Kentico in 2012: Even More Possibilities for Your Website

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Are you curious where we are heading in 2012? Do you want to know what features and improvements we are going to introduce this year? Read further to learn more about how we are going to push boundaries of unlimited website possibilities.
2011 was a great year for Kentico. We released version 6 together with a new product Kentico Enterprise Marketing Solution that is already used by numerous clients. We continued a significant growth of revenues and user base - Kentico CMS now empowers more than 12,000 websites in 87 countries and our partner network grew to more than 1,200 partners. We also started a new U.K. office, added another U.S. office and introduced our global 24/7 support that is available to every client with an active maintenance contract at no extra cost. Last but not least, we planted two new sets of Trees for Bugs. To manage all of that, our team grew to 75 people.

And we certainly won't rest in 2012 either. Our development team is busy with Kentico CMS 7 that is scheduled for the end of Q2/2012. You can find the updated roadmap here and we will add more details on feature availability in particular editions in the upcoming weeks.  

Below, you can find the areas that we find most important this year (not all of them will be included in version 7, so please watch our roadmap that is being updated as we move closer to the release).

User Experience

We will be working on improving existing features for better usability. In version 7, you will see a redesigned user interface in E-mail Marketing, On-line Forms and E-commerce product administration.

The Content tab will be highly optimized for faster loading and we will get rid of the complex frames structure here. We will also replace modal dialogs that currently open in a new window with dialogs opened in a new layer. Moreover, we will provide a simplified On-site Editing interface for casual users who want to simply update website content without using the full-featured CMS Desk interface.

There will also be UX improvements for developers who will be able to quickly preview the transformations and CSS stylesheets as they're editing them.

On-line Marketing

We will continue enhancing the online marketing features based on the feedback from our customers who already run Kentico EMS on their sites. There will be numerous minor enhancements, but one I'd like to mention is a new condition builder for marketers that will allow them to configure dynamic Contact Groups and Personalization without K# knowledge.

Since on-line marketing features tend to generate a lot of data, version 7 will allow you to store on-line marketing data in a separate database.

The E-mail marketing module will get an improved UI and support for A/B tests of e-mail campaigns.

We will introduce several integrations related to the on-line marketing during this year – Data.com (already released on our Marketplace), Salesforce.com and Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

Marketing Automation will be a big addition to the set of our Customer Experience Management features. If it doesn't make it into version 7, we will release it separately as an add-on through our marketplace. It will allow you to set up lead nurturing campaigns and establish a consistent communication plan around your customers' buying process.

Another big trend that we see is using the Business Intelligence tools to get new insights from the data that you collect from your website. It won't be included in version 7, but it's a major topic for us this year and we may release this separately later this year.

Mobile

Optimizing your website for mobile devices becomes a standard part of website development. We will enhance the existing support for creating mobile sites with mobile layouts that will be chosen based on the detected device. You can think of it as of responsive design but on the server side. Also, the previously mentioned On-site Editing interface will support basic content administration on mobile devices.

Additional Enterprise Features

Version 7 will introduce Advanced Workflow with browser-based designer that will allow you to define custom document workflow with complex business rules and combine it with custom actions executed during the workflow.
We will also significantly simplify Translation Management for customers with large sites in multiple languages.

Kentico Partner Network

Beside all the new features, we will keep improving our Partner Program and growing our Kentico Partner Network. We will be launching new partner competencies and we will work closely with our partners to grow their business with Kentico CMS.

... and much more!

There are a few other big announcements you can expect from us during this year and you will hear them at the right moment. One thing you can be sure about is that we will be here to help you create successful websites as we've been doing in the past 7 years!

As always, I will appreciate if you add your comments below. If you want to suggest a new feature or improvement, please use kentico.uservoice.com.
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Petr Palas

I'm the founder and CEO of Kentico. I write about Kentico, WCM, CXM, digital marketing and related technologies.

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