CommonSpot is a flexible Web content management solution that empowers organizations with sophisticated tools for creating, publishing and managing Web content.

The ease-of-use inherent in CommonSpot helps business users to be self-sufficient and productive, achieve faster time-to-market, and build communities and create buzz—while empowering organizations to achieve overall better business results.

Below are descriptions of many of CommonSpot's powerful features.  To learn what's been added in version 5.0, click here.

Framework

Complete Web Publishing Framework
CommonSpot provides a full-featured, out-of-the-box framework for Web publishing and content management, with all of the tools needed to create, update, publish, approve and manage content.

Browser-Based Application
CommonSpot's functionality is provided entirely through the browser, eliminating the need for client software, technical training or complex scripting.  Create new pages, edit and approve content, assign security privileges and more without ever leaving the browser.  CommonSpot supports authoring under Internet Explorer, Netscape, Mozilla, and FireFox.

XML Capabilities
CommonSpot has an XML framework which extends content beyond the Web.  XML rendering and XSL style sheets make it simple to manage the format and display of content for enhanced productivity, interoperability, and content re-usability.

Templates
Templates provide a variety of versatile, predefined page layout options that a user can choose from to simply and effortlessly build Web pages or other templates. Authors can pick from a series of predefined templates designed to handle their content requirements, or start from a blank page. The use of templates enables marketing to maintain a consistent look and feel across the organization and take control of their online brand.

Elements
Elements are specific regions of pages that have unique rendering characteristics. CommonSpot provides over 50 out-of-the-box versatile elements ranging from rich formatted text blocks and images, to hypertext links, bulleted lists, menu bars, multimedia, and more. CommonSpot also supports a wide variety of content formats created using today's common desktop applications - Word, PowerPoint, PDF, etc. 

Custom Elements - Content Reuse
Looking for a way to create, manage, and share content to meet your specific content requirements, and not be limited to what a CMS delivers out-of-the-box? CommonSpot is the only CMS that lets you build and manage user-defined elements (content objects) for maximum flexibility and ease of content reuse. Through a set of WYSIWYG tools, users can quickly and easily build a ‘Custom Element’ such as an "Event", "News", or "Job Posting" that collects content once and allows you to reuse and display it endlessly across your site. Content can also be easily repurposed for calendaring or distribution to PDAs, cell phones, or other devices.

Cascading Style Sheets Support
Use of Cascading Style Sheets helps to ensure a consistent look and feel throughout a site. Changes to style, fonts, sizes, etc. can be made in one place and incorporated automatically throughout all pages that utilize the style sheet.

Container Element
CommonSpot's container element provides increased control and flexibility over the positioning and scheduling of content on a page. The element delivers  support for table-less layout of content using Cascading Style Sheets Positioning (CSS-P). It provides a number of benefits including standards-based development, improved site compliance, and direct support for publishing content to devices such as PDAs, phones, etc. 



Authoring and Publishing Content

WYSIWYG Rich Text Editing
Content contributors can easily create and edit richly formatted content using Microsoft Word-like toolbars. The editor has multiple browser and platform compatibility, and provides support for standards-based format tags, text find and replace, HTML clean functions, property inspector panels, contextual menus, style definitions, and more.CommonSpot provides full content authoring and administrative functionality on the Mac platform.

Innovative Authoring Interface
CommonSpot’s authoring interface is optimized for maximum productivity. The interface offers simple rollover and Window-style menus and a centrally-located toolbar that make it simple to create and edit content, and manipulate the look and feel of content in fewer clicks. Consolidated icons, content outlining, and keyboard shortcuts reduce the number of steps required to access common functionality. It is also simple for administrators, technical managers, developers, and webmasters to customize the interface for maximum ease of use.

Context-Sensitive Help
CommonSpot provides context-sensitive help, allowing content contributors and administrators to quickly and easily access relevant documentation right from within any CommonSpot dialog – putting help right at your fingertips.

Content Reuse - Custom Elements
Looking for a way to create, manage, and share content to meet your specific content requirements, and not be limited to what a CMS delivers out-of-the-box? CommonSpot is the only CMS that lets you build and manage user-defined elements or content objects for maximum flexibility and ease of content reuse. Through a set of WYSIWYG tools, users can quickly and easily build a ‘Custom Element’ such as an "Event", "News", or "Job Posting" that collects content once and allows you to reuse and display it endlessly across your site. Content can also be easily repurposed for calendaring or distribution to PDAs, cell phones, or other devices.

