One of Kentico's most anticipated releases, Kentico 10 provides exciting enhancements: extended MVC architecture support for developers, more intuitive EMS usability for marketers, and performance and scaleability upgrades.
Kentico 10 EMS Marketing Suite Enhancements
Originally built as a tool by developers for developers, Kentico branched out at version 5 to offer marketing tools for agencies and marketers with the introduction of Kentico Enterprise Marketing System (EMS). Version 10 of the Kentico EMS includes new responsive image management functionality, improved marketing performance, and updated contact management, email marketing and campaign functionality.
The marketing suite has seen the biggest set of new-feature improvements in Kentico 10. Overall marketing improvements from Kentico 9 to 10 include:
Responsive Images Management
Developers get tired of having to resize images for various platforms and devices manually, and marketers get frustrated with the manual, error-prone process. With Kentico's new responsive images management, content editors can upload a single image attachment, which then automatically transforms according to
variant definitions coded to fit the publisher's specific needs for various layouts and devices.
Kentico Campaign Wizard and Cross-Site Contact Profile
Two new features especially applauded include the upgraded Kentico Campaign Wizard and the new Cross-Site Contact Profile. The wizard allows marketers to build and manage campaigns from a central location, from landing pages, emails, conversions and goals, while the Cross-Site Contact Profile makes all contacts global.
By allowing marketers to see all user interactions, users enjoy a complete view of the customer’s engagement. In previous versions no distinction existed between email newsletters and email campaigns, however, Kentico 10 provides the distinction which should add clarity to marketing initiatives. However, this feature may not be so popular with those who host multiple organizations on one Kentico instance, as there is no contact separation between sites.
Need to optimize a running campaign? Say goodbye to stopping everything and losing all the data before making changes. Because campaign journeys often change, Kentico 10 now allows marketers to edit a running campaign and still track all the data without stopping anything.
Additionally, a new Email Marketing Dashboard supports the abundance data collected, helping marketers make sense of all the data. Leveraging Microsoft Power BI capabilities, Kentico now gives marketers everything they need to get the most out of their email marketing insights via the device-and-platform-agnostic email marketing dashboard. [A] is experimenting with custom dashboards now.
Kentico MVC Architecture Support
While Kentico continues a renewed focus on marketing automation for agencies and marketers, Kentico developer support enhancements include the maturation of MVC (model view controller) application development, giving developers a clear separation between content editing and layout. With MVC enhancements, Kentico ensures developers have the freedom to develop the way they want and in a way that their organization can best support. The [A] team has been impressed with development improvements, including:
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Improved continuous integration
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Extended feature set for MVC development
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Azure deployment, caching, custom tables, and e-commerce features are supported in Kentico 10 and can be used when developing MVC applications
Kentico's MVC support is fully compatible with cloud deployments and can increase security by managing the live site in the cloud and site administration locally.
Kentico has added MVC support for:
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Working with standard products
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Product variants
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Product listings with filtering
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Product detail pages
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Checkout process
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Media libraries
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Multilingual websites
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Integration with Kentico users and roles
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Smart search
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SQL debugging
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Web farms
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Workflow — basic and advanced
Kentico Upgrades Performance and Scalability x10
Kentico 10 offers improved scalability and performance. As of the time of the Kentico 10 release, scalability was tested to the tune of 100 million contacts and a billion activities. According to Kentico this is not even the upper limit. This equates to roughly 10x the previous version capacity, a plenty high ceiling for high-demand enterprise scale. Kentico says users can expect a 50 percent load time increase for editor interface load times. [A] can report faster authoring experiences from our tests, and as a result, happier and more productive authors.
Upgrading to Kentico 10
[A]Ⓡ recently performed a smooth upgrade from Kentico 9 to 10. While [A] developers noticed some API changes as well as core class changes, the team saw nothing that Visual Studio's fix recommender could not help resolve. Overall, [A] is excited about the release and looks forward to working with it more.
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