2021 yearly release wrap-up: How to stay ahead of customer demands

The benefits of a headless CMS for technical teams are already well-established: freedom, flexibility, scalability. More recently, the conversation has expanded to address the evolving needs of business users too. To adapt to customer demands in the new year, content creators require advanced authoring and real-time collaborative capabilities, tighter governance frameworks, and even more independence from developer timelines.

Using Kontent.ai, both content creators and developers are empowered to work together to create and deliver engaging digital experiences at scale. With the following use cases as inspiration, see how your teams can adopt the features added to the platform in 2021 to accomplish big things in 2022.

Unifying the organization in a content hub

With distributed teams becoming the norm, a content hub is critical. Unifying all business content into a cloud-based repository helps teams stay organized and align on a single source of truth. By bringing everything together in Kontent.ai, organizations like Elanco, for example, can better manage and scale content strategies, even with a hundred marketers in the mix. The following updates to Kontent.ai help our customers keep content consistent, compliant, and on-brand.

Kontent.ai gives us a huge benefit as an organization, particularly as we move into more of a multi-channel arena, and as we think about expanding reuse in our website arena as well.

Jonathan Stone

Senior IT Director, Solution Engineering, Elanco

• The redesigned user interface, launched in March 2021, prioritizes discoverability. As the size of content repositories grow, being able to quickly find content and action items is a must. The intuitive authoring environment makes it easier for large teams to adopt a central hub more enthusiastically, as well as execute on operations with a minimal learning curve.
• Central oversight of users keeps growing workspaces secure and organized. In Kontent.ai, it’s easy to view and manage all roles across multiple projects or subscriptions. This easy-to-access, dynamic overview ensures processes stay under control, especially when users are often added to or removed from the platform.

Scaling complex content operations

To scale and govern enterprise content operations, customers like Income rely on Kontent.ai’s sophisticated content governance and authoring capabilities. New releases focused on process management have helped creators, editors, and stakeholders improve collaboration at every phase of the content lifecycle.

Kontent.ai allows our many stakeholders to improve efficiency and collaboration across a large organization. We’re able to create consistent experiences across touchpoints, while leaving the design flexible to our users.

Angeline Oh

Senior Executive, Brand & Digital Marketing, Income

• Defining multiple workflows in Kontent.ai has brought next-level content governance to team operations. With the changing nature of consumers’ expectations, teams need to agree on and map different levels of approvals for different types of content, from a blog post or product description to something more involved, like a case study or security policy.
• Smaller improvements to Web Spotlight, like custom colors, make the UX more comfortable, while game-changers like auto-refresh allow users to see changes to their web preview within seconds. In 2025, live preview functionality in the authoring experience replaced Web Spotlight for new customers. Learn more about Live preview.
• Built-in image customization also makes operations more efficient and users more resourceful. With this addition to the advanced asset management capability set, it’s possible to quickly resize and crop images directly in Kontent.ai. This is key for teams looking to get the most mileage out of their assets, stay organized, and ensure every image is picture-perfect.

Governing localization strategies

Resonating with audiences in-market requires a delicate balance of local breathing room and global governance. Kontent.ai helps organizations like Kramp achieve both. One of the biggest releases of 2021, collections, helps teams set up Kontent.ai to accommodate discrete workspaces and overarching permissions, perfect for managing content according to local needs.

Thanks to Kontent.ai, we have managed to move content marketing from a global level to the local level. The marketing departments in all our countries are able to create or edit their own content. We’re now able to do online content marketing in 24 countries/languages in an efficient and structured way.

Davey van Ommen

Online Content Specialist, Kramp

• With collections, enterprises can manage all their content in a single repository while maintaining control over which users can access each type of content. Collections act as organized sub-repositories for specific regions, departments, or separate brands. While permissions dictate access to each collection, a common content model is shared, ensuring alignment with the overarching strategy and operational requirements.
• Roles and permissions have also become more granular, mirroring the varied ways teams may be structured globally and locally. To ensure the right marketers work on the right content, it’s now possible to extend content governance to collections, assigning roles and permissions for specific collections and languages. Roles and active users per environment can also be configured according to your organization’s standards.
• Two technical updates improve how developers work with collections. The first is the ability to differentiate between collections with the {Collection} macro in preview URLS. If you’re using collections for multiple regional websites, you can use the new macro to tell your app which website to preview. The second is the /languages endpoint, which allows you to get a list of your project’s active languages through the Delivery API.
• With collections all set, it’s easier to move forward with localization strategies. Because of its API-first approach, Kontent.ai works well with your translation service of choice, allowing you to create compelling communication in any target language. Kontent.ai’s integration with XTM Cloud, for example, helps brands easily launch multilingual campaigns. XTM Cloud is an enterprise SaaS translation management system that automates and manages all aspects of the localization process.

Delivering seamless omnichannel experiences

Your website is no longer the only way customers engage with your brand. Fáilte Ireland is a great example of a customer-centric channel strategy, pushing content into multiple websites, search, and an internal CRM system. No matter what channels you plan on managing this year, a frictionless experience is still a key priority. In the past twelve months, Kontent.ai has improved the ways developers can construct and deliver omnichannel digital experiences.

