The Future Of CMS: Kentico Roadshow Recap

The Ascedia team attended the Kentico Roadshow in Chicago last week and returned with some insight into digital marketing trends and the future of CMS. Here are some highlights:

Create Once, Publish Everywhere

Digital trends are showing that users are starting to interact with content outside of the website experience. In fact, 30% of all web sessions will be occurring without the use of a traditional screen by 2020. Kentico Cloud will allow for a more distributed flow of the content across multiple channels by allowing us to decouple it from presentation. In the past, all of the relevant content for the digital experience was maintained and managed in different systems such as a CMS, an app, etc. 

Moving forward, Kentico Cloud allows all of your content to be shared across different platforms, enabling greater consumption of that information. Imagine having all your content stored but accessible by your existing website, an IOS app, an Android app, Alexa, your chatbot, and your VR app. We shouldn’t even limit it to digital applications, for that matter. Like adaptive and responsive design, thinking about content this way allows us to future-proof our content and get more return on the time and energy we invest in its creation.

The Advent of Azure Search

Kentico will soon enable the use of Azure Search for an on-site search platform. This is a huge shift for Kentico, and will allow any site on Kentico EMS to really beef up their search experience. Developers will be able to use functionality baked into the platform instead of using a third-party option. Azure Search offers search suggestions for type-ahead queries, faceted navigation for easy filtering of results, hit highlighting for keywords in results, and media file content indexing, just to name a few of its awesome capabilities.

More Efficient Email Campaigns

Kentico 11 has a much more robust email tool, with drag and drop functionality that competes with some of the big-name email tools in the marketplace. The plus? It automatically links directly to your CMS, which means that your blog articles, product information, and other content pieces can be easily added to the system’s email templates! You can customize emails by persona and create a series of templates that can always pull the most recent article or the latest event, without having to manually set up a message every time you want to send out an email. These enhancements can potentially cut the time your team spends managing email creation by hours.

GDPR: General Data Protection Regulation

Starting in May 2018, the EU Parliament will replace the existing Data Protection Directive.  The new policy will include:

• Right to Access: The ability to acknowledge that information is being gathered about the user.
• Right to be Forgotten: The ability for the user to revoke permission to have data collected and have all that data destroyed.
• Data Portability: The ability to have the data collected provided to the user.
• Privacy by Design: Data protection should at the core of the system and not an add-on after original core design is completed.

Compliance with GDPR is the responsibility of the company and violations can result in some rather large financial penalties. This will affect any site that is collecting information on anyone in the EU regardless of the company’s location. The good news is that Kentico 11 has already started implementing some key features in the CMS to help meet these new requirements.

DISCLAIMER: All data and information provided in this blog post are for informational purposes only. Kentico makes no representations as to the accuracy, completeness, currentness, suitability, or validity of any information contained herein. We recommend consulting with a lawyer for any legal advice pertaining to GDPR compliance.

The Future of the Web is Conversational

Future content decisions need to take both humans and robots equally into account. As the home gets more connected, more searches will be conducted using conversational context rather than the normal search patterns we currently use. Alexa, Google Home, and all other interconnected home devices are the precipitator to this trend, and they need structured data, using standards outlined on schema.org, to meet these requests. We learned that these types of searches will outnumber current search methods in just a 6-year timeframe. In order to stay in front of this trend, it’s important to rethink content so that it fits these types of searches, where natural language and questions replace keywords and phrases.