Contensis Service Definition – core
Contensis CMS
G-Cloud 4 Service Definition – core Contensis CMS
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Contensis Service Definition – core
Contensis CMS
Authors
Adam Green +44 1584 824212 | Paul Taras +44 1584 824213
Approved by
Richard Chivers
Contact
tenders@contensis.co.uk
www.contentmanagement.co.uk
+44 1584 824202
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Version 1.0
Contensis Service Definition – core
Contensis CMS
Table of Contents
Table of Contents ........................................................................................................................................................................... 3
Overview ......................................................................................................................................................................................... 7
About this document ................................................................................................................................................................... 7
Licence scaling ...................................................................................................................................................................... 7
About Contensis ......................................................................................................................................................................... 7
Service Definition: Overview ........................................................................................................................................................... 8
The Contensis G-Cloud CMS Service ........................................................................................................................................ 8
Introduction ............................................................................................................................................................................ 8
Hosting Environment .............................................................................................................................................................. 8
Service Definition: Functionality for managing your content ........................................................................................................... 9
The Contensis User Interface ................................................................................................................................................ 9
Editor Features & Usability ....................................................................................................................................................... 10
Content Administration and Management features .................................................................................................................. 13
Service Definition: Capabilities for Designers & Developers ......................................................................................................... 17
Templates................................................................................................................................................................................. 17
The Template Framework .................................................................................................................................................... 17
Template editing overview ........................................................................................................................................................ 17
Separation of Design & Content ........................................................................................................................................... 18
Mini-Templates .................................................................................................................................................................... 19
CSS Assignment .................................................................................................................................................................. 19
Code integration ................................................................................................................................................................... 19
Multimedia ................................................................................................................................................................................ 20
Media Gallery ....................................................................................................................................................................... 20
Streaming Video .................................................................................................................................................................. 21
Content, File & Media Types ................................................................................................................................................ 22
Search ...................................................................................................................................................................................... 22
General ................................................................................................................................................................................ 22
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Advanced Search ................................................................................................................................................................. 24
Security, indexing and search inclusion ............................................................................................................................... 25
Social Media integration ........................................................................................................................................................... 25
Site Tools ................................................................................................................................................................................. 26
Download as a PDF ............................................................................................................................................................. 26
Print this Page ...................................................................................................................................................................... 26
Send to a Friend Controls .................................................................................................................................................... 27
Syndication ............................................................................................................................................................................... 27
Syndicating content from other sites .................................................................................................................................... 27
Syndicating content from your site ....................................................................................................................................... 27
Accessibility .............................................................................................................................................................................. 28
Stylesheet Switcher.............................................................................................................................................................. 28
Font-size Selector ................................................................................................................................................................ 29
Text-only Button ................................................................................................................................................................... 29
The Permissions Framework .................................................................................................................................................... 29
Implementing permissions on published websites ............................................................................................................... 29
Securing your Search........................................................................................................................................................... 30
Securing your Menus ........................................................................................................................................................... 30
Securing General Content.................................................................................................................................................... 31
Enabling a Folder Password ................................................................................................................................................ 31
Content Editors’ Perspective ................................................................................................................................................ 31
Page Element-Level Permissions ........................................................................................................................................ 31
CMS Administrators’ Perspective ......................................................................................................................................... 32
Membership & Personalisation ................................................................................................................................................. 33
Personalisation Framework .................................................................................................................................................. 33
The Login Control................................................................................................................................................................. 34
Getting to a login .................................................................................................................................................................. 34
Active Directory Integration .................................................................................................................................................. 35
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Open API .................................................................................................................................................................................. 35
Service Definition: Information Assurance .................................................................................................................................... 37
Service Definition: Service Management ...................................................................................................................................... 38
On-boarding ............................................................................................................................................................................. 38
Off-boarding ............................................................................................................................................................................. 38
Service Level and Constraints .................................................................................................................................................. 38
Support Service Level Agreement ............................................................................................................................................ 38
Escalation ............................................................................................................................................................................ 39
Backup & Disaster Recovery .................................................................................................................................................... 39
How to raise a support issue ................................................................................................................................................ 40
Service Roadmap ..................................................................................................................................................................... 40
Help Facilities ....................................................................................................................................................................... 40
Training ................................................................................................................................................................................ 40
Training Modules.................................................................................................................................................................. 41
Data restoration/service migration........................................................................................................................................ 42
Consumer responsibilities .................................................................................................................................................... 42
Technical requirements ........................................................................................................................................................ 42
Service Definition: Pricing & Contracts ......................................................................................................................................... 43
Licence scaling ......................................................................................................................................................................... 43
Definitions ............................................................................................................................................................................ 43
Expanding the service .......................................................................................................................................................... 43
Data extraction ..................................................................................................................................................................... 43
Financial recompense model ............................................................................................................................................... 44
Ordering and invoicing process ............................................................................................................................................ 44
Contract terms ..................................................................................................................................................................... 44
Trial service ........................................................................................................................................................................ 44
Annex 1: The Zengenti Cloud-based Hosting Environment .......................................................................................................... 45
General Overview ....................................................................................................................... Error! Bookmark not defined.