Browser-based Image Editing
CommonSpot easily handles digital assets such as images. The digital asset management functionality allows users to easily edit and manage images, photos, and other graphics directly within the system. More than 20 popular image functions are available, including image crop, rotate, zoom, compress, flip, adjust contrast and brightness, and more.

Document Management
CommonSpot provides a central repository for organizations to manage all of their documents and digital assets. Easily upload any asset type such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF, and Audio/Video, and manage it using CommonSpot's check-in, check-out facility and features such as workflow/approval, content scheduling/expiration, freshness reminders, and version history. Apply keywords and custom metadata fields to documents for enhanced searching and dynamic indexing. Alert users of new document versions and maintain detailed audit trails of document modifications.

Preview Mode 
Check your work before it's published - with CommonSpot's preview mode you can see how content will appear prior to publication. Use CommonSpot's Visual Difference feature to easily compare proposed changes against already published content. 

Content Collaboration - Collaborative Authoring
Content that is "Work in Progress" for one author can be edited or viewed by another author using CommonSpot's collaborative authoring feature.  The "Edit Mode" option allows users with "Edit" rights to view and/or modify changes on a page - even if the changes have been implemented by another user. This feature is extremely helpful for sharing the content contribution between multiple users.



Managing Content

Content Freshness Reminders & Content Expiration
CommonSpot gives authors the tools they need to keep content up to date. Content freshness reminders can be set to notify authors that it is time to review the content for its currency and accuracy. Additionally, authors can configure the automatic expiration of content and can upon expiration warn, deny access entirely or redirect the user to another page. This Web content management feature is a great time saver.

My Pages
Keeping track of all the templates or pages a user has created on a site can be tedious. In one convenient place, "My Pages", CommonSpot displays a personalized view of all pages, templates and uploaded documents a user is responsible for managing. Sort pages, templates, and documents by any number of options including by type, state, subsite or category, date created/modified, etc.

Link Management
CommonSpot provides facilities to easily validate, repair, and redirect links when creating deleting, moving, or renaming a page. Also, content authors can view a list of referring pages and templates or images that contain links to the current page. This Web content management feature helps to save time and ensures accuracy.

Addressable URLs
CommonSpot provides common-sense tools like addressable URLs, so that you can create pages with logical names, like www.paperthin.com/products/benefits.cfm, instead of a jumble of confusing characters.

Register External Pages
CommonSpot provides the ability to easily register external pages, which can be easily accessed from within CommonSpot.



Workflow and Approval Processes

Approval and Workflow
Robust, yet flexible revision and approval procedures allow a workflow and approval process to be established, consistent with your business requirements, ensuring that high quality content is maintained throughout the site.

CommonSpot supports both a simple and a more stringent content management workflow ranging from 'publish now' empowering authors with approval and publishing rights to a more formalized process with several persons approval required before the content is published. Approvers are notified of content awaiting their approval via email and 'Pending Actions'.  

Visual Difference
Visual Difference makes it easy for an Approver to review and compare what's changed on the page, providing a handy comparison of the published version against the proposed changes - a helpful feature for content approvers.

Pending Actions
CommonSpot provides content owners with a list of changes in progress, content requiring approval, reminders to check content freshness, as well as many other items, through a personalized list displayed as you log in to CommonSpot.

E-mail Review and Notifications
Many times it is necessary to have content approved by someone who is not a content contributor. CommonSpot provides an option for “Email Review”. This feature allows content contributors to send a “Preview” of a page via email, providing a convenient mechanism to include other participants in the publishing process.

CommonSpot provides electronic mail notifications to both content contributors and end-users in association with various events (such as approval of content, content freshness reminders, etc). The ColdFusion SMTP interface is utilized to send the appropriate mail notifications.



Advanced Features

RSS, Atom & Podcasting Feeds
Business users can make their Web content highly accessible through simple syndication to any news reader, Web browser or mail program. Users can create RSS feeds in one simple step through a Wizards-driven interface without writing code.

