For 14 years now, Kentico has been focusing on providing you with the best way to work with content and helping you to tell stories that change the world. Kentico 12, the latest release, is focused on providing marketers with tools to design and deliver cross-channel experiences and developers with a platform built on MVC technology.
Customer Experience Is a Journey, Not a Destination
Kentico’s Enterprise Marketing Solution (EMS) has gone through several inflection points over the years. Back in 2006 the Portal Engine brought a browser-based page builder built on ASP.NET WebForm technology, allowing rapid development.
The following year saw EMS launch in Version 6, pioneering the CMS market, bringing together content management and customer experience management capabilities. No surprise then that in the same year Kentico became the first
CMS solution certified for the Microsoft Azure cloud.
Fast forward to 2016 and Kentico 10 delivered a significantly improved upon solution, with scalability and performance upgraded to allow enterprise organizations to adopt Kentico EMS as their primary digital experience platform. Then November 2017 saw the launch of Kentico 11 and the most advanced support available on the market for the new data privacy legislation of the GDPR.
Enters Kentico 12
And here we are in front of another inflection point for Kentico EMS. For the longest time, content management systems have been known for providing an interface that only engineers could love. As more marketers adopt these platforms, there are now expectations that systems need to be straightforward and easy to use.
To truly empower marketers to be successful and achieve their goals, we are delivering a modern and lightweight experience editing environment to business users that makes them more productive. The new experience editor enables marketers to transform the way they work with the content through an intuitive and clean authoring interface. Common tasks and quick actions can be completed, without going through too many steps, reducing the training and onboarding time necessary to get your team up and running.
Widget-based Visual Page Builder
Kentico's new MVC widget-based web content editor is changing the way marketers craft and build pages and customer experiences. The drag-and-drop interface provides marketers with powerful and flexible tools that help marketers experiment quickly and often, independently of IT. For each page, the administrator can configure which widgets are allowed to be used in a widget zone on the page to avoid the risk of breaking the website unintentionally. This also ensures visual consistency across pages based on the same template. The new streamlined editing experience helps to alleviate the productivity constraints on marketers and content editors. It's all about empowering users to become truly agile, delivering a better customer experience faster. Some of the key features of the new page builder include:
Widget-based page builder — a content and experience editor using reusable components to design pages
Sections and widget zones — a grid or matrix made of rows and columns dividing widget zones into multiple areas, each able to hold multiple
Widgets — components providing specific functionality, supporting personalization and inline editing
Personalization
When it comes to providing personalized experiences, it's all about the customer context, and even
GDPR hasn't changed anything about that. Kentico's Analytics provides insights into activities and interactions completed by customers across all of your digital properties, channels, and devices. The data gathered in the activity log allows to evaluate the behavior of customers, and use activities in combination with other marketing capabilities, for example, to automatically calculate scores for contacts based on their activities, use activities as triggers for starting marketing automation processes, or to personalize a site for customers who have performed specific activities.
The more you know about the context of your visitor, the more relevant you can make the experience. To be more effective in generating and converting leads and reaching your goals, you can personalize content displayed by widgets without any assistance from developers.
Simplified personalization management allows you to create new widget variants based on different options such as Persona, Country, Device type and others. Working together with developers, additional personalization condition types can be registered, as needed, to provide powerful personalization capabilities.
Smart Forms
Nothing makes marketers happier than a well-performing lead generation machine. At the core, each lead generation campaign relies on valuable customer information being gathered as the prospective customer moves through their journey. It is, therefore, imperative for every marketer to have tools at their disposal that allow them to design and publish online forms quickly, when and as needed. Kentico 12 brings the new generation with its component-based drag-and-drop form builder. Smart forms allow marketers to design, build, and publish online forms easily, independent of IT. Marketers become more agile while developers get to focus on what matters. Smart forms let you design progressive forms gathering customer data throughout multiple steps of their journey, which has been proven to be more effective in collecting more data and keeping forms compact.
Kentico 12 Goes All-in on MVC
WebForms are retiring and MVC is the new king! With WebForms becoming obsolete (confirmed by Microsoft in October 2018), Kentico EMS future-readies your projects with its transition to the MVC-only development model, scheduled to be completed by the end of 2020. For EasyTech that means all new EMS projects will now be MVC led.
No need to panic, web forms won’t be retiring overnight. Support for existing projects built on Portal Engine will continue until end of 2022 or more, so that’s 4 years to get your all-singing-all-dancing MVC site up and running!
What else is new?
- Brand new eLearning modules
Since MVC is the new king of the jungle, we also prepared a new training course for you... You can expect the developer certification to be ready in January 2019, while the marketer certification is going to be publicly available a month later, in February 2019.
- Scalable Licensing Options
Many organizations historically struggled with assessing needs related to server architecture and scalability concerning their website or web properties...The new
Kentico Scalable License model will be available in (three) options or tiers:
- Auto-Scalable Licensing
- Planned-Scalable Licensing
- Emergency- Scalable Licensing
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