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Infrastructure .......................................................................................................................... Error! Bookmark not defined.
Resilience .............................................................................................................................. Error! Bookmark not defined.
Security & Environment.......................................................................................................... Error! Bookmark not defined.
Operating Systems................................................................................................................. Error! Bookmark not defined.
Maintenance .......................................................................................................................... Error! Bookmark not defined.
Load Balancing, and server resiliency.................................................................................... Error! Bookmark not defined.
Monitoring .............................................................................................................................. Error! Bookmark not defined.
Backups ................................................................................................................................. Error! Bookmark not defined.
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Overview
About this document
This document describes the core Contensis CMS. Additional features can be added
to it through our optional modules. These are also featured on the CloudStore.
Licence scaling
The core Contensis CMS comes in four licence levels. These differ primarily in the
scalability e.g. number of concurrent users, web projects, publishing servers. For the
Lite licence a small number of the optional modules are not available. Otherwise, the
entire functionality described in this document is the same across these four licences;
Enterprise
Professional
Standard
Lite
Full details of the product (including discounts and scale pricing) can be found in this
document and in the accompanying Zengenti Pricing for G-Cloud September
2013.docx on the CloudStore. You will also find details on the Pricing section of our
website, Zengenti.com.
All prices quoted in this document are exclusive of VAT.
About Contensis
Contensis is a leading .NET Web Content Management System used by many large,
often high-profile, organisations across the UK. Of these, a substantial majority are in
the public sector, spanning all types of operations, such as;
Local Government – 22 county, borough and district councils
Healthcare – 13 NHS Trusts & other bodies
Higher Education – 16 universities and 3 colleges
Public services – over 30 organisations including central government agencies,
police, housing associations, research organisations, membership bodies and
charities.
We also work closely with many major commercial organisations, such as Pearson
PLC and Domino Printing Sciences PLC. By facing this breadth of requirements, we
ensure that the Contensis system remains ahead of the market in terms of
functionality. If you need the system to do something, you can be sure that one of our
many customers will have implemented this.
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Service Definition: Overview
The Contensis G-Cloud CMS Service
Introduction
Contensis is a leading .NET Web Content Management System used by many large,
often high-profile, organisations across the UK. Of these, a substantial majority are in
the public sector, spanning all types of operations, such as;
Local Government – 22 county, borough and district councils
Healthcare – 13 NHS Trusts & other bodies
Higher Education – 16 universities and 3 colleges
Public services – over 30 organisations including central government agencies,
police, housing associations, research organisations, membership bodies and
charities.
Hosting Environment
With all Contensis packages, we provide a fully managed cloud-based hosting
service operating from UK-based locations. This environment provides a robust,
secure and fully scalable online infrastructure that is dedicated to hosting multiple
Contensis CMS instances and published web systems of all types.
Key features include;
99.9% uptime guaranteed
24x7x365 monitoring and support
Scalable infrastructure
Fully Managed Backups & Maintenance
Security
Further details can be found in the Genetics Cloud-based Hosting Environment,
Annex 1.
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Service Definition: Functionality for
managing your content
Our extensive experience in every aspects of the internet – especially in the public
sector - has driven the development of both the Contensis product and our
implementation methodologies. In particular, the system is very easy for editors to
learn and use, taking a maximum of two hours training before they can productively
start adding content.
The Contensis User Interface
Contensis pioneered the development of the single intuitive interface and its features
just continue to grow. Users at every level soon become familiar with the controls
and, as their knowledge grows, even non-technically minded people are soon
undertaking tasks that previously would have required the involvement of web
specialists.
This screenshot shows the CMS’s WYSIWYG editor in use;
Contensis makes it easy for editors and their organisations at every possible level.
The Contensis Navigator works in much the same way as Windows Explorer on
a PC. You can expand folders, right click on items to get more detail and even
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drag-and-drop items around the screen. The navigator shows you the physical
hierarchy of your website or content repository.
Items of content are categorised into this tree structure, and the structure of the
navigator will reflect the structure of a published website.
