Rivet Logic Announces the Spinoff of Crafter Software

This week Rivet Logic announced the launch of Crafter Software Corporation, which will offer commercial support and licenses for the Crafter CMS open source project (previously known as Crafter Rivet). Crafter CMS is an award-winning web content and experience management solution that allows organizations to build and manage rich online experiences on the web, mobile, social, and all digital online channels.

“We have seen tremendous commercial demand for Crafter’s modern, open and well-designed solutions in a variety of industries,” said Mike Vertal, CEO of Rivet Logic. “With hundreds of sites now in production and interest surging from major organizations around the world, we knew the time was ripe to spinoff a new company entirely focused on continued development and global support of Crafter.”

Crafter Software’s solutions are offered as both a Community Edition under the GNU open source license, and as an Enterprise Edition with a commercial license and global support.

Rivet Logic will continue to offer Crafter consulting and full-lifecycle implementation services for Web content and experience management solutions.

What does this mean for you?

If you are an existing Crafter Rivet user or customer, you will continue to get the great consulting and solution support from Rivet Logic, along with software support from the dedicated team at the new Crafter Software — all from the same team that was supporting you before.

If you are considering Crafter for your next Web content management solution, you now have the extra confidence that Crafter Software has been established to focus on the continued innovation, development and support of Crafter on a global basis.

If you have any interest in a new, modern enterprise Web CMS that was built for the new era of web engagement, check out the new Crafter Software at craftersoftware.com and craftercms.org

Learn More

To read the press release, visit www.businesswire.com/news/home/20130507006137/en/Web-Experience-Management-Simplified-Crafter-Software

For more information on Rivet Logic’s Crafter-based WCM/WEM solutions and consulting services, visit rivetlogic.com/solutions/web-content-management and rivetlogic.com/services/crafter-consulting

Content targeting is all about getting the right content to the right user at the right time. While targeting used to be something large companies with big budgets utilized to make incremental improvements on transactions, it’s becoming increasingly important that organizations of all sizes start looking at content targeting.

This is largely attributed to the explosion of mobile device usage, which goes beyond just another form factor to how your sites are being used. People are online more often than ever before because they have their devices with them at all times. However, they are online in shorter bursts for specific, immediate needs in the context of their daily activity. In order to hold the attention of this new type of Web consumer, we must speak directly to them with content that is relevant to who they are, where they are, and what they need or are doing.

The tricky part is understanding your users, which can range in complexity. Usually, the more specific your overall goals and interactions with your user, the easier it is. However, in most real-world cases, we find that understanding a user can be quite complex. When a visitor visits a site, we need to determine the reason behind each specific visit. To do this, we must leverage both explicit information provided by the user (or about the user provided from sources like preferences or a profile page), and implicit information based on the user’s behavior on the site and other interactions with your organization.

When it comes to user behavior, certain behaviors are more accurate in helping us understand what a user wants. Behavioral targeting projects often discuss the use of click stream analysis, but this turns out to be a pretty inaccurate indicator of what the user actually wants. On the other side are purchases, which are great in that they tell us exactly what the user wanted. However, by that time, we’ve already missed out on the opportunity to engage with the user with up sells, cross sells, and other useful information. They already have what they need and are on their way. A purchase can certainly help us during the next visit, but it’s not usually that valuable during a visit.

However, when a user’s behavior is of the engagement type, they are telling us exactly what they want. Comments, ratings, and the ability to download content are quite important. Users love these types of features because it gives them a channel to communicate with your company and community. At the same time, these types of features are also the most accurate indicators of what the user wants during a given visit to your site, often prior to a major conversion like contacting your sales department, or even making a direct purchase.

Traditional approaches in handling audience-specific content on websites include creating mixed audience pages with content that speaks to more than one audience on a given page, or creating stove-pipe websites where sections are dedicated to each audience, or a mixture of the two. These approaches make it difficult for users to get to the content they want, especially in a mobile context.

With Crafter Rivet, we can handle content targeting in a much more effective way than these older approaches. Crater Rivet supports dynamic content through the use of templates, which along with the help of other components in the system, can make decisions about how, when, and what content to serve to any given user.

Content targeting in Crafter Rivet relies on a rules engine. The rules engine has access to information about the user which can be acquired from the user profile – populated by the user through a profile Web form, a CRM system integration, or other data source – location provided by the browser, social graph through Facebook integration, user activity tracked and recovered from analytics integration, and so on. Using these data points, the rules engine will work in conjunction with the template engine to create a unique, personal experience for each user or type of user.

To learn more about how Crafter Rivet can address content targeting, visit crafterrivet.org.

Content targeting is all about getting the right content to the right user at the right time. While targeting used to be something large companies with big budgets did to make incremental improvements on transactions, it’s becoming increasingly important that organizations of all sizes start looking at content targeting.

