eZ Systems introduces eZ Flow for eZ Publish

Dec. 4, 2007 - PRLog -- eZ Systems, the world’s leading Open Source Enterprise Content Management (ECM) provider, today announced eZ Flow (http://www.ez.no/ezflow), the latest extension to the company’s flagship eZ Publish software. Available immediately, eZ Flow empowers news and media organizations to create dynamic portal pages by scheduling content publication, streaming rich content and managing revenue streams, including pay-per-view and paid content placement.

eZ Publish is already the trusted web platform for some the world’s largest media organizations such as Lagardère and National Geographic. In creating eZ Flow, eZ Systems has leveraged the resulting expertise to create functionality specific to the needs of media organizations seeking to deliver to users a compelling and interactive experience through full Web 2.0-capable Web sites.

“News and media organizations face unique challenges. They have large and distributed editorial teams, demanding and engaged users, and the need to provide a continuous stream of dynamic content,” said Bård Farstad, co-founder and chief technology officer at eZ Systems. “By building on the powerful, feature-rich eZ Publish Content Management System, eZ Flow addresses the most important needs for media Web sites.”

eZ Flow brings the following capabilities and functionality to news and media organizations:

- Pre-plan the content publication schedule
Editors build queues of content items that are rotated at set time intervals, either in sequence or randomly. Alternatively, items can be automatically published at a specific date and time. Editors can preview portal pages to determine how the site will be viewed by visitors.

- Support for revenue streams
eZ Flow supports revenue generation from multiple sources, such as ad servers, pay-per-view content, paid content placement and subscription management.

- Easy-to-use graphical user interface
In addition to the simple front-end single-click editing capabilities of the eZ Publish Web site Toolbar, the eZ Flow interface makes it easy for editors to manipulate and schedule the content on portal pages.

- Rich multimedia content
eZ Flow’s video streaming capabilities make it possible to record and stream video, whether from a live feed or from a video archive library. Video plays via the embedded Flash player.

- Send content to mobile devices, including the iPhone
Because content presentation is based on a template system, eZ Flow can provide content to mobile devices simply by using a template tuned for the devices’ display. For example, a template customized for Apple iPhones would tune the display of content to the iPhone display size.

- Standard eZ Publish functionality within eZ Flow includes features designed to engage users, including surveys, ratings, tagging, comments, forums, polls and blogs. Multi-user, multi-role access permissions provide complete control over which users – including anonymous site visitors – can create and edit different types of content. With multi-channel exporting, site content can also be published to RSS, OpenOffice.org, Microsoft Word, QuarkXPress and more.

About eZ Publish
eZ Publish is an award-winning, enterprise-grade Open Source Content Management System and development framework with functionality for web publishing, media portals, intranets, e-commerce and extranets. eZ Publish helps all kinds of organizations – including multinational corporations, humanitarian organizations and educational institutions – succeed at sharing their information.

About eZ Systems
Founded in 1999, eZ Systems is the world's largest Open Source Content Management software company with offices in Norway, Denmark, Germany, Ukraine, Belgium, France and North America. With customers such as the United States Navy, Oslo University, Telemark University, Swissfirst, Massachusetts Insitute of Technology, Elle, Vogue and Norwegian Telecom, eZ Systems is the creator of eZ Publish, an award winning Open Source Content Management System with 2 million downloads, more than 150,000 installations and registered users in more than 130 countries. The eZ philosophy of openness and information sharing is still the basic guideline for the company, employees and Ecosystem.

Website: www.ez.no