Sitecore Site Control
At the heart of every well managed website is a strong set of site controls. Highly effective sites start with a strong management foundation that allows you to control security, have clear content publishing and workflow controls, allows you to manage the different language and output formats for your site and allows you to continuously optimize your site using reports and tools that help your site get results. Sitecore offers an array of capabilities that address the requirements of the most demanding sites.
Search Engine Optimization
Build it so they will come. Ever wish you could see your site as the search engines see you? Well you can, using the Sitecore Search Engine Optimization module. SEO strategies are an integral part of every companies marketing mix, and getting it right only once isn't enough, you have to keep getting it right. That's why Sitecore created the SEO module, to let you see how your site will be seen from the search engine perspective, and where you can adaptively optimize your site as it needs it, to keep your organic rankings as high as they can be.
Workflow
Sitecore's workflow engine includes versioning, controlled approvals, incremental publishing, notifications and reminders, and archiving capabilities and for Outlook users, notifications conveniently within their inbox.
The customizable workflow provides tremendous flexibility out of the box, and is also highly extensible, allowing you to integrate with third party systems, optimal when supporting both internal and external translation processes. The document comparison feature allows enhanced version control content, allowing editors and approvers to see exactly what has changed.
This feature is also useful when managing content translation processes, highlighting exactly what content has changed and needs to be translated from its source language. Having strong workflow processes ensure your content is the highest quality it can be, and your site delivers the most compelling user experience it can.
Security
The security of your website is critically important, and Sitecore offers a rich set of tools that allow you to control who can manage your site in the staging environment, as well as allowing you to directly manage which site visitors can view content on your production websites. Sitecore offers an incredible level of security granularity, enabling you to manage content down to their component and element levels, and provides a sophisticated permission management system to grant rights to users, groups and roles. Sitecore also supports external authentication and authorization systems, and was engineered to plug into existing systems such as CRM solutions to power visitor authentication as well as easily integrating into Active Directory for user management.
Multi-lingual Site Management
Sitecore provides site localization capabilities at many levels in the content management process which allow you to deploy sites in any number of languages and locales, enabling you to reach more customers and tap new markets. With Sitecore, organizations can localize websites, intranets and extranets for every market to ensure a consistent global message on all international sites. Sitecore can support sites in any language through its uses of UTF-8 and support of Unicode.
From an editorial standpoint Sitecore CMS is available in most major European languages. Sitecore allows you control the translation process, and efficiently ensure consistency across all language versions of your website. Translators can be given authenticated access to your site from anywhere in the world to translate content fast and efficiently. Sitecore's workflow process can route content that requires translation and includes document comparison to highlight for translators new content requiring translation. For organizations that outsource their content translation work, Sitecore offers integration with Clay Tablet's Rosetta Gateway. The Rosetta Gateway connects Sitecore directly to your translator’s workflow systems – removing the manual steps of moving content from your site to your translator. Content can be selected with the Sitecore CMS then sent automatically to one or several translation providers. Translated content is automatically returned to the Sitecore CMS, in the right location on your website.
Publishing
Like most Web Content Management Systems, Sitecore separates pre-production content (staged) with production content (live). This separation ensures that content isn't available on the live website until it's ready. Sitecore provides a host of publishing oriented features to allow content to be to be moved or published from the staging environment to the production environment, whether via in-house servers or virtual hosting, for unlimited scalability.
Sitecore keeps pace with changing server capabilities with a balanced publishing archecticture that is cloud-ready. Out of the box, the web CMS is designed to scale for both CM (content management) and CD (content delivery), minimizing the impact content editors and site visitors will have on server load. Standard technology, such as Microsoft IIS Web Deployment and Windows DFS, propagate file changes and publishing between the CM and CD layers.
Configure content management workflow processes to route content through a series of approval steps before making content eligible to be published. Sitecore also allows users to set dates that control when content will be published and taken down from a given site, and provides a simulation environment that shows an editor what a site will look like on a given date.
Site Structure and Layout Control
A fundamental concept behind Content Management Systems is the notion of keeping the content separate from the way the content is presented. Sitecore provides one of the best systems for creating this separation, as well as sophisticated ways to deliver that content in controlled ways. Sitecore gives you complete control of how pages should look, and lets you enforce that layout by providing editors with the only choices that makes sense for any given section or page on your site. Sitecore also provides automated functions such as navigation, breadcrumb and treecrumb tools to simplify new page, section or site creation. Sitecore allows you to give as much or as little control and flexibility to editors of your site, based on your requirements.
Reporting
A key element to managing your site, its content and user experience is knowing what's going on. Sitecore offers an array of reports that can tell you what's happening in the editorial process to how your site is performing in the live environment. In the editorial environment, Sitecore offers reports on auditing, workflow status, link checking, users and security management, translation management, content lifecycle and many other report types. Sitecore also offers site analytics capabilities that allow you to view how your site is performing, and allows you to quickly adjust your site's content, structure and experience to quickly adapt to ever evolving customer needs. And if you've already invested in a third party analytics solution, that's ok too. Sitecore integrates so naturally with analytics technology, that WebTrends uses Sitecore to power www.webtrends.com. High praise indeed.
Archiving
In today's business climate, many organizations must be able to reproduce the state of their site in the past for regulatory reasons. Other organizations wish to retain all previous content for historical purposes. Sitecore supports these needs with a full version management and content lifecycle control system. Content can be authored, managed and ultimately retired into distinct archive repositories where it can be maintained for a designated period of time.