Leverage Expressroom for Better Content Management

Expressroom provides you with the the tools and architecture to efficiently create, manage and deliver your web content. With Expressroom you can:

Reuse content
Reuse is essential to deriving development efficiencies. Web site designers have long been advocating reuse of their designs through template strategies. Expressroom encourages and facilitates this approach. A layout template created once in Expressroom can be used any number of times throughout the site.

Expressroom applies the same concept to all types of content. One piece of content can be re-used throughout the site and by different devices. Standard legal disclaimers and company contact information are typical examples of content that is ideal to “write once, use anywhere.” Because Expressroom uses XML to identify elements of content, individual parts of the content (e.g. “headline” or “date”) can be addressed independently and used in different ways throughout the site.

Globalize content
As the globalization of business continues, being able to support multiple languages within one content management system becomes increasingly important. Expressroom is fully Unicode compliant and supports content in any language, including those that use double-byte character sets. By having different versions of content bound to the same presentation, the same site can appear in English, French, Chinese, Japanese, or any other language.

Manage multiple sites
An Expressroom site can be rapidly created from existing, individual pieces and parts through a drag-and-drop operation. It is extremely easy to create targeted, re-branded versions or presentations of an existing Web site – a trick which is almost impossible with a traditionally managed HTML Web site. Multiple sites can be managed and synchronized from within the Expressroom Site Controller, sharing some or all of the same content.

Ensure content security
Expressroom provides a robust permissions and access model. Based on individual users, groups, or roles, publications and individual assets can be managed by assigning permissions. The Secure Socket Layer (SSL) encryption provides extra security for transactions between clients and servers. Privacy, authentication, and message integrity are supported throughout the system, when publishing, retrieving and submitting content. SSL makes sure that all assets are secure until published.

Guarantee publishing of approved content only
Workflow is a vital tool for managing the content approval process and ensuring quality and accountability. Expressroom provides a flexible, customizable, embedded workflow system with GUI-based tools. Creating a workflow is done visually through a simple drag-and-drop operation, and permissions, actions, and variables can be associated with a particular task. All users are able to build workflows – avoiding the cost and time delays of assigning this to a specialist in the team. Exception handling, e-mail notifications, and reporting are all supported.

Introduce a staged release strategy
Expressroom facilitates the introduction of physically separate staging and live servers. The staging environment provides a location for continuous updating throughout the approval and workflow cycle. All contributors connect to and work on the staging environment. Approved content, presentation, and code are released to the live server by Expressroom. The live environment is never accessed directly by contributors, reducing the risk of unintentional changes.

This configuration is ideal from a network perspective. The staging server can reside behind the firewall, on the same LAN as most of the contributors, providing secure high-bandwidth access to the Web team. The live server (or servers) can reside in a public Web facility, optimized for handling heavy traffic and multiple connections.

Releasing content from stage to live is a secure and rapid process carried out by the Expressroom Site Controller. The operation is cross-platform, allowing content to be published between dissimilar operating systems (e.g. Windows to Solaris). The Site Controller allows publishing of individual assets and distributed publishing control of different parts of the site tree between different departments.

A site can be published to multiple live servers in a transactional, synchronized fashion. While many individual files must be moved to replicate the site to the live servers, the changes all commit as one single event. When the publish event occurs, all the live servers actually snap over to the new version of the content at the same time, keeping all of the servers synchronized.

Expressroom supports setting a publish date and time for new content. Many sites are updated with new content at a certain frequency, for example, every Tuesday at midnight. Users can create an entire upcoming issue and embargo it (hold it for release at another time). Expressroom automatically releases it to the public on the live servers at the time set.

Integrate with enterprise infrastructure
Often, larger enterprises already have a considerable investment in security, storage, and delivery infrastructure. Rather than requiring new infrastructure for content management, Expressroom is designed to work with existing facilities.

The user management model of Expressroom can be configured in standalone mode or can be configured to work with enterprise directories such as LDAP and Microsoft® Active Directory.

Content, presentation, and code can be stored in any server filesystem, or in an existing enterprise relational database system. Oracle^®, Sybase^®, Microsoft^® SQL Server, and other repositories are supported for the storage of all Expressroom assets.

The Expressroom Page Server works with all popular Web servers, like Resin, Microsoft IIS, Apache, and Netscape, and popular application servers like BEA WebLogic^®, ATG Dynamo^®, and IBM WebSphere. Because Expressroom does not dictate the Web application delivery platform, enterprises are free to make and uphold whatever platform choices appeal to their application developers.