Localisation – all the labels on the CMS interface can be changed if required,
either to match local jargon or for users who operate in other languages. This is
in active use for our Welsh clients.
Management console - gives you access to all of the system administration
functionality; configure a new front-end webserver or add users and groups with
a couple of clicks.
The management console is only visible to users with the relevant permissions, so
you can be assured that only your System Administrators can make major changes
to your overall system configuration;
Editor Features & Usability
Browser based and independent – so that your users can edit content anywhere
they wish and at any time, and a Mac user, for example, has all the same
features available to them as a PC user
CMS Search – find content via “Quick” search, filter to just see a particular type
of content or browse through the common-sense navigator.
The “Quick” search screen in action;
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The content filter option:
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Metadata Framework – completely configurable and extensible, all necessary
field types and validations can be applied (e.g. look-ups, compulsory fields,
taxonomy etc).
Image Editor – straightforward tool to enable users to handle the vast majority of
image editing tasks with ease, such as auto-resize, absolute resizing,
choose’n’crop, image effects such as monochrome.
Image Library – inbuilt library which retains original hi-res images, displays all
edited versions, supports drag’n’drop of image into placeholders.
Navigation management – we provide a whole suite of navigation controls as
standard. Include in Menu, Search, A-Z, SiteMap are all radio button choices.
Creating a page in the navigation automatically creates menus, so great majority
of users don’t need to think about this step. Re-order the menus is simple
drag’n’drop (if you have permission) and the CMS will handle the rest.
Real preview - One of the many advantages of the decoupled model is that the
staging site is a real published website, albeit a test site that is not publicly
available. As a result, when you preview your pages whilst editing, it is are as
close to how the real page will look as possible, in contrast to many other CMS
products which simply create a simulation.
Single-click publishing – If you are editing a piece of content you can publish to
test or live simply by clicking the preview button in the Editor.
As you can see there is also an option to preview using dual-view. Dual-view enables
you to view any version of the content side-by-side.
If you just want to preview a previous version this can be done from the version
history tab.
Whatever you preview, you can be assured that it is a REAL preview of the content,
and if you authorise the version to live, it will appear exactly as you have seen.
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Getting content live is straight-forward. If you have the relevant permissions you can
simply click submit and authorise from the workflow menu, and your content will
publish immediately.
Contensis has a lot of options for publishing, with full publishing schedules, aliases
and, of course, the disconnected publishing model which ensure your content is live
when you want it to be for as long as you want!
Track changes - Track content changes – allows you to see the differences
between different versions of the same piece of content, supports added,
deleted and changed, as well as indicators for other elements e.g. a structure
change to a table.
Wizards - Wizards were introduced in Version 5 of Contensis to aid and assist
users who are less familiar with Contensis, or who may be using the system less
frequently. Wizards effectively hand-hold you through various processes in the
system, from creating a piece of content to importing files.
Content Administration and Management features
Security & Permissions – the user’s permissions control access: users see a
security trimmed navigator, interface, dashboard etc. For example, at left is a
widget from the dashboard, personalised for the author’s site activity. The
interface is customisable, so typically editor’s screens have irrelevant formatting
buttons removed – editors then use the style picker to ensure compliance with
corporate design.
Audit trail – all actions by each are captured in detail, for all content types (not
just “pages”).
This screen shows audit trail and version history (note the Revert and Dual View
options);
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Publishing schedule – decide when your content goes live, or set an exact time
and date to review it or to remove it from the live site into archive. Email
notifications are provided at each step.
Content usage and dependencies – details of which template and stylesheet are
in use, indexes of all links between pages (with warnings on deletion), image
usage/dependency and general content usage statistics.
Import & Export – comprehensive range of import and export features. Majority
of migration tasks can be achieved with the Contensis Blueprint XML importexport tool. Other options include database import tool, file system import tool,
WebDAV and spidering an old site.
Multi-channel delivery
o
Print - Using tools such as InDesign or Quark Express
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Web - Using the native Web deployment model
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Mobile - Using the native Web deployment model
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TV - Using the native Web deployment model
o
Touch-Screen Kiosks - Using the native Web deployment model
Multilingual capability – as standard Contensis supports UTF8, enabling
websites to be published in any language and any script (i.e. non-Roman, such
as Russian, Chinese etc). We also have a multilingual workflow capability, see
the Multilingual Module Service Definition.
Multi-site management – manage any number of sites within a single instance of
the software, either on a “pre-paid” basis (unlimited Enterprise service), or on a
“call-off” basis for the other services (see Licence scaling).