The APIs and the webhooks were key for us, front and centre. Apart from the multiple websites, we also push content into search. We push it out to our sister agency, Tourism Ireland... we also push information to our internal CRM system.

Philip Keogh

Cloud Solutions Architect,  Fáilte Ireland

• With Kontent.ai’s native GraphQL API, developers now have a new option for fetching content from any channel. Using GraphQL for content delivery improves the efficiency of content queries, prevents over-fetching, and helps support modern tech stacks. The Delivery GraphQL API is a useful alternative to the Delivery REST API in your apps. The native GraphQL API capabilities also include secure access, a Preview API key, ordering, AND/OR operators, and extended filterable system fields.  
• Searchable, organized audit logs are essential for IT staff as they handle a variety of channels, timelines, and deliverables simultaneously. Audit logs, specific to each environment, let users search for and view any and all changes made to content types—so that they can quickly identify and correct issues impacting any digital touchpoint across websites, applications, and more.

Designing a modern tech stack

The power of a microservices architecture is choice and flexibility. For organizations like Trusted Choice, using best-of-breed tools helps them stay agile, flexible, and open to change. Kontent.ai’s headless CMS fits seamlessly into modern tech stacks, allowing organizations to meet consumer demands on any channel.

Kontent.ai has allowed our company to completely rethink how easy it is to deliver new content. With the successful transition to Kontent.ai for our primary consumer site, we’re now working towards the development of dozens of new web properties. Our previous vendor would’ve made this goal unthinkable.

Adam Weigold

VP Engineering & Chief Architect, TrustedChoice.com

• On the Microsoft Azure Marketplace and AppSource for customers, Kontent.ai is the first and only certified enterprise headless CMS available for purchase with the Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment (MACC). This allows Microsoft customers to make use of the trusted Azure Marketplace for easy and secure discovery, implementation, and management of Kontent.ai as an integral solution in their enterprise-grade microservices architecture.
• The ability to efficiently swap environments is also a big win for technical teams who expect speed, ease, and security from every solution in their tech stack. With Kontent.ai, there’s no need for a developer to manually copy over changes from the old environment to a new one. A quick, straightforward swap of environments instead helps save valuable developer time, while minimizing the risk associated with altering content models.

Creating a winning e-commerce experience

E-commerce experiences have taken center stage. Now, many consumers see it as their go-to option. When customer behaviors change, so do expectations. Kontent.ai is helping brands like Hautlauer action agile e-commerce strategies to drive revenue goals and increase trust and loyalty.

Through the extensive omnichannel commerce project, Hartlauer is transporting its well-known top customer service into the digital world. We can optimally complement our range of existing stores and have thus created the basis for intensifying and strengthening existing customer relationships. At the same time, we have significantly more opportunities to build new customer relationships.

Florian Freidhager

Head of Digital, Hartlauer

• Kontent.ai’s new integration with Uniform helps businesses provide seamless e-commerce experiences for different target audiences. Kontent.ai is natively supported in Uniform Canvas, allowing users to compose personalized digital experiences from various headless solutions, including e-commerce and analytics. With Uniform Optimize, marketers can tag content with specific customer intents, which are then dynamically tracked during visits. Uniform is the latest e-commerce integration partner for Kontent, joining other vendors such as Shopify, Magento, Slatwall Commerce, commercetools, and, for product search and discovery, Algolia.
• Asset taxonomies also help customers work more efficiently with their assets and choose the best visuals to support informed purchase decisions. When your asset library is overflowing or disorganized, it can be a challenge for users to find what they need. Grouping assets into categories speeds up the search, while governing asset usage for specific products, business units, regions, or campaigns.

Centralizing knowledge for education portals

Well-structured, consistent content is fundamental for any successful digital self-service initiative. With Kontent.ai, University of Amsterdam consolidated 30+ sites into one student portal. And we’re proud to say we manage our own Learn portal with Kontent.ai too. A central repository, combined with these latest improvements, streamlines enterprise knowledge management.

We needed something that just works, that’s easy to use and integrate with, and that was Kontent.ai.

Robert Buzink

Product Owner, University of Amsterdam

• Expanding nested linked items has been a huge quality of life improvement for customers who maintain deep structures of linked items, particularly valuable for use cases such as automated form fills or chatbots. In Kontent.ai, it’s possible to view linked items in context by simply expanding them, rather than opening them in a new window. Nested linked items behave like nested components and allow users to expand them to the seventh nesting level.
• With regex validations, content models now give even more structure to content. When many users work in the same platform, it’s important to maintain content standards at scale. Regexes (short for regular expressions) make sure an input matches a specific pattern and can be used to validate whether a given text is correctly formatted, like a valid email or an acceptable mailing address. And for education portals especially, accuracy is one of the most important things.

Staying ahead in 2022 with Kontent.ai

To stay ahead of the changing market and consumer expectations, organizations need to rely on a headless CMS that not only fulfills the requirements of technical teams, but also satisfies the business need for advanced authoring capabilities and enterprise content governance. Not every improvement from 2021 was recapped here, so feel free to review the product changelog for all the details. 

If any of these use cases sparked your interest, learn more about how Kontent.ai can help by scheduling a focused demo with one of our experts.