Round Tale

(The Hosting News) – Flexiant, the cloud software and services company, announced today it is to offer CohesiveFT’s cloud overlay, VPN-Cubed®, on Extility, enabling secure virtual private clouds.

CohesiveFT’s product suite, developed from decades of enterprise management experience within a cloud-oriented engineering organization, directly addresses the needs of the cloud user. VPN-Cubed will provide Flexiant customers with enhanced networking tools including static addressing, end-to-end communication encapsulation and encryption; as well as the use of normally cloud-prohibited protocols, complete topology security and control in third party infrastructure.

Traditionally launching on the cloud meant giving up control over addressing, topology, protocols and communication to deployments was carried out over the public internet. With VPN-Cubed users take control with static addressing for virtual machines using VPN-Cubed managers as virtual routers or switches, allowing use of popular enterprise protocols for service discovery, and encrypting all communications between virtual machines and the datacentre using the user’s existing extranet device.

Tony Lucas, Founder of Flexiant comments:  “We are delighted to be partnering with CohesiveFT – we have a great deal of respect for this innovative company and the products it has developed. The core technologies of both companies complement each other and combined provide an end to end cloud computing solution that is pragmatic and agile, providing a real opportunity for data centre owners to drive down operating costs and reduce capital expenditure.

“VPN-Cubed offers everything Amazon Web Service’s Virtual Private Cloud (AWS VPC) does but addresses its key weaknesses by offering customer control and market interoperability.  Additionally, VPN-Cubed has been developed from a software rather than hardware perspective meaning more rapid feature development and easier integration with existing systems.”

One of only three independent public cloud providers in Europe and five world wide, Flexiant launched Europe’s first cloud platform, Flexiscale, in 2007. Extility, Flexiant’s licensed virtualised cloud platform, launched earlier this year effectively enabling hosting providers to compete on an even playing field with global market leaders of proprietary rapid provisioning infrastructures.

Extility offers a viable alternative to the cost of developing a cloud computing platform in-house. Licensees generate substantial savings and reduced energy consumption slashes operating costs and shrinks carbon footprints.

All the benefits of real-time server estate management are delivered to end users through Extility’s unique user interface and API.  Users can shape server requirements to meet fluctuations in demand, allowing provisioning and reconfiguration of servers in seconds or minutes rather than hours or days.

Extility’s licensees see substantial capital expenditure savings, streamlining of technical resource and progressive efficiencies in server utilisation, allowing them to achieve business acquisition and profitability targets. This in turn enables them to offer Extility’s unified platform at a realistic cost.

Importantly, in times of challenging margins and market fluidity, sales gestation periods are dramatically shortened through accelerated delivery timescales, so reducing time to invoice and to attaining positive, profitable cash flow.

CohesiveFT has been providing enterprise-grade virtualisation and cloud products since 2006 (Elastic Server® and VPN-Cubed).  Its early participation in the market provides it with the expertise to help enterprises understand the real benefits of cloud computing from assessment through to deployment. Elastic Server, a multicloud virtual server, will also be available soon  on Extility.

Flexiant and CohesiveFT join forces to offer virtual private clouds on Extility

Previously known as cmPublish, the Clickability Platform is a CMS with a different approach on content management.  Developed by CMS provider Clickability, this platform is delivered on an on-demand basis, as well as full service with the company’s “Innovation as a Service” solution.  Aside from content management, the Clickability Platform also offers analytics, email campaign, web 2.0 and advertising among other functionality.  While there is obviously far more to the Clickability Platform than content management, this is indeed the focal point of the package.

Core Technologies

Though a licensed commercial product, Clickability Platform is based on powerful open-source technologies such as PHP, MySQL and Java.  It utilizes Apache as its web server and Velocity for the templating system.  Even though you have to pay for a license, the leveraging of various popular open-source tools makes Clickability Platform a cost effective CMS product.

