RedDot Keeps It Simple

by Lowell Rapaport

With headquarters now in New York as well as in Oldenburg, Germany, RedDot offers RedDot Content Management Server Professional (RedDot CMS), a system that delivers flat content and binaries formatted and ready for Web delivery or reuse in other media.

RedDot CMS provides administrators and users alike with simple, easy-to-use Web interfaces. Users can view Web pages as they add content, clicking the company's trademark red dots in order to open text editors or dialog screens to enter and edit text or add images, code or binaries.

RedDot CMS only accepts browser-compatible files. HTML is easily accommodated since it is designed for browsers. Files such as Microsoft Office documents, images, multi-media files and so forth, are handled by Media Elements — the company's name for tools that convert files to Web-ready formats. RedDot users also have the option of installing Adobe Acrobat Writer to convert and publish documents as PDFs.

As in other Web content management systems, administrators create or import Web page templates coded by hand or authored in an HTML editor. Templates allow content creators to avoid HTML programming, although they can insert simple HTML elements such as URLs within text. In this way, a block of text can be linked to external Web sites or content outside the RedDot system.

RedDot CMS stores content in Microsoft SQL — either an embedded SQL database that ships with the product or a full SQL installation. Once in the database, the content can then be served up through Microsoft Internet Information Server, or it can be transferred to another server via FTP. The system can be used with any content delivery platform, including databases, electronic publishing systems (such as Quark) or Unix Web servers running Apache.

RedDot CMS can also work with XML. If the content delivery system can be programmed, instructions can be embedded within the text documents that RedDot manages. Therefore, the system can manage the code that makes the content work in an e-commerce environment. For example, CGI scripts can be embedded in order to query databases.

"Our approach is to make content management a component in a larger system [integrated] with software from other vendors," says RedDot president Detlef Kamps. "Since RedDot CMS delivers flat content to whatever delivery system the user chooses, the complexity is taken out of the management system and placed in the programming tools."

RedDot CMS is essentially shrinkwrapped Web content management. Administrators only have to click on menu items to create workflows, add multilingual support and edit user permissions. This ease of use contrasts with some higher-end Web content management systems that require programming to take advantage of such features.

Since RedDot CMS requires little programming — as long as you don't want or need any special functionality — it enables companies to bring Web content management in-house even if they don't have or want to develop internal programming resources. This was the case at golf equipment supplier Acushnet, a division of Lincolnshire, IL-based Fortune Brands (www.fortunebrands.com). The company maintains www.titleist.com, www.footjoy.com, www.cobragolf.com, www.pinnaclegolf.com and other golf equipment sites under development.

"We post product information and the latest golf news on these sites," says senior interactive marketing manager Chris Ladd. "The sites are updated every day."

Until last February, the company relied on external contractors to design and maintain these sites. This approach created bottlenecks in keeping the sites up to date, and it was also costly. Each site was maintained independently, and there was no content sharing, coordinated branding or corporate identity development.

Ladd says it took Acushnet "just a few days" to have RedDot CMS up and running. Bringing content management in-house improved the speed and efficiency of getting content up on the company's sites, and it also saved a considerable amount of money.

"We're saving more than $100,000 per year over the way we used to maintain our Web sites," says Ladd. "We have just one content team instead of five, and that team has direct access to the Web sites."

For the small amount of programming that Acushnet requires, the code can be embedded in text documents and added to the site via RedDot. For example, scripts can be used to bring user-entered data from a newsletter subscription window into a database.

"We also have a lot of legacy content on a SQL database repository not connected to RedDot," Ladd adds. "We can seamlessly access that legacy content by simply pasting URLs inside text content managed by RedDot CMS."

The current generation of RedDot CMS, version 4.1, was released last November. The next upgrade, slated for the second quarter of 2002, is expected to bring compatibility with Oracle as well as annotation and redlining capabilities. The latter will allow authors and editors to mark up content to improve collaboration.

RedDot competes with a group of low- to midrange content management vendors like Fatwire, Hablador (recently acquired by Plumtree) and Microsoft Content Management Server. Like these competitors, RedDot CMS is easily deployed and highly affordable, but it lacks the features and scaleability of high-end content management systems like Vignette and Interwoven.

"High-end Web sites have features like dynamic personalization," says Gartner Group research director Mark Gilbert. "Systems like RedDot export flat content." Even if personlization technology is added, these systems are not designed to scale up to thousands of end users. "RedDot is designed for more modest Web sites and the needs of small- to midsized companies and departmental use."

RedDot CMS Professional costs $45,000 per server, bringing content management to a whole new range of customers who need basic management capabilities for Web sites and intranets.