Ektron, Inc. Confidential--May Northern Blvd., Suite 6 Amherst, NH Simplifying e-Business Information, Authoring & Management Ektron

CFUN 2K ColdFusion User Conference, July 2000, Bethesda, MD Coding Content Management in CF Presented by Bill Rogers Founder & CEO Ektron, Inc.

Ektron, Inc., is a rapidly emerging leader in providing browser-based Web content authoring and management products and services. We enable business users in organizations of all sizes to easily author and maintain their own Web content, and empower small to medium-sized businesses with easy to use, cost effective, content management solutions. What we’re about...

About Ektron Founded 1998…based in Amherst, NH 28 Employees …growing fast Customers in more than 35 countries

Partial List Customers iXL Learn.com Lucent MorningStar National Semiconductor Pacific Bell 3Com - PalmPilot Qwest/US West TRW University of CA, Irvine Viant West Point Akamai Allaire (Technology partner) American Airlines Bell Atlantic Boston Scientific Carfax Danish Postal Service Deloitte & Touche EDS Ernst & Young ICE

Volumes of content to manage –Companies need a Web site BUT … once they have one the content quagmire begins Limited resources –Shortage of available IT and Webmaster resources make development/content management a nightmare Finite budgets -Smaller budgets prohibit the adoption of nearly all of the current content management offerings Barriers to End User participation –Line of Business Professionals do not want to learn HTML programming, graphic upload or FTP Challenges Of The Mid Sized Business:

Disperses Content Management Responsibility: –Puts content ownership in the hands of the business user –Keeps stylistic control with the Webmaster –Brings process and organization Eliminates IT/Webmaster Bottlenecks: –Free scarce resources from mundane Web updates –Staging and content workflow Requires Little Additional Training: –No need to learn HTML, FTP or Graphic Design –Familiar Word-Like interface –Intuitive set up, workflow and authoring Content Management using ColdFusion

eWebEditPro is the industry’s leading browser-based, WYSIWYG Web authoring tool - designed specifically for dynamic Web sites - that replaces traditional text area fields and generates xHTML. eWebEditPro

eMPower provides an orchestrated and streamlined publishing process for Web teams to create, manage and publish content directly to their dynamic Web site. eMPower

Building a ColdFusion Application

Block Diagram

Responsible for: Gathering information from the user Sending user information to the business logic layer for processing Receiving the results of processing in the business layer Displaying results to the user The display layer consists of client side HTML, DHTML, JavaScript, and server side CFML templates Display Layer

Responsible for: Receiving input from the display layer Interacting with the data layer to perform the business logic Sending the processed results to the display layer Initiates all entry and exit to the data access layer The business logic layer consists CFML custom tags Business Logic Layer

Responsible for: Storage of data Retrieval of data Maintenance of data Integrity of data This layer is an RDBMS (SQL Server, Access, Oracle, Sybase, etc) layer. Data Access Layer

This architecture easily ports to other platforms such as Microsoft Active Server Pages where the display layer becomes ASP scripts, the custom tags in the business layer become ADO COM objects, or Java. Portability

By layering (and modularizing) the architecture, maintainability is greatly improved. Once modules and to a lesser degree layers have been tested and verified, other modules or layers can be worked on without impacting each other. Members of an engineering team can be assigned to work within a particular layer or module based on strengths and weaknesses. Maintainability

Separating the display layer from the business layer: allows scalability to be greatly improved eliminates much of the interaction with the database -- allowing the application to take better advantage of data connection pooling Requests to the server are reduced by “fattening” the client (browser) through usage of DHTML, ActiveX or Java applets. Scalability is greatly improved by using a relational database design that takes full advantage of the database engine and index tuning. Scalability

Example code, used for the dynamic menu Code Example

Q & A Thank You Stop by Ektron table for demos Raffle Questions and Answers