Reporting – Contensis comes configured with a whole set of reports that can
instantly be used. These interactive reports are generally focused on Content
Usage, Workflows and User information. Each report entry is a clickable, active
link with options such as view, edit etc.
Structured Content – We utilise structured content for many of the modules in
Contensis such as News and Events. It allows us to provide a simple form-based
approach to content entry, and to have precise validation over input. You can set
up any structured content interface you wish, making data integration with other
systems easier.
Notifications – keeps you informed about tasks and events that occur within the
system. Notifications are used in many areas of Contensis, and are completely
configurable via email templates to meet your branding guidelines. Examples of
where notifications are sent include:
o
Content Checked Out
o
Content Checked In
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Submit for Authorisation
o
Authorisation Declined
o
Revoked Submission
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Pass To a User
o
Content Published
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Requires Review
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Expiry Imminent
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Content Expired
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Link Failed
Workflow framework – All content types are included in workflow, including site
elements, templates, CSS and multimedia. Contensis supports multi-level
workflow, although most clients use two-tier and three-tier workflow. These
correspond to the following:
o
2-Tier: Contributor (Create or Edit) -> Approver (Amend, Reject,
Publish)
o
3-Tier: Contributor (Create or Edit) -> Approver
(Accept/Amend/Reject) -> Webmaster (Amend, Reject, Publish)
o
Referral: Users can forward content on to any other CMS user
(subject to their security rights)
The content can be revoked by the contributor up until the approval point. If not,
it can then be amended, approved or returned (with comments) by the Approver
and/or Webmaster and is accompanied at each step by e-mail notification.
Content re-use - Contensis provides extensive options for content re-use. (Note:
As well as the following features, some of the optional modules also enable reuse especially the Micro-Site Wizard and Synchronisation Module Service
Definitions.
o
Shared Content/HTML Snippets: This involves a separate chunk of
content being created (e.g. Address/Contact details) that is stored
in the repository and can be inserted into any web page as
required. When it is updated and the changes are approved then
all instances within pages are automatically updated.
o
Mini Templates: These are believed to be a unique feature of
Contensis not available in other CMS products. They are similar to
Shared Content described above, but as their name suggests they
are template based. Therefore it is possible to change the
surrounding presentation template in a single place and have all
pages that use the mini template updated automatically. This is
particularly useful with rebranding exercises as it removes the
search and replace that often takes place in other systems.
o
Dynamic Components: Contensis has numerous dynamic delivery
components that can render lists of content, e.g. list all word
documents within a particular folder. These components can be
inserted, configured and ready to use in a matter of minutes.
o
Shadow Content: This feature of Contensis, provides a
straightforward mechanism for creating duplicate content in a
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separate area but only having to manage a single version.
However it is possible to override the meta-data for the shadow
copy and to set specific properties such as include in menu,
search, etc.
o
Link “Libraries”: It is straightforward to store sets of links in a folder
which editors can then drop into a page but not amend. This is
particularly useful for “authorised” external links.
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Service Definition: Capabilities for
Designers & Developers
Templates
Templating is probably one of the most crucial areas that you must evaluate when
choosing a Content Management System. How the templating works will have a
dramatic effect on the implementation of your system and on-going branding
requirement.
We believe that Contensis has one of the best templating engines in the industry and we will endeavour to show you why.
The Template Framework
Ability to implement any design that can be created in XHTML
HTML5 support as standard
Enables Accessible Content to AAA standards
Full Workflow
Full Versioning
Full model for site re-branding
Mini Templates
Code Integration
Bespoke Web Controls
Template editing overview
Template editing can be carried out directly through the CMS WYSIWYG interface.
Creating a template is as simple as copying and pasting the relevant HTML source
code into the system and then adding extra components to it, such as placeholders.
Typically a design will start its life in a tool such as Photoshop, Fireworks or InDesign.
The next phase is to actually cut the template into HTML and CSS. Normally this
would be done for every variation of the template and it can still be done in this way,
but the templating engine in Contensis allows us to improve the implementation times
by providing a 'componentised' approach to templates.
The first step will normally be to identify the common elements of the template, which
normally consists of a footer, header and main content section. This is what we
would call the Base Template and this is what we would first create in the system.
Utilising the sub- template functionality, we may make this template from a separate
footer, header and content template or we could create it as a single entity - it just
depends on the scenario.
Once the Base Template is created, we can then start building on this by creating a
range of variation. Normally we would construct the other layouts, what we call
Framework Templates, such as a two column or three column layout, for example. At
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this stage we will probably also start adding elements such as localised text if we are
working on a multilingual site, menus and breadcrumbs.
