in both the US and Germany (where it’s from) and the company is very optimistic about its prospects. The IBM partnership is likely going to help dramatically (that’s for LiveContext), getting the CoreMedia brand into more organizations in the US, but it’s the complete digital experience platform that is worth looking at, including the functionality rich CoreMedia Studio for power-users.

CoreMedia sits in the Visionaries quadrant of the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Web content management platforms (from October 2014).

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