Ektron

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Ektron
Simplifying e-Business Information, Authoring
Management
http//www.ektron.com 5 Northern Blvd., Suite
6 Amherst, NH 03031 1 603.594.0249
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CFUN 2K ColdFusion User Conference, July 2000,
Bethesda, MD Coding Content Management in
CF Presented by Bill Rogers Founder CEO Ektron,
Inc.
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What were about . . .

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.
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About Ektron

• Founded 1998based in Amherst, NH
• 28 Employees growing fast
• 600 Customers in more than 35 countries

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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

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Challenges Of The Mid Sized Business

• 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

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Content Management using ColdFusion

• 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

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

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eMPower
eMPower provides an orchestrated and streamlined
publishing process for Web teams to create,
manage and publish content directly to their
dynamic Web site.
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Building a ColdFusion Application
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Block Diagram
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Display Layer

• 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 userThe display layer
  consists of client side HTML, DHTML, JavaScript,
  and server side CFML templates

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Business Logic 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

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Data Access 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.

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Portability
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.
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Maintainability

• 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.

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Scalability

• 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.

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Code Example
Example code, used for the dynamic menu
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Questions and Answers

• Q A
• Thank You
• Stop by Ektron table for demos
• Raffle