Our Web Content Management SaaS provider – Clickability – has won the best WCM CODiE award from SIIA for the last two years running.  The decision to adopt Clickability was made based on the strength of their platform for supporting media companies – newspapers, magazines, tv, etc. – as well as their extensive customer list.

Clickability provides a wealth of technology which makes WCM easy.  The following list of features were key items in our decision to purchase:

• Robust Velocity Based Template Engine – the templating engine is based on the open-source Apache Velocity project: a simple yet powerful Java-based template engine that renders data from plain Java objects to text, xml, email, SQL, Post Script, HTML etc.  For more info on Velocity, visit the Velocity wiki page.  Clickability has dramatically extended Velocity to support their extensive feature set.
• Scalable Multi-Tenant Architecture – a true SaaS and IaaS model with full backup and redundancy across two data centers (one in San Jose and the other in Denver).
• Unlimited Content Types – ability to create custom content types (e.g. blogs, articles, events, etc.) with their own tailored CMS back-end.
• Text and Media Asset Management – a full media asset management system that integrates seamlessly with all content types.  Assets supported include images, videos, podcasts, audio, binary files and text.  Clickability does not provide a streaming video or audio service: that would require a 3rd party service provider.
• Fully Indexed Site and CMS Search Engine – the platform utilizes the open-source Lucene search engine which works well.
• Email This & Print This & Save This & Most Popular Presentation Tools – integrated tool sets.
• Ad Server – a simple but powerful ad server for managing web ads.  If you need advanced ad serving features then you will need to go with a 3rd party solution.
• Integrated Analytics – a built-in web analytics package.
• In-sight Editor – a Firefox plug-in for viewing specific page analytics and well as in-browser content editing.
• Commenting – A real-time commenting solution that makes it simple to turn on commenting for any type of content type, such
  as a blog, press release, product information, technical support item or video.
• Content Submission Queue – User generated content enables visitors to upload content, video, and media files to your site or community.
• Newsletters – Email newsletters enable publishers to create marketing and subscription based newsletters.
• Content API Access – The Content API is a standards-based web service interface for providing real-time and batch content repository integration.

The full feature set matrix is below:

My development team have found that the system is quite robust and flexible enough for our needs.  However, using such a system forces one to work within the provided framework and prevents direct access to the underlying data structures and does not allow any customization of the CMS back-end for data entry other than the ordering of fields.

For information on the dynamics which caused the company to even consider Clickability, please see my post To SaaS or not to SaaS?