I blogged in February a Sneak Preview of Adobe CQ5.5 and yesterday Adobe announced that this new version is available immediately. With this new announcement, Adobe is providing out of the box integration with many other products in the Adobe Digital Marketing Suite, including:
- Insight for analyzing large volumes of data in real-time
- Scene7 for converting rich media to dynamic content optimized across channels
- Search&Promote for targeted site search and surfacing relevant product and content matches
- SiteCatalyst for actionable online analytics
- Test&Target for website optimization and personalization
CQ5.5 also introduces new e-commerce capabilities using an open framework and partnership with hybris.
Four big and important new capabilities for Adobe CQ5.5 are, according to Adobe’s press release:
- Client Context—Deliver contextualized content and consistent brand experiences as customers move from channel-to-channel and device-to-device. Harnessing rich profile, segmentation and analytics data from the Adobe Digital Marketing Suite, Client Context empowers digital marketers to create, preview and optimize the personalized experience of target customer audiences.
- Mobile App Development—Empower marketing to rapidly create HTML5-based mobile apps through new integration with PhoneGap, Adobe’s standards-based framework for building cross-platform apps. Intuitive, drag-and-drop functionality takes full advantage of device features, such as the accelerometer, camera and GPS.
- DAM—Enable collaboration on rich media assets, including video, beyond the borders of the organization. Marketers can easily find, share, add comments to, and revise and publish assets regardless of format, speeding time to market on digital campaigns. Now includes integration with Adobe Creative Suite® tools, as well as Adobe Creative Cloud, which is expected in the first half of 2012.
- Cloud Manager (beta)—Ensure optimal performance during peak customer demand by eliminating bottlenecks and accelerating time-to-market on new campaigns. New cloud service enables marketers to take control of fluctuating peak customer traffic while minimizing turnaround time of key online initiatives.
This new version is a great improvement over the already outstanding CQ5 platform. I think the Client Context features are extremely exciting as it brings the power of personalizing a web site to the non-technical user in a tremendous way.
I’m also excited about the new integrations in the Digital Asset Management tools. This should make collaboration between the creative people and the web managers even more seamless.
