With fall comes events... From the return of NFL and NCAA football to the season premiere of the X Factor – whoa don’t forget the – calendars are filling up fast! This got me thinking about ways you could improve event management and promotion on your Websites.

As you may know, the Event Calendar application was totally revamped in SiteExecutive 2011. Its new features now include a component for displaying your “Upcoming Events.” We call this component an application viewlet.  It can be used on your site’s homepage or any relevant page (or template). The viewlet is highly configurable, it offers control over the number and types of events displayed – there is no longer any need to display your entire event calendar. To see the viewlet in action, check out the list of events on the homepage of the award-winning Flagler College website....Click here to read more.

As a trainer, I’m always looking for ways to help our clients get more value from SiteExecutive. Since we launched SiteExecutive 2011 EP 1 in May, we’ve received plenty of feedback on new features from across our user community. Working with this feedback as a starting point, I’ve come up with a set of SE 2011 tips and tricks you can use to enhance the overall effectiveness of your Web and mobile sites....Click here to read more.

When it comes to Web applications, one of the biggest changes in user interface design over the past few years has been the growing use of LightBox dialogs.  Though they’re similar to a popup window, the LightBox doesn’t involve a new window at all.  Indeed, the LightBox is simply a dynamically created <div> that displays a new modal window with a semitransparent cover.  This cover blocks user interactions with other page elements while the LightBox is open....Click here to read more.

The SiteExecutive team is hard at work on Enhancement Pack 2 (EP 2) for SiteExecutive 2011 (SE 2011). A key feature of EP 2 is something we’re calling, structured content.  Though there is nothing new about structured content, we think our approach will greatly enhance the impact and value of using structured content on your websites, because you, Mr. / Ms. Content author will be the one who creates the content structures – as opposed to developers and XML geeks....Click here to read more.

People drive business processes. More specifically, teams of people. No other software feature reflects this reality more than workflow (a.k.a. governance).

For the sake of this blog, workflow means commanding:

1.       The right action/attention

2.       At the right time

3.       In the right way

So, when teams change, workflows change. It follows then that great software facilitates this change.

Ta-da… SiteExecutive 2011 does.

With SE 2011, we’ve introduced a new workflow engine which lets developers (for now) easily add workflow to custom SiteExecutive development, as follows:

·         Model workflows: imagine defining a workflow process in the same way you’d draw it - boxes and lines with arrows. Create processes that branch, loop and have multiple endpoints. 

·         Track Versioning: track information changes. Know who made changes, approved or rejected; and capture why.

·         Communicate Outcomes: automatically generate template-driven email in response to business events (e.g. publishing). Populate those emails with values based off of the data in workflow.

·         Integrate: multiple points for reading, writing and transmitting data between databases and external systems. 

The workflow engine also works independently of SiteExecutive, e.g., as a Web service, so developers can take advantage of the engine with external applications too!  And yes, we eat our own dog food, as the new workflow engine is already used in SE 2011 for:

1.       Profile Directory versioning

2.       Event Calendar approval tab

For a bit of background, we’ve battle tested the workflow engine in production on a large and somewhat unique SiteExecutive deployment where it’s used for managing a non-linear content approval process. In this case, the customer is a large retailer using SiteExecutive for an intranet application that conveys store policies (AKA standard operating procedures) to its million+ associates.

As we move forward with SiteExecutive 2011 enhancements, our plans call for updating the page and template approval process with the new workflow engine. More on this in the coming months.

In the short term, you can learn more about the new engine and how it works by contacting your SAI representative. You can also sign up for our three-day API / developer training course to get hands on experience with our APIs, modules and application framework.