Building More Site Value With Episerver’s Fall Release

Episerver recently announced their Fall ’16 release, which includes new products, features, and enhancements to the Episerver CMS. As Episerver continues to build on its already-impressive functionality in regular updates and through the acquisition of products like Peerius and Optivo, it offers its users more and more value, giving them the tools to create great website content and connect with their customers online.

One thing to remember is that the Fall ’16 release is really a marketing release to announce these new features. In actuality, these features had already been made available to site owners via Episerver’s continuous release cycle, which provides updates to Episerver’s software every two weeks.

The Fall ’16 release includes a number of updates to the Episerver CMS, including new personalization capabilities, tools for managing product inventory, and expanded A/B testing. We wanted to highlight two major enhancements that we think bring a great deal of value to the platform:

An API-Driven Approach to Social

Social media offers organizations the ability to engage with their customers like never before, especially through the implementation of user generated content like ratings and reviews. Episerver Social provides new capabilities for integrating social platforms into your website and building a community for your users.

We’re especially excited about the API-first approach that Episerver has taken in integrating social media into the platform. This provides site owners with the ability to shape the user interface (UI) to fit their needs rather than following one single approach. Episerver Social offers a more granular level of sophistication when it comes to driving interactions with site visitors, and its integration with other systems goes beyond what we’ve encountered with other CMS platforms.

Robust Workflows and Content Approvals

A well-defined approval process is essential for creating website content, especially for larger organizations. Episerver’s new content approval system is one of the most exciting updates to the platform, since it not only includes everything you would expect from a multi-tier approval system, but it can also be customized to do just about anything else you want to happen.

Being able to integrate external systems into the approval process is one especially powerful benefit that Episerver now provides. For example, a SMS integration can be used to send a text message to an approver, or notifications can be sent to Trello and added to an approver’s to-do list. These capabilities provide organizations with the opportunity to make the historically tedious task of approvals more palatable and better integrated with their team members’ everyday routines.

The Value of Episerver’s Continuous Release Cycle

As we mentioned above, if you’re taking advantage of Episerver’s continuous release cycle, you’ve already seen these features flow into the Episerver product. Being able to quickly and seamlessly integrate new capabilities into your website as they are released is one of the primary advantages of the Episerver platform, and having a partner who can help you make the best use of these new tools is key to realizing success in your digital strategy.

If you’re curious about these enhancements and how they can bring more value to your organization, or if you want to know more about how to take advantage of Episerver’s continuous release cycle, please feel free to contact us for more information. We’d love to chat with you about how to leverage the power of Episerver to build a successful digital strategy!

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