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• TERMINALFOUR Site Manager
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  • Key Features
    • Feature Rich Authoring
    • Navigation & Information Architecture
    • Styles & Templates
    • User Rights & Roles
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    • Version Control & Rollback
    • Multi Language
    • Multiple Sites & Channels
    • eForms
    • Accessibility
    • Audit Trail & Management Reports
    • Configuration & Administration
    • Content Archiving
    • Content Scheduling
    • Easy to Use
    • Meta Data Management
    • Publishing Options
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    • What's new in version 6.0?
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Feature Rich Authoring

Feature Rich Editors

TERMINALFOUR Site Manager is completely browser based and has been designed for use by end-users with basic keyboard skills. The more powerful functionality of the software is reserved for more advanced users at administrator or developer level.

There are three alternative editing interfaces within TERMINALFOUR Site Manager:

• Site Manager's standard interface, featuring "WYSIWYG" editing
• "Direct Edit" functionality: A fully dynamic editor allowing authorised users to update web page elements "in situ"(i.e. whilst looking at the finished page)
• E-forms Gateway: Enables the building of custom forms to update the content management system or indeed to populate other legacy systems.

Devolved Web Authorship: "WYSIWYG" editing

The ability to enable non-technical devolved web authorship is fundamental to content management.

Site Manager provides its own built-in "WYSIWYG" editor which features a range of "MS Word-style" icons for easy formatting. This editor enables operations such as changing font types, sizes, and colours, inserting and formatting tables, indenting, highlighting, adding bullet points, undoing and redoing, adding web links, using the multimedia library and so on. This editor is of course ideal for end-users familiar with the basics of common word-processing software.

The WYSIWYG editor can be used in two main ways: where the lifecycle of the relevant content begins with the web, then users can author new material "from scratch" with the editor.  Alternatively, where pre-existing material is being published, users can simply add this content to Site Manager, perhaps by pasting it in from a WP application. A "clean unnecessary MS word tagging" button within the WYSIWYG prevents unwarranted interference with corporate style sheets.

 

The WYSIWYG editor is used for all text-based work within any template and even allows for basic image manipulation.

The system uses "file-locking" or "check-in/check-out" functionality to prevent more than one user from working on a particular document at a time. Facilities to author and to select from templates are determined by the System Administrator at an individual user level by username and password.

In our next version of the software, we hope to provide a minor upgrade that will feature a direct link to MS Word so that users operating in Word can select to "print" to Site Manager directly.

The WISIWYG editor is particularly useful for creating new documents from scratch, in that most of the icons for formatting will be immediately recognisable to any users familiar with the Microsoft Office suite. Building internal or external web links requires just one click on the site map for links internal to the system, or by inclusion of the name of the URL that is being 'linked to' for external links.

In the case of all of Site Manager's content creation tools, additional options outside the default settings, are all available via the tabs on the main editor screen.  This could allow the setting of publish and/or expiry dates, the publishing to more than one site or channel, the creation of other language "twins", as examples.

Site Manager now offers full multi language spell checking functionality as part of the WYSIWYG editor.

End-User Authoring

To ensure rapid user acceptance and deployment, Site Manager is designed so that all interaction with the system happens via an easy-to-use browser interface.  It facilitates absolute consistency and seamless update - whether being used by one user or multiple users.  This ease-of-use and multi-user capability is a key reason why Site Manager has become a market leader in large enterprise environments - where there are a large number of simultaneous users e.g. public sector and universities.

Site Manager enables consistent authorship standards through:

• configurable workflows, approval stages and quality control checks 
• field based templates with optional compulsory fields
• ensuring users meet various standards, such as providing meta-data 
• strict styles and templates ensure quality throughout the site
• standardised and procedural method of adding and modifying content
• strict security privileges so that users can only update the areas of the site(s) they are responsible for 
  ability to manage the locations within a site that specific templates can be used
• controlling file size - restricting the number of words, restricting the size of files that can be inserted
  

Multimedia Content

Site Manager's inate flexible design will enable it to present any digital file online and make it available to be opened automatically or for download.  Images such as photographs would often be presented open and embedded in web pages, whereas PDFs and CAD files would typically be made available for optional download.  Site Manager can work with all formats including Flash.

Visual Editing

TERMINALFOUR Site Manager has its own editing module called 'Direct Edit'.   Direct Edit enables users who are logged into Site Manager to view a given page on the website, click the Direct Edit button and edit the template elements directly.  This means that elements can be simply configured and modified in the finished page so that they can see amendments in situ i.e. exactly as they appear on screen.

Many new users find this approach the easiest of all for web page creation since users can "edit what they see, and see what they edit."

Content Templates

Site Manager is engineered to give maximum design freedom, while at the same time, maintaining simplicity of use.  Our ongoing customer research has identified that the two most common formats are as follows; and Site Manager makes it very simple to structure data within these very flexible formats:

• Free-flowing content, i.e. a web page will contain a number of documents, each displayed one after the other in a structured format
• Enterprise content, i.e. a number of documents are displayed in a less structured format creating greater diversity within the layout, which is particularly suited for B2C and B2B Internet sites

Enables On-Line Formatting

What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) HTML editing gives the user total control and confidence in the format and appearance of content, e.g. italics, highlight, or underscore, add tables, create lists, insert bullet points and so on.   It also allows users to cut and paste content from existing documents without experiencing the loss of formatting, which can be very time consuming to rectify.