The Feed Index Element allows users to create a listing of all syndicated feeds which visitors can use to quickly subscribe to feeds of interest. The listing is automatically generated, displayed, and updated based on filtered metadata criteria. Users can easily control the look and feel of the index, as well as link instantly to popular RSS readers such as Google, Windows Live, and MyYahoo.

Blogs, Wikis and Calendars
CommonSpot offers three out-of-the-box applications built using the Custom Application Framework that demonstrates its true power and flexibility. These applications enable business users to simply create and easily syndicate blog, wiki, and calendar content in a few simple steps using CommonSpot’s RSS syndication feature

508 Accessibility Compliance
CommonSpot includes functionality supporting compliance with the accessibility guidelines of Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act Amendments of 1998. Administrators can enable options to require certain Section 508 specified features such as the required use of ALT tags, table summaries, etc.

Simple Forms & Datasheets
Simple Forms gives non-technical users the ability to create simple HTML forms within a page and to have the results stored in the database repository and/or e-mailed to the form creator. Flexible controls for the layout of the form on a page allow you to easily create attractive, functional forms. You can also include a summary page of submitted data, enabling the user to easily review and edit a submission. And it's easy to build multi-page forms and surveys.

The 'Datasheet' element allows technical and non-technical users to create tabular views of structured information. The tabular views allow reporting of pages and associated meta data custom form results and dynamic custom SQL query results. Datasheet results can be conveniently exported to Excel.

Query By Example Element
The Query by Example feature enhances the search capability that you can provide on your site. For example, you might allow visitors to search for:

With this element, you can allow visitors to query existing simple forms, custom metadata, and custom elements, and have the results of the query display on a page.

Multi-Language Support/Content Localization
CommonSpot makes it easy to build multi-language sites, providing mechanisms to associate and manage content that is created in multiple languages. The multi-language feature also facilitates the efficient production of localized content, helping to ensure consistency across multi-language sites. Full UTF-8 support allows for publication of content in all languages. CommonSpot's search interface can be directed to search and return results in the appropriate language.  International date formats are also supported.

Personalized and Dynamic Content

Dynamic Self-Updating Indexes & Navigation
Easily create a listing of page links on a page to display recent news stories, A-Z lists, a list of press releases categorized by audience, or dynamic navigation.  Administrators as well as end users can create dynamic indexes such as listings of page links, uploaded documents, and external links that are automatically generated, displayed, and updated based on the categorization of content.

CommonSpot's wizard-based tools guide users through the process of building a page or document query based on filtered standard and custom metadata and then outputs the index directly on a page. Users can control the layout of the index through a simple point and click interface and more than a dozen pre-defined rendering properties, including: page results limit, links with descriptions, and links with last modified date. This valuable feature saves times and eliminates the need to manually create a list of hyperlink pages, external links, and documents. And, Webmasters and developers don't need to write a line of code. Creating and managing the index is quick and easy for any user. 

Content Scheduling
Pages within CommonSpot can be scheduled to be published and to expire on a date in the future. You can also schedule the display of a specific content element based on a specific date, period in time, page category, site, sub site or browser type.

Content Personalization
Increase the relevancy of content by targeting it toward visitors based on their behavior or affiliation with a group. CommonSpot's personalization functionality provides the ability to display content based on a user's profile and his/her association with a group. Content can be targeted at both the page and element level.

Import/Export Module
The import/export module makes it simple to develop and extend CommonSpot applications and modules such as custom content, custom field types, metadata forms, and field masks.  Administrators can share applications between sites and carry over custom-developed code and applications.  The Import/Export feature also enables developers to post applications and modules to the developer's tag gallery, making it simple to share popular applications with others in the CommonSpot community.

Extensive Metadata Support
Help people browsing your Web site to quickly and easily find the information they seek. Use metadata (information about information) to classify content for improved search and retrieval and to facilitate maximum content reuse. Increase the relevancy of your site by delivering targeted and personalized content. Metadata helps to ensure that the right content is provided to the right people at the right time.

CommonSpot eases the process of collecting metadata for a site. By default, CommonSpot collects standard metadata (title, keyword, description, publication date, etc.) as part of the page creation and update process. Organizations can also define their own unique business rules for classifying content using custom metadata.

