What’s new in Kentico 10?
Kentico web content management (WCM) suite ranks among the most preferred choices for web development projects, hugely popular for its extensive features, ease of use, pre-defined workflows, smart search, easy customization, and a host of other powerful functionality.
Kentico launched version 10 of its WCM suite on November 30, 2016. The suite retains the inherent advantages of Kentico, which made it so widely accepted, and goes beyond, gearing the suite up to match the advancements in technology and the changing paradigms.
More Power
The most noteworthy feature of the new Kentico 10 is the functional enhancements that improves usability and speeds up things.
Kentico 10 comes equipped to handle the ever increasingly volume of enterprise data. The updated CRM suite is capable of storing 100 million contacts and one billion activities. The unmatched scalability comes with amazing speed, with 50% faster page load and response times, compared to incumbent versions.
It is not just capacity than Kentico 10 enhances, though. The CRM now offers advanced Power BI analytic capabilities, giving users the power to make sense of the vast data swathes in a much more efficient and insightful manner than before.
The 50% speed-up means not just deploying websites quickly, but rolling out digital marketing campaigns faster, so crucial in today’s highly competitive market, where marketers need to seize the moment or be left out. With Kentico, Digital marketers not only remain competitive but can also do more with the available time.
Kentico has hitherto been strong in the small-to-medium sized businesses. The improved scalability on offer makes the suite attractive for large enterprises as well.
Agile Campaigns
Kentico 10 furthers the cause of agile campaigns in a much better way than before.
The new version offers a single unified control panel to execute and analyze highly sophisticated digital marketing campaigns.
The cross-site contact profiles functionality shares data across web properties, making explicit all user interactions. Users now get a complete and comprehensive view of the customer’s interactions and activities, cutting across all brands and channels, in a single pane. Such deep yet simple insights related to customers enable cross-site lead scoring and contextual marketing with considerable ease.
The new WCM eliminates repetitive tasks, and automates many unavoidable chores. The biggest improvement here is users needing to upload images just once, with the system adjusting it automatically, for various media. The rise of mobility has resulted in a fragmented ecosystem, with users accessing content through devices with various screen sizes. Such a trend makes resizing images and rendering it in various layouts, color profiles, and viewports imperative. With Kentico 10’s responsive image management, all the user needs to do is upload the images, and Kentico adjusts it in the backend automatically, to suit different media.
Powerful Marketing Campaigns
Kentico 10 empowers marketers in a big way, allowing them to keep track of the campaign journey in an effective way. Marketers can now track the sequence or steps in the journey visitors make in their interactions with the brand.
The biggest impact of the new version is, however, flexibility in marketing campaigns. Marketers may change the attributes of an already running campaign, without having to conclude the campaign and start afresh, and without having to forego already collected data.
Marketers no longer need to create newsletters for an entire contact group. It is now possible to create new ad-hoc email campaigns and send it to contacts or contact groups in double-quick time. Kentico 10 assigns each contact an email marketing status, for easier overview of data in the database.
Kentico 10’s Power BI Email Marketing dashboard delivers all email marketing insights all on an interactive, customizable, user-friendly dashboard. Through the dashboard, Kentico continues its strategic relationship with Microsoft, and offers advanced Business Intelligence (BI) capabilities, allowing everyone to access the same channel intelligence.
Increased Control
Kentico 10 offers the utmost flexibility in developing forms and reports. It supports both Web Forms and MVC development across the board, enabling developers to take full control of their web development process, and develop as they want.
Kentico 10 fully incorporates the ASP.NET Model View Controller (MVC) developer framework, in both e-commerce and online marketing fronts. The ASP.NET MVC developer framework is now hugely popular as it facilitates the creation of scalable and high performing websites. Kentico leverages REST API for content repository in many use cases, allowing the same content to be consumed through traditional delivery channels and also in native mobile apps.
Bringing Disparate Systems Together
A key advantage of Kentico is its ability to bring disparate systems together, facilitating seamless work. Kentico 10 lives up to the reputation, offering a seamless integration of ASP.NET CMS, e-commerce, and online marketing functions. The CRM suite automates or relegates to the background all the nitty-gritty, leaving developers free to focus their energies on creating cutting-edge websites and optimize the customer’s journey without having to manage multiple systems.
Kentico 10 also supports fully deployed continuous integration. Generally, every developer has their own instance of development base and development installation, creating problems when they try to share the functionality with others in the team or enterprise. The continuous Integration tool supports all the object types in Kentico 10, making it possible to move objects between environments quickly.
Kentico 10 is a big leap forward, but there are still some loose ends. For instance, integrations are still a bit weak, and there’s scope to improve data visualizations in a big way. All these are hopefully first on the agenda for Kentico 11.
In a way, Kentico 10 exemplifies the company’s approach to web content management systems. Rather than packing the suite with a wide array of features, Kentico tries to understand how digital marketers work and offer them the most relevant tools to get their job done in the best possible way. Kentico has focused on not just adding new features and improving existing features, but also weeding out unnecessary features, to deliver a highly optimized suite.
The Kentico 10 release comes weeks after the launch of the new Kentico Cloud, an API-first, multi-tenant Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering. The Kentico cloud platform runs parallel to the on-premises Kentico 10.