Australian firm Elcom (news, site) recently expanded into the North American market, adding analytics and mobile capability to its CommunityManager.NET release. Clients and customers have reason to rejoice, with the release of the latest version of CommunityManager.NET, now at version 7.3.

New Features for a Better User Experience

Elcom's 7.3 update to CommunityManager.NET highlights features that can simplify the web development process, particularly with regard to ensuring better content-delivery to clients. Among the core features of this update is the addition of A/B testing to Elcom's Online Marketing application. A/B testing enables users to conduct comparative tests between baseline control sample web pages and other pages using single-variable test samples. This is usually done to check responsiveness and speed -- an important feature in the developer's client wish list.

CommunityManager.NET also integrates RSS Curation in version 7.3. This lets users monitor RSS feeds, and create articles from content using certain criteria. Content is also tagged and organized based on these criteria. This provides users with "the ability to personalize their content with the information that interests them," which product director Anthony Milner says is "a big step towards enhancing ... clients and their customers' online experiences."

Easy Content Management with Ephox EditLive

Another highlight of the 7.3 update is Elcom's partnership with Ephox (news, site), particularly the integration of Ephox's EditLive with CommunityManager.NET. This feature enables creation, editing and management of content, including copying from external sources, image manipulation and collaboration. Milner is confident this integration will meet user expectations for ease-of-use.

[U]sers will be truly impressed with its functionality, and specifically the way it cleans and presents semantic HTML code even with cut/pastes from external sources, image cropping, track changes, commenting and accessibility checking as you type.This even extends to advanced table management, whereby it can handle splits, resizes, merged cells, define header rows vs. data rows and table summaries for accessibility.

Expansion for Global Reach

Elcom recently opened its New York office to better service its North American clientele with localized marketing and tech support. Gartner estimates that the US accounts for 60% of the worldwide Web CMS market, which is forecast to grow at a 14% compound rate through 2014. Elcom's clients include government offices, gadget brands, automotive brands and financial institutions in Australia and worldwide. These run different types of CommunityManager.NET deployments, such as intranets, websites, e-commerce platforms, portals, e-commerce sites and mobile platforms.