Because templates can be created by dragging and dropping other templates into
each other, you will never be in the situation of having to update the footer on each of
the different page templates again - a single source of change is all that is required.
We have actually done real-world tests with our in-house professional services
department, with the same person creating a template in the traditional way and the
Contensis way, and found that we can reduce implementation times by up to 40%.
Obviously if you prefer to have completely separate HTML and disconnected
templates for each page type, then this is still just as easy. The choice is yours.
Because the templates are content in Contensis, just like the CSS, you have all the
standard benefits of the system, including full versioning, auditing and workflow. As a
template developer, once you are happy with your template you can simply submit it
for approval, and once approved the template will then publish to the live site, and
update every page that uses it.
As templates are standard content you also have the ability to set publishing
schedules on templates, so you may like to push the new site look-and-feel live on
Friday at 8pm after you have gone home!
Separation of Design & Content
Separating the design and presentation from the content is extremely important in
today’s Multi Channel world.
The template engine allows you to achieve this separation successfully by allowing
unlimited numbers of placeholders, so you can easily split the content from the
template.
It is also usual to restrict the buttons and styling options available to the user and
instead carefully style the different elements of a page, so a user can simply select a
Paragraph or a heading and the content will style automatically without having to
assign a dozen CSS classes.
Although we have many tools available in the WYSIWYG editor so we can tick boxes
in tenders and proposals, in most scenarios, if the design and CSS is created
properly, many of these can be turned off with no effect other than allowing your
users to create beautifully created content with very little effort.
When template creators insert placeholders into a template they have a wide range
of options available to control how the placeholder will behave and what the user can
do within it. This functionality is very important when aiming to keep a standard
corporate look-and-feel.
Standard placeholder options include;
Text Only - Only text can be placed within the placeholder; no other HTML such
as headings, for example.
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Max Length - This option allows you to determine the maximum number of
characters that a user can enter in the placeholder.
Constrain Images - This option allows you to specify maximum width and heights
that images can be inserted at into the placeholder.
Content Types - This option allows you to specify exactly what type of content
can be inserted into a placeholder - if you don't want images to be inserted, just
un-tick them.
Can Change Styles - This option specifies whether a user can utilise the CSS,
heading and paragraph options to apply style to the text content.
Tag To Render - Allows you to specify what HTML tag will render around the
content, or no tag at all.
CSS Class - Allows you to specify a CSS class against the placeholder.
Mini-Templates
Sub-Templates or Mini Templates, as some customers like to call them, allow you to
create pages and templates from a pre-created set of building blocks.
Many of our competitors offer snippets to achieve this functionality. The problem with
this is that the presentation gets stuck in the content and when you come to
completely re-brand the entire site it becomes near impossible.
CSS Assignment
CSS is an integral part of any template implementation. CSS can be assigned to
templates by default or forced to appear wherever the template is used. On top of
this you can also change the CSS at section or sub-section level - you may, for
instance, have different colour schemes for each part of the site. This is simple to
achieve just create the different variations and then assign them to the sections as
relevant.
You may wish to change the style sheets based upon user input or for
personalisation or browser compliance. We offer a simple set of methods to change
the style sheets at runtime, if you want to programmatically change the CSS
assignment based upon anything you deem relevant.
All types of style sheet Media are supported including, for example, print style sheets.
Code integration
If you are using our .Net publishing method, then it is possible to write .Net code
directly into the templates which either calls your own bespoke components or
assemblies or calls our Open API or the standard Microsoft .net framework.
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There are many reasons why having the ability to change execute code at runtime is
important. An example may be that you wish to show or hide a component on the
homepage of the site based upon a user's role.
A custom code example hiding or showing an element in the template based upon
group membership.
This example is very straightforward, but it just shows that any .Net code can be
executed that you choose - in this case we are calling the Page API to personalise
based upon the user's group membership. For those of you who are concerned that
the name of the group may change, you can also pass in the group ID (the above
example ID is for illustration purposes only).
If you are a Contensis customer then you can get a whole host of custom code
examples on our Support Website.
Multimedia
Media Gallery
The media gallery control can be embedded in a page. It provides visitors to the
website with a straight-forward means of viewing multiple images in a gallery format.
The control utilises a combination of components that you can see from the
screenshot including:
Automatic paging
RSS/Atom feeds
Lightbox functionality
Image download option
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Streaming Video
In today's web environment, streaming media is a must for almost every website out
there. In Contensis creating streaming media couldn't be easier. Typically, streaming
video or media is being created using Flash Video or FLV, as many of you will know
it. Contensis supports FLV content natively but also supports many other video
formats such as MPG, AVI and many more.