Clickability Content

The main content entity in the Clickability environment is the item.  Authors have the ability to create content items by selecting various types of content from the navigation pane.  This CMS gives you a number of different content items out of the box, including jobs, blogs, press releases, case studies and FAQs.  Furthermore, custom content types can be created as well.   The templating system is a major part of the process as it allows you to actually get the content on your web pages.  These templates can be tailored to display numerous types of content in different sections of a single page.  While this feature caters to beginners, Clickability Platform also has something for developers with advanced creation environments and other customizing assets such as stylesheets.

Additional Features

Clickability Platform certainly isn’t short on features.  The package bundles streamlined content management capabilities alongside a host of SEO tools, Web 2.0, capabilities and the following list of features:

Newsletters – Publishers can create a newsletter of content and automatically distribute it to subscribers.  They can also manage mailing lists and have the ability to provide subscribers with double opt-in capabilities.

Advertising - Adverting functionality is tightly integrated into the Clickability Platform.  This allows administrators to create and maintain campaigns as well as all the details that go along with them.  Because ads are considered content pieces, they have targets that provide administrators with a way to track and keep up with the history of their performance.

cmSideKick – Clickability Platform allows you to run your website in the browser and the intuitive cmSideKick in a second frame.  cmSideKick is a utility that enables you to perform deep analyzation of statistics, allowing you to view your site in the administrator mode or selective views to modify certain areas.  This is one tool that you are likely to put to great use in the Clickability environment.

Conclusion

Clickability has come a long way since its days as cmPublish.  However, it has managed to maintain all the basics of content management and received some nice upgrades to compliment the emerging technologies and web trends.  Clickability Platform is definitely a enterprise CMS solution and can help to satisfy the needs of businesses of all sizes.

Originally released in 2001, Umbraco is one of the only open-source content management systems built on ASP and Microsoft’s .NET technology stack.  To no surprise, the platform isn’t necessarily made for beginners, yet developers who prefer to utilize .NET web technologies.  For those who are not familiar, this article will provide more detail on the features and capabilities of the Umbraco CMS.

Core Technologies

Umbraco is a content management solution that thrives off Microsoft web technologies, running on the Windows Server platform and SQL Server or VistaDB database system.  Built on the NET 2.0 framework, ASP.NET 2.0 and C#, it supports both NET User Controls and .NET Customer Controls without having to do much at all as they can easily be added using macros.  The CMS also provides you with full access to the Umbraco API, which has more than 15,000 lines of code.

Presentation

Unlike other open-source systems, Umbraco doesn’t have a template engine, yet a single template system, which can be viewed as both an advantage and disadvantage.  The good aspect is that you do not have to learn a brand new programming language in order to create your website.  With Umbraco, you can design your site with a popular tool such as Abode DreamWeaver or FrontPage, cut and paste the HTML code into the template editor and save.  When you render a page using the template system, the content can be automatically displayed in dynamic fashion.

The Umbraco CMS gives you complete control over your website design.  There is no need to scan the web for themes as the design can be anything you desire.

Umbraco Content

In the Umbraco environment, the core foundation of your site is the Document Type.  The Document Type refers to the type of content that can be incorporated into your website.  Prime examples include Articles, News Items, your HomePage and SearchPage.   Determining how Document types work is key to grasping the Umbraco application itself.  While this isn’t the easiest part to decipher, once you get a solid understanding of these concepts, the rest of system will become much easier to comprehend.

Administrative Functions

The Umbraco Back Office is where you can perform a variety of administrative tasks.  The number of tasks others can perform all depends on their roles and permissions.  Some of the management options you have are dealing with scripts, custom templates, media and document types, style sheets and programming languages.  There is also a section made for developers, allowing you to perform actions such as adjusting browser cache settings, manage data types, create macros, Python files and more.

Conclusion

The Umbraco CMS makes an ideal solution for the Microsoft .NET savvy developer.  It has become very popular over the last few years, now averaging approximately 7,000 downloads per month.  Though not an out-of-box, user-friendly content management tool like Joomla or Mambo, Umbraco’s power and straightforwardness makes it a winner.  If you’re looking for a .NET-driven system to create a content-rich, dynamic website, the Umbraco CMS is worth checking out.