MARINA DEL REY, Calif. (Sept. 9, 2002) – CrownPeak Technology, the premier content management ASP, today announced the release of Publisher Advantage™, a special publishing industry edition of Advantage CMS™, its flagship ASP-based content management solution.  Developed in response to the specific needs of the publishing industry, this special version of Advantage CMS offers a series of powerful enhanced capabilities: greater user manageability and control over content and digital assets, infinitely configurable workflow, improved proofing tools, integration with ad serving components, e-mail newsletter creation and management, performance monitoring, increased report management capabilities, and an exclusive “content similarity engine.”

 “Like almost no other business, professional publishing needs an efficient method to manage content online,” said Jim Howard, CEO, CrownPeak Technology.  “We’ve been listening to our publishing clients, and responding to their needs for enhanced control and access to content.  We continue to improve the functionality and capabilities of Advantage CMS, delivering the highest level of usability we can while staying true to the ASP model.

“Increasingly, there is scant reason to buy a CMS – and every reason to rent,” Howard said.  “With these new features, we’re empowering clients focused on online publishing with maximum control over their content and their digital assets. Publishers are gaining the benefits of an in-house, highly reliable, world-class solution without the expense, the deployment delays and the sheer hassle of a traditional enterprise-level package.”

Publisher Advantage is already being deployed in professional publishing environments.  WorkForce Magazine, a publication specializing in topical issues facing human resources professionals, recently implemented Publishers Advantage for its online property WorkForce Online.  “We selected CrownPeak Technology and its Advantage CMS solution because we know the people behind it and their track record of both innovation and success in this space,” said Margaret Magnus, president and publisher, WorkForce.  “CrownPeak provides literally all of the features we need today, along with other capabilities we will grow to need, at a much lower cost than anything else we’ve seen in the marketplace.”

Workflow is expanded significantly in Publisher Advantage, which features unlimited flexibility within workflow and approvals configuration.  Supporting the unique demands of the publishing industry, Editors and Content Authors now have powerful tools that that enable the collaborative editorial process online, allowing page notations, expanded task management capability, ad hoc routing, parallel and serial approval processes and nesting workflows within the content management system. 

Publishers Advantage grants clients expanded control over content, providing the ability to proof, monitor and develop usage reports as well as tracking links across the site.  The Link Checker function automatically notifies the client of broken links.  In addition to the new tracking and management functions, Report Writer maintains detailed records and statistics for monitoring purposes – especially useful for publishing sites that require comprehensive reports.

Clients using Publisher Advantage will now be able to develop ad-hoc reports on any scenario that they wish through the Advantage CMS Report Writer.  Clients can create reports specifying the number of pages, size of pages, images, and other useful statistics to track their online assets.  Report Writer is capable of tracking assets recently modified, deleted, and added over time, while monitoring performance for every page on the site, based on speed of response.  The report module enables clients to set alerts for slow performance and track broken links, internally or externally. 

Proofing has also been expanded in Publisher Advantage, with Real-Time spell checking offering writers the ability to check spelling against an embedded 250,000-word dictionary, as well as add their own words.

In addition, Publisher Advantage delivers major enhancements in the areas of directory management, e-mail marketing and ad serving.  Publishers with both business-to-business and business-to-consumer activities have embraced a new advertising model centering around the creation of niche directories that enable subscribers to use the publication as a source of information.  Publisher Advantage dramatically eases the management and maintenance of these directories, and provides metrics on their usage.

Additionally, recognizing that renting out newsletter subscriber e-mail lists has become a major revenue source for online publications, Publisher Advantage streamlines and simplifies this process.  The special version allows online publishers the ability to assemble and send these newsletters as easily as they create a Web page, along with the ability to monitor and report on available inventory of available e-mail recipients for potential advertisers.    

CrownPeak is the only content management system to embed its own algorithm to compare the content in every asset in the system and automatically provide links to related content.  The system can be configured to enable the content author or editor to select from the suggested links, and automatically publish those as part of any page.  For new clients with large repositories of pages, the task of creating links to related articles is often monumental.  Automating this process can save literally thousands of hours of work, and compress the transition to Publisher Advantage in a fraction of the time of other systems.

CrownPeak Technology’s Advantage CMS provides all the powerful features of a world-class CMS at a fraction of the cost and time commitment required by packaged solutions.  Its easy-to-use Web interface enables users to maintain and edit content in any format as text, images, movies or any hybrid medium.  The Advantage CMS application is hosted on high-availability servers, where CrownPeak backs up, maintains and extends the system.  As an enterprise-level content management system, Advantage CMS is highly inter-operable with other systems and applications. Connection options available to developers include SOAP, XML, FTP, HTTP, SMTP and ODBC.

Based in Marina del Rey, Calif., CrownPeak Technology is the first company to provide world-class content management as a service, so that secure, feature-rich, enterprise level technology can be made available economically.  As the premier hosted application provider, CrownPeak offers in Advantage CMS a feature set that is helping to redefine the content management space.  The company's comprehensive developer environment, industry-leading service levels and "risk-free" outsourcing options have made CrownPeak one of the fastest growing companies in its sector.

Press contact:
Erin Lumley
SHIFT Communications
elumley@shiftcomm.com
415.591.8414