Mobile devices have drastically changed the internet landscape, and the change they’re bringing is moving very fast as mobile use of the internet is expected to take over desktop use by 2014. And it’s not just about people visiting your sites on a different form factor, but also how they use your sites. People are online more often than ever before, but in shorter bursts for specific, immediate needs in the context of their daily activity. In order to hold the attention of this new type of Web consumer, we must speak directly to them with content that is relevant to who they are, where they are, and what they need or are doing.

So how do you tailor your website to deliver targeted content to specific audiences? Traditional approaches to handle audience specific content on websites include creating mixed audience pages with content that speaks to more than one audience on a given page, or creating stove-pipe websites where sections are dedicated to each audience, or a mixture of the two. These approaches make it difficult for users to get to the content they want and need efficiently, especially in a mobile context.

In our most recent webinar, we discussed in detail what content targeting is and how our Crafter Rivet WEM solution enables delivery of real-time, dynamic and personalized content based on visitor profiles, behavioral patterns, social graphs, and more.

To learn more, a recording of the webinar is available on our website, and the slides are available here.

We all know the importance of creating engaging and content-rich websites to keep up with the demands of the modern day user. New websites often need to be created quickly to satisfy a variety of business needs – new product launches, events, marketing campaigns, and more. The process should be hassle free, intuitive and user-friendly for content authors and publishers.

This is why we developed Crafter Rivet, our award-winning Web experience management application built on Alfresco 4. It provides business users with a powerful toolset for easily building rich websites.

In two recent webinars, we demonstrated some of the robust features of Crafter Rivet by showing users how to build a website from scratch with Crafter Rivet and Alfresco and how to migrate your existing website to Alfresco 4, both in just 30 minutes.

If you’re interested in seeing these demos, recordings of both webinars are available on our website, http://rivetlogic.com/resources/webcasts.

Over the past year, organizations of all sizes and have shifted their focus from basic Web content management towards Web experience management. As the amount of Web usage continues to grow for both consumers and enterprises, creating an engaging Web experience is now a top priority. I’m sure that many people have experienced incidents where a website’s lackluster UI or ineffective search that didn’t produce the right results have deterred them from spending more time on the site or even from ever returning. Losing out on these valuable customers is a costly mistake that organizations can’t afford to make. Thus, providing relevant content thru an engaging user experience is paramount to a successful online digital strategy.

And now, with new mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets being constantly introduced to the market, organizations need to make sure those same Web experiences are applied across all delivery channels.

When it comes to managing these Web experiences, it’s important to use the right WEM system to produce a consistent experience across the different channels, and doing so in an user friendly manner.

At Rivet Logic, we’ve been busy developing and enhancing Crafter Studio, our complete authoring and publishing environment for managing Web and enterprise content. Developed as a major extension to Alfresco, Crafter Studio is a user-friendly and extensible platform for managing multi-channel publishing for mobile, Web, social channels, etc.

One new feature we’ve recently released is the availability of different templates for the different publishing channels, allowing the system to serve the same content through the appropriate template for each publishing channel – iPhone, iPad, desktop, etc.

The demo below showcases this features along with Crafter Studio’s in-context editing and multi-channel in-context preview capabilities.

For more information on Crafter Studio, please visit our wiki.

Rivet Logic is happy to be one of the original Proposers of OASIS’ new WCM standard initiative, Web Experience Management Interoperability (WEMI). Russ Danner, one of our Senior Architects, is on the Technical Committee that will define the specifications for this emerging standard.

WEMI represents an evolution in WCM and is set to increase interoperability between WCM vendors, thereby driving down costs of Web content integration and publishing. Formed through the standards organization OASIS, WEMI endeavors to define a simple domain model for delivering aggregated content into a total Web Experience.

WEMI comes at the right time, as industry WCM requirements have now expanded to include the creation and management of rich, engaging and consistent Web experiences across multiple online channels that leverage numerous sources of content.

When complete, WEMI’s abstract feature set should constitute an international open standard, widely implemented by WCM/WEM systems. Existing standards only address content interoperability at the lower data level, which forces customers to implement costly customized solutions at the content presentation layer.

In addition to benefiting end users, extensibility of WEMI will allow Rivet Logic to leverage standard solutions across multiple industries and domains, saving our customers time and money.

For more information, visit http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/wemi.

We’ve been hard at work with Crafter Studio, an extension to our open source Crafter rivet framework, that offers a complete authoring and publishing environment for managing various types of Web and enterprise content.

Today marks the release of Crafter Studio 1.7.0, which contains a number of updates, including an Alfresco upgrade for 3.4.5E support, Preview Tools enhancements, along with a number of bug fixes.

To learn more about this release of Crafter Studio, visit our wiki at http://wiki.rivetlogic.com/display/Crafter/CStudio+1.7.0.