Product Review: the new SDL Tridion 2011 Web Content Management System

The new SDL Tridion 2011 has arrived at last! Since its acquisition by SDL in 2007, the Tridion platform has seen little in the way of innovation. But its product developers have been doing their homework. As a result, the platform has been completely renewed. Lots of features have also been added, once more making SDL Tridion the best of its breed.

So you think you really know Tridion?

To refresh your memory, here’s a few key facts about Tridion.

Analysts such as Gartner and The Real Story Group consider SDL Tridion to be a leading player in the field of web content management. It is a user-friendly web content management system, called on by large organisations that need globalised websites, brand management, targeted audience marketing and multi-channel marketing as part of their communication, sales and support strategy.

Tridion’s unique BluePrinting technology gives users the flexibility of building individual components and easily configuring the different components, in order to rearrange existing page lay-outs or to create new ones. Tridion also makes it easy to share content across multiple sites, and it automatically constructs and publishes content pages.

Among the customers using SDL Tridion are Brussels Airlines, Daikin Europe, Province of Antwerp, Toyota Europe, Kind & Gezin, the City of Leuven, the Belgian Federal Government, Rabobank and many more besides.

So what’s new in SDL Tridion 2011?

In terms of flexibility and multichannel publishing, the SDL Tridion platform’s base architecture still had core strengths. But it was high time for a major overhaul of the underlying technology. Microsoft’s old COM+ technology was finally replaced by .NET throughout the whole product (with just one minor exception), making Tridion a powerful, fully supported and evolving technology again.

Let’s take a look at those new features:

• Extensive user-testing was done during the development of SDL Tridion 2011, and this was hugely influential in the design of the new Content Manager Explorer interface. The interface is now more user-friendly than ever, taking usability to a higher level. The Message Center, for instance, shows a log of all actions performed. Furthermore, the new Ribbon Toolbar (much like the one in the latest Microsoft Office suite) makes it easier for new users to familiarise themselves with the product.

• The Content Manager Explorer now also has cross-browser support, eliminating the need for Internet Explorer/Windows on the client side.

• The product installer has become a lot smaller, allowing smooth deployment.

• A full read-write .NET API enables easy development of customised interactions with the system.

• A full-featured web service is available, enabling users to do the same actions without the need for server access to run any logic . With minimal effort, users can therefore build a customised web interface or a fat client on top of the Tridion core.

• New extensibility features in the web GUI also make it easier for users to add customised functionality to Tridion, such as interactions with different data stores.

• The internal Tridion search engine has been rebuilt and now runs on proven Apache Lucene search technology.

• The Content Deployer (one of the major components in Tridion’s publishing mechanism) often created a bottleneck in the publishing process. It is now fully scalable, with the result that publishing speed is virtually unlimited.

• The Content Delivery running in the front-end website has also been improved in terms of performance and flexibility. Moreover, a web service has been added to offer more dynamic access to the published content.

And there’s even more...

• Both Audience Manager and Outbound E-mail have been developed alongside the core product and they are now completely integrated in SDL Tridion 2011. These developments have enabled easy gathering of information, such as the characteristics of website visitors or the management of e-mail communication campaigns, directly from the Tridion GUI.

• SDL’s SmartTarget is a fully integrated personalisation engine. It even allows users to target anonymous customers based on their physical location, referring link and their online behaviour. In addition, SmartTarget can target your offering based on time of day, repeated visits and browsing behaviour.

• Through its partnership with mobile technology provider Netbiscuits, SDL Tridion has improved its core strengths in multi-channel publishing with advanced mobile website management capabilities that are based on device detection and transcoding.

Still to improve

Even the best of products are not perfect. With this new SDL Tridion, it can sometimes be tricky to keep different environments aligned with one another (e.g. development and production systems). With SDL’s current solution, the SDL Content Porter, it can be hard to transfer and synchronise changes (e.g. newly developed features) across different SDL Tridion environments. Fortunately, SDL has already announced that the next version of the Content Porter will contain major improvements in this problem area.

Conclusion

After a (long) period of ‘status quo’, the WCM team at SDL Tridion has completed a major overhaul of its flagship platform, and in the process added some interesting features. This should ensure that SDL Tridion remains a top-rated WCM platform, for both analysts and customers.