About Essence CMS

Essence™ content management system enables the user to administer, organise and publish content to various platforms such as Internet, Extranet, e-mail (newsletter), print, PDA and mobile phones ( SMS, MMS, EMS, WAP)

Essence™ CMS is controlled flexibly by roles and rights management and therefore integrates seamlessly with the organisational structure of both small and large organisations. Essence™ CMS version 3.5 has been upgraded with a faster and more flexible search engine, more flexible menu administration, built-in statistic functionality, support for Dublin Core metadata, improved media browser, discussion forum and improved stability and faster file upload.

Essence™ CMS makes it easier for companies to update their online communication regularly. In contrast to traditional static web-solutions where all updating must be done manually and often requires assistance from skilled personnel, publishing and updating information with Essence™ CMS is as simple as writing a document in Microsoft Word.

The graphic user interface (GUI) in Essence™ CMS is based on ”Human Interface guidelines” developed by Microsoft to ease the learning curve for users already familiar with Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Word.

Essence™ CMS is based on the Coretex™ framework witch ensures security, scalability and flexibility with integration towards third-party systems. Essence™ CMS and Coretex™ are both developed on Microsoft technology: C , Visual Basic, ASP, XML, XSL and MS SQL Server 2000 for computer storing.

Features:

Essence™ CMS provides the option to manage several websites from the same administration interface, including any number of public facing websites and Intranets and Extranets. All the sites can have different design, structure and URLs (web address). Administrator access to the various websites is controlled by Essence™ roles and rights management.

Essence™ CMS facilitates multi-language websites, supporting all languages and characters (for instance Chinese). Data is stored as UNICODE in the database.

Essence™ CMS supports cross-publishing of content. In one operation an article can be published to several areas of the same website, as well as to different websites. Any modifications to the cross-published article will be reflected in the all instances.

Essence™ CMS has built in caching functionality which supports simultaneous usage for heavy traffic web sites.

Essence™ CMS can be set up to have different display templates depending on properties like: Language (displaying the appropriate language to the user) Browser support (Internet Explorer, Netscape, Opera…) Client (PDA, WAP, WEB…) Time (e.g. for products launch, seasons such as Christmas, Easter etc.)

Essence™ contains a Dublin Core metadata framework and DLC (Document Level Description).

With Essence™ the administrator can easily set up roles and rights management for both individuals and groups. This will control what functionality the user has access to as well as what is displayed on the screen. There are no limits to the number of users in Essence™.

Essence™ also has built-in functionalities to transfer access control to a 3rd party program like Microsoft Windows NT, Active Directory or LDAP (e.g. Novell).

Essence™ has a media library for storing mediafiles such as video, sound, pictures, and documents. The user can organize the media library in folders and sub-folders. When uploading files, the user has the option to attach different keywords so the file can easily be found and used in an article. A change to a media file will be carried forward to all the articles in which it is used.

Essence™ supports the possibility of storing media files on separate file server (s). In solutions with frequent display of video, it is recommended to stream this from a separate computer with, for example Microsoft Media Server, as it places a heavy load on server resources and bandwidth.

Essence™ publishes content to any platform, including web-pages (Internet, Extranet and Intranet) and handheld devices (PDA, SMS, WAP and MMS). The Direct marketing (DM) functionality in Essence™ also enables content to be published via e-mail (newsletter).

Essence™ workflow management is modelled on that of a newspaper with privileges allocated between authors and editors. Users with "author" roles can only submit their articles to the "editor" for approval, and have no access to publish directly. Submitted articles will be listed in the "editor’s" inbox where he or she can read, edit, approve or reject each article. The workflow in Essence™ can be modified and tailored to fit with the internal structure or business logic of any organisation.

All changes made to an article are stored in the article’s own revision history. A user with the necessary rights can see what changes where made, when and by whom. From the revision history the user can then reactivate, deactivate, archive, store as a rough copy, or resend the document for approval or rejection.

Essence™ contains full searching features; searching within all articles, or within one article only. Searches can be specific to article status and the number of results displayed can be modified.

Article relation enables the user to relate one article to another.( For instance, linking product descriptions with further information). These relations are administered in article relations with the option to relate both ways.

Menu items in Essence™ can link directly to one article, to a set of articles, to an external web address, or directly to a file in the media archive (image, document, video etc.). The number of menus, menu names and what each menu item will point to is administered in Essence™. There is no limit to the number of menus or sub menus.

Essence™ 'Questionnaire' is a functionality which enables the user to create forms on the website. This can, for instance, be used to give front-end users access to publish content, sign up for events, post comments etc. These forms are set-up in the questionnaire manager.

Experience shows that 3rd party programs are unsuitable for tracking user statistics in CMS based solutions. Version 3.5 of Essence™ now includes its own statistics engine, tracking number of page views, number of users and unique users, number of downloaded documents, average time for page creation, which search engines are used to ‘find’ your site, e.g. Google, Altavista, Fast Search etc., which search phrases are entered to ‘find’ your site. On sites that involve heavy user personalisation or targeted market promotions and e–campaigns, data-mining on such activities within the site statistical reports can be provided.

The audit functionality tracks all ‘events’ done by Essence™ administrators, and can be sorted by name, date and action.

Essence CMS customers

Here's a short list of selected Essence CMS customers:

• City of Oslo (Bjorvika Information Center)
• Ministry of Petroleum and Energy
• Norwegian Ministry of Defence
• Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs
• Norwegian University of Sport and Physical Education
• Police Academy, Oslo

• Directorate for Cultural Heritage
• New Architecture/ Papadakis Publishers
• NMSI: Ingenious
• The Museum Bookshop
• OVF - Opplysningsvesenets Fond
• Science Industry and Culture (SIN)

• Natural ASA
• Tonalin® CLA
• The Oslo Sports Trauma Research Center
• Ullevaal University Hospital
• The Radium Hospital (Radiumhospitalet)

• Icopal Takbok
• KLP eiendom (property developer) (Upgraded to Sitecore CMS)
• Konferansebooking (conference booking)

• Chelsea Cloisters Estates
• Citylife Apartments
• Event Travel
• Varner - Group Inc.

• Move Systems
• Tandberg Videoconferencing