This screenshot shows Latest Videos; as you click on the videos they will “lightbox”
up to a full screen;
Streaming Video in the Media Gallery: The Media Gallery control has automatic
support for Flash Video, so as you navigate the Media Gallery you can navigate
images and Flash Videos.
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Industry Standard Player: Rather than reinventing wheels Contensis provides
support for the LongTail Video JW Player. This player is one of the only solutions
which tick all the boxes from an accessibility viewpoint. When you commit to a
Contensis SAAS contract, you will have a licence to use the JW Player on as many
sites as you are licensed for with Contensis.
Streaming Video from any page: Adding a video to a page is simple with
Contensis. All you need do is drag and drop a video from the Contensis Repository
and you are done. If you want to insert a Video from a different source such as a
streaming media server or provider, then just add the URL.
Content, File & Media Types
Contensis is designed to handle any content type that is relevant to the web or
indeed any application, and in practice this is exactly what our existing clients do.
They can upload and publish content in any of the following formats;
Multimedia: FLV, JPEG, GIF, BMP, PNG, MOV, MPEG, AVI, WMF, ASF, WAV,
MP3, WMV, MP4, OGG, SWF
Documents: DOC, DOCX, PDF, PPT, XLS, XML, XSLT
Web Pages/Content: HTML/XHTML, ASPX, ASP, PHP
The full list of supported files has over seventy types. When a new file type comes
into use we add this to the standard set of file types for Contensis; a recent example
is SRT (SubRip Captions Format) used for video subtitles.
Search
General
The Contensis “Standard Search Engine” is part of the overall CMS product and has
been developed as the underlying toolkit that we use to create any search which our
clients require – and it is far from “standard”.
Using the Contensis Search as the core engine for your search will satisfy all of the
underlying technical requirements, so that we can concentrate on building the search
functionality outlined. The design phase will create the visuals and layout of your
searches which we will implement as a set of templates and mini-templates, so that
they sit neatly within the overall site design.
Functional abilities of the search include:
Absolutely all content is included in the indexing process
Detect and respond to misspelling of terms
Detect and respond to terms with relevant synonyms (“Thesaurus” functionality)
Assign field weightings, including “compulsory” results
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Boolean Query Support
Hit Highlighting
Configurable Data Sources
Respects Permissions
Thumbnail Image support
Word Stemming
Nesting and concatenation of search features into single “advanced search”
Search term logging & reporting
Starting with this “kit of parts” and assembling them, the full rich functionality of your
search can be built up without the need for any significant new bespoke work. In
particular, the search process will be configurable. Initially this will be undertaken by
our Professional Services Team who are implementing your intranet, but we will hand
this over to your control, with the required knowledge transfer and documentation, so
that tweaks can be made to how critical search.
This screen shows a standard search results control, without any extra styling
applied:
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Advanced Search
The advanced search allows users to specify other search criteria to refine their
search results further. The variety of searches that can be produced is enormous,
from Boolean logic,
to comprehensive implementations such as this one for the European University
Institute;
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Security, indexing and search inclusion
Securing your Search: Using the Contensis standard or enterprise search, you can
simply tick a box to enable permissions. Once you have ticked the box, the user
doing the searching will only get the results they have permission to see. It is as
simple as that.
If you want the results to be shown, but for the user to be sent to a call to action or
access denied screen when they attempt access, just don't tick the enable
permissions box.
Many search systems have problems when implementing permissions, especially
when the permissions can be completely granular. The Contensis Search gets
around this problem, and allows for a totally permission-sensitive search to be carried
out.
Include in Search: Within Contensis, at both folder and content level, it is possible to
include and exclude items from the search. This functionality can be very useful as it
gives individual editors the choice of whether their content is to be returned when a
search is executed.
The options can be accessed from the properties tab at any time whilst editing any
piece of content or, if you are a folder administrator, you can make changes in bulk to
content and folders in the section for which you have administration rights.
Indexing: The Contensis indexing service has the job of indexing all content in the
Contensis repository. Quite simply, as soon as a new piece of content is uploaded or
created, the indexing engine will go to work to index it for search purposes.
Social Media integration
At its simplest, many of our clients have links to Facebook, Twitter etc., often within a
full set of social bookmarking links in the footer, such as the following example:
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Where a client organisation has their own Facebook or Twitter account, the
Contensis RSS control can be used to update Facebook with selected content,
thereby avoiding double-working of content. The RSS Feed Reader is also designed
to properly handle Twitter feeds.