CommonSpot's custom metadata affords tremendous flexibility. Administrators can easily define custom metadata fields that are stored in metadata forms and can be bound to multiple page level objects, including: subsites, templates, page categories, and document types. Choose from a comprehensive list of field types (checkbox, formatted text, radio buttons, date/time controls, calendar, image, etc.) or register custom field types via a published API. Apply field level security by showing and hiding fields to different users/groups, logically group fields under user defined tabs, or bind forms together by selecting a metadata value from another metadata forms field. Mark metadata fields as required, forcing users to enter content and assign default field values, making the forms easy to fill out.

Use custom metadata to drive content reuse and personalization, to render dynamic lists of page links, and to define the layout and design of a page. With CommonSpot's custom metadata the possibilities are endless.

Taxonomy Management
The taxonomy module allows for incorporation of external taxonomies, as XML documents.  Using the taxonomy classification custom metadata field allows for the classification of content to the terms in a taxonomy, allowing for powerful categorization of information.

Taxonomy Term Editor
The taxonomy term editor allows site administrators to easily organize and classify Web content by creating and managing flexible taxonomies directly within CommonSpot. The term editor provides simplified, controlled taxonomy management by enabling site administrators to easily define a taxonomy and its facets and terms. Content can then be rapidly assigned to terms using the taxonomy classification custom metadata field. As an organization's classification needs evolve over time, the term editor provides the flexibility to manage any additions and changes (i.e. edit, move, detach, and delete terms, add new narrower or broader terms) to the taxonomy.

Taxonomy API
The taxonomy API allows developers to programmatically access any of the terms and relationships within a taxonomy. This capability enables easy development of unlimited custom-interfaces to related content.

Facet-Based Navigation
Facet-based navigation dramatically enhances the visitor experience and facilitates a faster information discovery process. Visitors can intuitively navigate through a defined taxonomy and easily browse and discover information within topic areas based on one or more selected facets.

Access Based Roles & Privileges
CommonSpot empowers individuals and teams through an interlocking system of roles and privileges. A content management user's view and access to the tools and functionality is determined by the individual's role. Unnecessary options are hidden from the user, greatly simplifying CommonSpot's use.

Distributed Administration and Security
CommonSpot's model of distributed team-based Web authoring relies upon a tiered security system consisting of site administrators, departmental administrators and individual content creators. This functionality allows for effective distribution and management of security privileges.

User Authentication
CommonSpot provides a user and group management database through its own shareable user database. Alternatively,CommonSpot can be configured to leverage enterprise authentication systems including Windows NT Domain Security. Through the use of CommonSpot's custom-authentication.cfm callback, developers can integrate CommonSpot with their own authentication database, such as a pop server, third party membership database, or LDAP. Additionally users can be authenticated for non-contributor functionality via cookies.



Architecture

Database Managed Content
Unlike traditional HTML authoring systems such as Front Page or Dreamweaver that create and manage static HTML pages, CommonSpot manages content at a much more granular and object oriented manner. All of the content, except images and other native document files, is stored and managed within CommonSpot's content repository, a series of relational databases. This object-oriented framework provides tremendous advantages:

Content can be stored independent of its formatting, enabling control over its look and feel. Content can be controlled, approved, versioned, scheduled, personalized and secured at a much finer level of granularity. Multiple users can contribute to the creation and management of content in a shared environment. CommonSpot supports MS-Access, Oracle, and SQL Server through ODBC, and native driver support is provided for Oracle and SQL Server databases.

CommonSpot Pages
Each page created within CommonSpot is accessed through an easily addressable URL (allowing easy linking and book marking). Though the content within a page is actually stored within the database and built dynamically, CommonSpot avoids the use of long query parameters to identify the page. Instead an appropriately named 'stub' file is created for each page. This 'stub' file is a small ColdFusion module stored in the root directory of the corresponding site or subsite. Its purpose is two-fold; besides making it easy to address each unique page, the stub file also contains ColdFusion variables used to minimize database access.

Sites and Subsites
Through the CommonSpot Administrator module, site designers can create and manage the desired site hierarchy to match their needs. CommonSpot supports the creation of top-level sites and unlimited subsites. Each site or subsite can be managed separately, have its own security settings, search collection, and templates. The content contained within each top-level site and its child subsites is managed in a separate database. With CommonSpot, it's also easy to copy subsite parameters from one subsite to others, expediting site development and maintenance. 

