Top Innovations of 2020 for Oracle Content Management

2020 is officially hindsight. The year brought forth so many changes in nearly every aspect of our lives and those changes came pretty rapidly. Technology was no exception as more and more businesses accelerated digital customer experience enhancements to better serve their customers during the pandemic.

To help our customers meet their goals, we released hundreds of new capabilities in Oracle Content Management. Here are my top five.

#1: Video creation, editing, and streaming

In 2020, it seemed like I had more video interactions than in person ones. Scaling the creation and delivery of professional quality video content without breaking the bank is a hot topic among many customer experience professionals I talk to.

In April, we acquired Sauce Video to do exactly that. Sauce enables global businesses to collaborate and create video with their employees, communities, fans and customers at scale—powered by smartphone cameras. The enterprise ready, cloud-based solution removes barriers to video creation empowering teams to create engaging content and obtain user generated content in a fast, easy and efficient way for a multitude of channels and audiences.

To learn more, check out this blog, or watch “Here’s What’s Cool About Sauce Video” on Cloud Customer Connect.

#2: Custom forms

Close your eyes and imagine creating a piece of promotional content or a blog article. What do you see? Probably a form with a list of fields, one for each element of your content item (e.g., title, image, body, call to action). Not exactly the most intuitive or immersive content creation experience, right?

This has been the status quo for too long for content management systems and it hinders adoption. When content creators are only presented with a generic form with little added value, they end up creating the content somewhere else and then copying and pasting it into the CMS. It’s an efficiency and user experience nightmare that we solved in 2020 with our custom forms feature.

Custom forms allow you to do exactly what it says. Create a custom form using simple HTML and JavaScript to give content creators a more tailored, guided experience. For example, a custom blogging form might have multiple pages to guide you through targeting your post to an audience, selecting a topic, creating the actual article with tips for readability, and an easy way to see how your article will look in a Google search snippet or Twitter post. This can all be done without having to leave the app.

To learn more about custom forms, check out the Develop Custom Content Forms here, or watch “Here’s What’s Cool About Custom Forms” on Cloud Customer Connect.

#3: Smart categorization

Proper tagging and categorization are key to any content management strategy. It’s like organizing a closet. If you don’t have the right shelves, cubbies, hangers, and labels, you end up shoving a bunch of stuff it and then you wonder why you can’t find anything. (Can you tell I recently organized my closets for the new year?)

But here’s the thing with content management, regular users hate having to categorize stuff, or when they do, often times they choose an incorrect category or tag which, as we all know, makes a frustrating mess. Enter Smart Categorization. With Smart Content enabled and categories defined, Oracle Content Management can review content items and suggest categories to which large groups of content items can be quickly and easily assigned. Ta da! Now if only we had a solution for your closets!

To learn more, check out the documentation, or watch “Here’s What’s Cool About Smart Content” on Cloud Customer Connect.

#4: Headless

Headless is so much more than a buzzword. When it comes to next generation content management, headless is a must-have. Oracle Content Management was built from the ground up as a headless content management system that also wisely includes drag and drop business user tools to keep everyone happy.

In 2020, we took headless further and made it even easier for you to build impactful applications that consume our content services. Throughout the year, we released a variety of headless quick start guides, samples, and tutorials designed to speed your time to market.

To learn more, check out “Developing with Oracle Content and Experience As a Headless CMS.”

#5: Embeddable, redwood UI

If you’re looking for a next generation CMS, you’ve probably done some amount of reconnaissance to figure out why the current one. .two…or five make that give content management systems you own aren’t meeting your needs. There are likely lots of reasons for that, but a big one is it’s probably just too hard to use, or isn’t really well integrated into how or where your content creators or consumers work.

In 2020, we changed all of that with the embeddable UI. It’s exactly what it sounds like. You can embed the Oracle Content Management web user interface for assets and documents in other applications. The embedded web interfaces can include conversations, sites content, search results, and other Oracle Content Management features.

It’s a real game changer that allows you to put content front and center in any application that requires it without having to build an integration or UI yourself. Plus, it looks gorgeous in our next-generation, customer-first user experience design system, Redwood.

Honorable mention: Advanced workflow

When it comes to getting the right eyes on content before publishing, flexible workflow is essential. Sometimes you may want a quick, single step approval. Other times may require more sophisticated, multistep approvals. Or, you may need something in between.

When it comes to workflow, thankfully, we didn’t need to reinvent the wheel. Oracle Content Management now natively leverages Oracle Integration workflows so you can facilitate the right level of approvals. But we didn’t want to just leave you entirely to your own devices, so to help you along, we also released a QuickStart Workflow Package for easy workflow implementation.

Simply load the package, make any changes you need, and off you go. It’s kind of like those five-ingredient recipes everybody is trying in the new year.

To learn more, check out the Use Seeded Content Workflows guide here, or watch “Here’s What’s Cool About Workflows” on Cloud Customer Connect. To go even further, check out the documentation here.

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