This means that you can have a Twitter feed up-and-running showing the Twitter
source without any extra configuration.
Because Twitter sets the title and the description of the feed item to be the same, we
recommend hiding the description, which is just another one of the standard options
available on the control.
Most recently, we have packaged up the Facebook controls so that they can be
dropped into a Contensis page without the need for any technical skills. Controls
include;
Like It
Comments
Recommendations
Recent Activity
Combined Like with Comments
They have also been made to produce accessible pages, which the “raw” Facebook
code does not.
We have an additional-cost Social Media Module which manages the creation and
publishing of content to Twitter (see Social Media Manager Service Definition).
Site Tools
Download as a PDF
The Download as PDF control can be embedded on any page in a site, typically
embedded in your main template as part of a site tools menu or similar. As with all
other controls, just a simple click and insert and it is up-and-running. The control has
the option to use print stylesheets, in which case the PDF will look like a printed
document.
Print this Page
The print page control is there to take the hassle out of producing an accessible but
functional site. In essence, the print control creates a hyperlink that, when clicked,
will ask the browser to print the current page the end user is viewing. The control
supports setting a static print page that is used to explain to users how to print, if they
are using a browser that does not support script, for example.
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Send to a Friend Controls
The Send to a Friend control can be embedded in any web page. All you need do is
link to the page with the Send to a Friend control and your end users can start
sharing your content. The control comes with a standard simple theme, so there is no
need for any specific styling unless you want your own look and feel.
Social Bookmarking: If you want to embed a social bookmarking tool, such as the
one we use on this site, to share the page with Facebook, Digg or any other site, all
you need do is paste a few lines of JavaScript into your page template. Because
there are so many providers such as AddThis.com and ShareThis.com we see no
point in specialising in a particular vendor. Typically one of these services can be
configured and implemented in a few minutes.
Syndication
Contensis has been designed at every level to cater for the needs of syndication,
whether it be automatically available syndication in virtually every one of our lists
such as What's New, News, Events, Blogs etc. or a bespoke syndication where you
want to create a very specific feed that has nothing to do with your actual page layout
and presentation.
Syndicating content from other sites
All we need is the URL of the feed – such as the BBC news headlines feed - and we
can then paste this into our syndication control. To improve performance the RSS
Feed Reader can also cache the data for a time duration of your choice.
The RSS Feed Reader is also designed to properly handle Twitter feeds. This means
that you can have a Twitter feed up-and-running showing the Twitter source without
any extra configuration.
The RSS Feed Reader can either be formatted as an unordered list or a series of
paragraphs. The control comes with a standard theme that will style it automatically if
your designers have not prepared a specific stylesheet for it. As with all Contensis
controls the source code is accessible, semantic and XHTML compliant.
Syndicating content from your site
RSS in Standard Controls: Syndicating content out to other sites couldn't be
simpler. In Contensis most of the standard controls support RSS and Atom natively.
For example, in the What's New control, all you need do is leave all the options as
default when you insert it into your page or template, and the RSS Link and Atom
Link will automatically appear. Virtually every Contensis list control supports RSS
ranging from social networking to jobs.
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Creating a Custom RSS or Atom Feed: If the RSS produced by any of the lists is not
appropriate then you can create a custom RSS feed using the RSS Feed Writer
control. This control allows you to include/exclude any content from your entire site,
and present it on a URL of your choice. The selection of content is driven by query,
so as new content is applicable it will start appearing in the feed. The website visitor
is presented with a standard RSS feed output when visiting a URL that is served by
the RSS feed.
RSS AutoDiscovery: Contensis fully supports RSS AutoDiscovery.
Accessibility
The accessibility features detailed below are available to be inserted into a web page
design. These are the visible elements that can assist users with particular needs to
read and navigate your content. The majority of the accessibility functionality offered
by Contensis happens before content is published - for details on this please see
Quality Assurance Module Service Definition.
Sometimes it is important (or useful) to re-format the way a web page is rendered in
order for someone to view it, for example where site visitors are visually impaired or
dyslexic and require a screen reader to read the text for them. Someone else might
be using an old device to view the content. Using the tools below you can publish
content knowing that it will be accessible to as many users as possible.
The Text-only button provides the user with a fast loading page with text rendered in
a high contrast format. This feature differs from the Style-sheet Switcher in that the
formatting is removed as well as any images. The text-only version is not only
beneficial for users that require high contrast colours on fonts, it is also great for
viewing web pages on legacy devices or on slow internet connections.
