Data Center Systems Overview

The solutions for which CrownPeak provides data center infrastructure and professional services are an integrated suite of Web applications. Customers utilize these solutions to manage Web site content, offer Web site search to site visitors and serve Web content to site visitors. These solutions are offered in concert with each other, or completely separately depending on the customer’s requirements. They are also designed to be flexible, easy to manage and maintain and allow additional features to be added without significant changes to the core system.  

There are four discrete solutions that CrownPeak may or may not provide to a given customer covered under this documentation:

• Web Content Management Application
  CrownPeak’s Cloud CMS manages content through the full lifecycle of Web content. The system is a publishing system where the software is hosted and managed separately from the Web site. When content is made “live”, it is published (typically via FTP or SFTP) to a destination Web server for serving to the general Internet. In no case is live Web content ever served from the CrownPeak Cloud WCM, and the WCM runs no software on the target web server. Because of this, the CMS can publish content to any kind of web serving platform (.Net, Java, PHP etc.) 

A conceptual diagram of the Web site content management system is depicted in below (Figure 1.1.1. )

Figure 1.1.1. CrownPeak Cloud CMS Conceptual Diagram

• Web Content Optimizer - Online Marketing Module – Snippet Content Serving
  CrownPeak’s Web Content Optimizer (WCO) provides Content Testing and Targeting Modules. This module is a little different than the architecture associated with the WCMS (above) as in this case content is served by the application directly. Content is delivered dynamically to the user’s web browser at run-time, via a JavaScript include on the web site. Each content snippet being served is “personalized” based on segmentation/targeting attributes set within the CrownPeak application. These attributes are typically applied on a percentage basis for testing purposes (A/B, Split & Multivariate) or by explicit attributes derived by a cookie or referring IP address which provide content targeting (by such attributes as referring site, or information gathered from web forms). The percentage based serving methods are used for testing content, and first-party Cookies are utilized to determine attributes of known users to serve targeting based content. As visitors click around on the site and/or enter content into forms, data is passed into and stored in the application. The data is information related to the click-path taken by the user, and/or explicit data relayed through form submissions on the customer web site. Data contained in this form is stored within the CrownPeak system and utilized to further segment content and provide the basis of measurement. 

A conceptual diagram of the CrownPeak WCO serving method is depicted below (Figure 1.1.2).

Figure 1.1.2. CrownPeak Search Conceptual Diagram

• Web Site Search
  CrownPeak’s Site Search system enables visitors to a Web site to search that site’s contents. The product can parse PDF, Word, XLS, and other common document types as well as meta data associated with an image or other binary asset or embedded into a Web page. The Search Index is created by spidering the live Web site, and retains any field information (HTML meta fields) from the live content. The results from any search query are retrieved dynamically based on the search query. The results are served from CrownPeak servers – and then linked to content being served at the Customer’s Web Site (typically via a JavaScript include). 

A diagram of the Web site search concept is depicted below (Figure 1.1.3). 

Figure 1.1.3. CrownPeak WCO Conceptual Diagram

Content Delivery / Web Site Hosting
CrownPeak provides high availability, high service web site hosting to complement it’s WCM system. Since the CrownPeak CMS publishes content to the target web server on any platform, customers may choose to host their own content, but CrownPeak is uniquely interested in your content, and provides a very robust platform for hosting. The hosting is cloud based, with redundant, load balanced machines. Many types of monitoring and reports are provided, and an SLA is in place to guarantee uptime. 

A diagram of Standard Multi-Zone CrownPeak Content Delivery is depicted below in Figure 1.1.4, and a diagram of Global Multi-Region Content Delivery architecture is depicted in Figure 1.1.5

Figure 1.1.4. CrownPeak Content Delivery Conceptual Diagram - Standard

Figure 1.1.5. CrownPeak Content Delivery Conceptual Diagram - Global Hosting