Stellant: Customers Can Manage Wikis, Blogs, And RSS Feeds

Content management developer Stellent Inc. yesterday rolled out new capabilities for managing wikis, blogs, and really simple syndication (RSS)feeds within corporate environments.

New and enhanced capabilities and best practices for Stellent Universal Content Management allow customers to integrate wikis and blogs into a multi-site Web content management framework. This allows an organization to leverage the same skills, processes and software to manage all of their Web sites and maintain consistent branding and security across all sites."

There continues to be concern among enterprise IT managers that wikis and blogs present risk and introduce non-compliance issues if not properly monitored and managed to protect confidential or proprietary information. By incorporating wikis and blogs into an existing enterprise content management infrastructure, the same level of workflow, audit trail, and records and retention management can be applied to these newer types of collaborative Web content, according to Stellant.

Stellent Universal Content Management now enables wiki contributors to create hyperlinks in both pattern-matching and wizard style formats. This allows users to link to other topics and pages within a wiki site, as well as other Web sites. When an author creates a new hyperlink about a particular subject, the Stellent system will automatically link to a wiki page about that topic. If the page does not exist, it will automatically create a new page.

Contributors can edit wiki pages in real-time and instantly view their changes. The Stellent technology records a history of wiki activity, so readers know who writes or changes content, how many times content is revised and if there are certain topics currently under heavy debate. A locking and revision control feature ensures only one user may change content at a time, and it also keeps an audit trail of all revisions which is then available for records and retention management purposes.

Also new to Stellent Universal Content Management are blog-formatted WYSIWYG forms, enabling authors to post new blog entries without using HTML. A preview function allows users to proof posts before publishing them. And, the Stellent system gives blog readers the ability to efficiently provide comments on posts to facilitate further discussions on a topic.

Users can write blog entries using e-mail or word processing applications such as Microsoft Word or OpenOffice. Companies also can distribute blog posts through really simple syndication (RSS) feeds, allowing audiences to subscribe to specific content.

A security feature helps organizations control who can author and view a blog.

Stellent also unveiled new Universal Content Management capabilities for leveraging really simple syndication (RSS) within an enterprise content management framework.

"Users can browse the content and Web sites managed in Stellent Universal Content Management, conduct searches for content, and then subscribe to and receive individual content items or groups of content via an RSS feed," said Dan Ryan, Stellant executive vice president of marketing and business development.

New templates enable organizations to quickly deploy RSS feeds for intranet, extranet and public Web site content managed in the Stellent repository. The Stellent system automatically generates RSS feeds of managed content using metadata and rule sets.