Dynamic Browser-Based Authoring
CommonSpot's content authoring model is unique in that content providers and approvers edit and approve content directly within the context of the page. How does this work? In response to an HTTP request from the Web Server, CommonSpot dynamically constructs the resulting page based on the user's current role (reader, author, designer, approver), his/her access privileges and any content scheduling or personalization. When the user is authoring or approving content within a page, intuitive user interface components are dynamically added to the page to guide the user in performing his/her publishing tasks. These added components, or indicators, are context specific depending of the type of element being edited.



Enterprise-Level Features

Advanced Cache Management
CommonSpot provides an intelligent caching architecture, which significantly improves page rendering performance. As content is published, appropriate cache files are generated based on the requesting browser type and page mode. The next time a request is made, the page is built from the appropriate cached objects, minimizing the number of expensive database queries.

Depending on the nature of the content contained within the page, CommonSpot may create static cache representations at the page and/or element level. Content that is rendered the same for all users, time periods or site location are rendered into the static page cache. Elements that are dynamic in nature are cached at the element level. If the page contains dynamic content or when the page rendered for 'Author' or 'Approve' mode, caching is performed both at the page and at the element level. This multilevel caching framework enables dynamic page content without the performance penalty typically associated with purely dynamic sites.

Static Site Generation
The Static Site Generation module is designed to further extend CommonSpot's scalability, performance and total cost of ownership. By separating the process for handling dynamic and static content, a more scalable, reliable and higher performance site can be realized.

Verity Full Text Search
CommonSpot utilizes the Verity search engine bundled with ColdFusion to perform full text search queries. Whenever new changes are published on a page, so long as full text search indexing is enabled for the site/subsite, and the specific pages' configuration did not exclude it from indexing, CommonSpot automatically indexes the entire page through the Verity search engine. The CommonSpot administrator allows site administrators to create and manage Verity collections as appropriate. Sites and Subsites can then be assigned to specified collections. CommonSpot also supports the Verity K2 Server, which incorporates a highly scalable search server architecture with improved performance results.

Content Replication
Moving content from a content management authoring server to a production server or group of clustered servers is easy with CommonSpot. CommonSpot internally manages the task of replicating all database and file system content to the target server on a real-time, scheduled or on-demand basis.

Cluster Support for Load Balancing
Utilizing the high performance and scalability features of ColdFusion, CommonSpot's content management architecture scales to handle the most demanding Internet, intranet or extranet sites. To support sites with heaving traffic and/or high content volumes, CommonSpot provides functionality for use in a clustered environment for load balancing and server fail over.

Transaction Logging/Audit Trails
In order to better support emerging regulations regarding audit trails, and to enable tracking of contributor actions and events, CommonSpot provides a configurable transaction logging facility. An interface in the Administrator allows you to configure which events/actions to track, and the duration for keeping the log data. Transaction log data can be easily exported to Excel for further analysis.



Integration and Customization

Content managed on a Web site typically falls into one of two buckets; structured & unstructured content. CommonSpot's rich distributed, anywhere publishing features provide a solid foundation for handling the unstructured content within web sites. Structured data (data typically contained in proprietary structured repositories such as an inventory database, or a real-time news-feed) is often best handled through custom code or other third party vertical software applications.

CommonSpot realizes the need to integrate the structured data components, and as such provides two flexible interfaces (custom ColdFusion code can be written at both the template and element levels) for integrating structured ColdFusion applications or modules. Through these easy-to-use interfaces, CommonSpot allows developers to leverage the power of ColdFusion and build or integrate existing or new applications.

Custom Application Development Framework
CommonSpot's powerful custom application development framework makes it easier for CommonSpot users and partners to develop applications and move them into production, or share them with the general CommonSpot community. Deploying applications built within the framework will allow organizations to take advantage of best practices and best-of-breed, add-on applications without having to write any code.



Knowledge Sharing and Discovery

Knowledge Tools
Authors can easily add value to the content they publish. Useful information such as relevant contacts, see-also references, keywords, threaded discussions, and more are displayed through consistently accessible Knowledge Maps.

Keywords & Keyword Views
Keyword Views allows users to classify, search and retrieve, organize, and navigate to information simply and easily, in a manner that enhances their knowledge discovery.

Either an author or a user may assign a keyword to a document or page. Each keyword or phrase represents meta data (information about information) that CommonSpot leverages to allow users to create dynamic categorized views.

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