Moving from Headless to Content as a Service

Our vision has always gone beyond the technical benefits of the headless model, focusing on the content creation process. We’ll surely remember 2019 as the year of our exciting rebrand—we finalized our transition to Content as a Service and unveiled the product’s new name, Kentico Kontent, together with the product’s new website.

As the name of our domain (kontent.ai) suggests, artificial intelligence (AI) and other modern technologies combined with Kontent will make your life easier. Have you heard about our integration with Recombee, the content recommendation engine?

In fact, 2019 brought the means of integrating Kentico Kontent with other best-of-breed services. We released integrations with e-commerce services, static site generators, data analytics tools, and more. You can have a look at all the available integrations here.  

Developing New Features That Streamline Content Creation 

Since we’re constantly working on improving the authoring experience, we introduced a lot of new features last year. Below are a few of the most impactful improvements we made.

In January, we released Custom Elements that enable you to customize the default content authoring experience and create custom editing elements (e.g., Markdown editor, Color picker, Image selection from DAM system—the possibilities are endless).

There are several features that help achieve faster and more efficient collaboration on content. If you’re a content creator, we hope you like using our improved Comments that are displayed right alongside the specific part of the content item. Mentions in comments will notify you, the contributor, that there’s something you need to respond to. No need to read through every single comment and no need to copy content from comments either—when changes to your content are needed, the reviewer can use Content Suggestions, and you can then approve the changes you like with one simple click.

What also makes the authoring experience more intuitive are Content Tabs—contributors can see all the fields they need to populate on one tab. Moreover, with the new permissions capabilities, it can be locked down so those are the only fields contributors have access to edit. 

Thanks to Kontent Management API v2, developers can embrace a code-first approach. They’re now able to manage their content models from the development side, which makes migrations and deploying of new code safer and easier. By configuring triggers for each webhook in your project, you can now get notified about specific events, such as moving items to a specific workflow step. One of the primary examples we’ve seen is integrating with translation services. Another use case is integrating with third-party notification/collaboration tools (like Slack or Teams) to notify people of changes to content.

A critical requirement for larger organizations is the role-based access control, which gives them granular control over who can perform which operations on different content types, according to the user’s role. We’d also like to mention Editorial Calendar, which was our first step towards addressing the Planning phase of the content life cycle. It gives content teams the ability to map their projects and campaigns to the content needed to execute on those initiatives. Once the team has identified the content to be created, stakeholders can watch the progress and be notified if any items are at risk of creating delays. 

Have you already started using these features? Let us know what you think in the comments!

Introducing Kontent at Kentico Connections

Every year, we organize a series of events called Kentico Connections. In 2019, you could have met us in Brno, Denver, and Melbourne. If you’ve never been to one of these events, what happens is that marketers, developers, CEOs, Kentico partners, and we from Kentico meet up to discuss the future of content management systems and make connections for new projects.

There’s always great food, drinks, and a party at the coolest places, such as the Melbourne Star Observation Wheel or Brno Observatory and Planetarium:

Understandably, revealing the Kentico Kontent brand and positioning the product as a Content-as-a-Service solution was some of the greatest news we shared at our Connections last year. And, speaking of events, we also attended a few—to mention one example, we really enjoyed Confab, the Content Strategy Conference in Minneapolis.

Launching Kentico Kontent Certification

To help you reinforce your knowledge of the product and its features, we launched two certification programs last year. Developers can take the Kentico Kontent Developer Certification exam consisting of 40 questions that test the understanding of APIs, SDKs, content modeling, and so on. For those of you who work in the business environment, there’s Kentico Kontent Business Qualification designed to build confidence in identifying potential opportunities. Are you up for a challenge?

Striving to Develop the Best Product for Our Customers

There are two more accomplishments that we’re proud of when looking back at 2019. In June, we gained three ISO certifications that apply to Kentico Kontent: ISO 9001:2015 – Quality Management System; ISO 27001:2013 – Information Security Management System; ISO 20000-1:2011 – IT Service Management System. These certifications show the commitment we have to delivering top-quality, consistent standards and to ensuring consistency of those standards throughout all our offices globally. 

Moreover, in December, we passed the SOC 2 Type 1 examination designed for service providers that store customer data in the cloud. This proves that Kontent can securely manage data and protect the privacy and interests of our clients. Our goal for 2020 is to pass the SOC 2 Type 2,  which requires assessment of policies and procedures over a specified time period (a minimum of six months).

Our Plans for 2020

Besides the mentioned SOC 2 Type 2, at the top of our to-do list for 2020 are even more features for large organizations with big marketing teams and a major redesign of the user interface. What will the UI look like? Stay tuned for more details!