Stylesheet Switcher
As well as addressing the need for content to be accessible for people using screen
readers, effort is being spent to address the needs of visitors that don't use screen
readers at all but do find certain colours or font-sizes a challenge. Users of your
website or intranet can use the Stylesheet Switcher to pick the version that will
enable them to view the content in a format appropriate to them.
The Stylesheet Switcher offers different versions of the stylesheet that controls the
layout, fonts and colour scheme for the design. With a different stylesheet a user with
vision problems can use a version with bigger fonts, no irrelevant graphics and a
layout that will make sense when magnified on the screen.
Each accessible stylesheet is developed at the same time as the rest of the design is
built into Contensis.
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Font-size Selector
By adding the Font-size Selector to a website you allow visitors to set the size of the
text to their preference. This provides a quick and intuitive method of adjusting the
text size for users with poor vision without the need for special tools.
Text-only Button
The Text-only button provides the user with a fast loading page with text rendered in
a high contrast format. This feature differs from the Style-sheet Switcher in that the
formatting is removed as well as any images. The text-only version is not only
beneficial for users that require high contrast colours on fonts, it is also great for
viewing web pages on legacy devices or on slow internet connections.
The Permissions Framework
Permissions are easy to configure, but at the same time entirely granular. If you want
to do it a certain way, there will be a way of configuring it within the Contensis
permissions system.
Permissions are completely granular in Contensis, and combine a range of
parameters:
What CMS users can do (Create/Edit/Delete/Approve etc)
Where they are allowed and what is visible to them, at any level from a
placeholder, to a folder, groups of folders, sections/microsites to an entire
project. For example, a user may have little access to the overall website, other
than one microsite where they have full control, in effect acting as “local
webmaster” for a small section.
Which content types the user can work with, enabling you to limit who can use
PDFs for example
Which templates the user can choose from when creating new content
Whether they can see and/or access any of the system administration functions
What content formats and types are allowed within the placeholders that make
up each template
It is worth noting that permissions are not only used internally within the system, to
control content creation, approval and editing, but also, if required, to restrict access
to different parts of a published website. Keeping permissions all in one place
ensures there are no mistakes, as you can easily comprehend access permissions
for any piece of content in a couple of clicks.
Implementing permissions on published websites
Implementing permissions on your published websites couldn't be more
straightforward. You simply need to update a couple of config settings to enable
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authentication and the permissions will kick-in. Having the permissions totally
integrated within the CMS allows the contributors and managers of different sections
to decide which content can surface.
This screen shows secure content visible to a registered user:
We find that many projects no longer have a separate sense of intranet, extranet and
website; they are all the same site. The only thing that separates them is the
permissions you assign to different types of user.
Securing your Search
Using the Contensis standard or enterprise search, you can simply tick a box to
enable permissions. Once you have ticked the box, the user doing the searching will
only get the results they have permission to see. It is as simple as that.
Securing your Menus
If you want to know more about Menus then visit our section on Navigational
controls. In this area we are simply highlighting that if you want to, you can enable
permission checking on menus. This means that users logging in with different
permissions will see different content in the site menu.
Many of our customers use this on their extranets to show certain information to
clients and other information to suppliers. It is another simple method of
personalising the experience to the visiting user.
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Often you can use this functionality in conjunction with a CRM. If you know that your
customer has purchased x level of membership, then give them permission to see all
the documentation; whereas if they have a lower level of membership they can
perhaps see less content. A simple CRM integration is all that is required to achieve
this type of functionality.
Securing General Content
We have looked at hiding items using permissions from the menus and the search.
The content side is the final piece of the puzzle. You can configure exactly which
users and groups are able to see which content. This functionality relies on
permissions being configured and is totally granular.
Enabling a Folder Password
Folder password protection is exactly what it says it is. You simply assign a password
to a folder and thereafter anyone attempting access will be prompted to enter a
password. This functionality is very useful when you want to give out blanket access
to anyone with a password. The accounts will not lock and all you need is the
password.
Often this is useful when you wish delegates from an event to be able to access a
shared resource, or for a publisher publishing web resources when marketing a book.
A simple password is all that should be required.
Content Editor’s Perspective
From the perspective of a content editor, permissions couldn't be more
straightforward. Permissions are used to allow access to certain areas of the system,
everything from editing to authorisation. Administrators can choose which sections of
the site a user has access to create, edit, authorise and delete new content or
folders.
If the administrator decides, you may only see a single folder out of 10,000 in a CMS.
The permissions are completely granular.
Page Element-Level Permissions
Even if you want to control permissions for editing element-level parts of a page, this
is straightforward.
The most common requirement for this is on a website homepage. Normally we find
that most homepages actually contain very little static data, as the homepages are
fed from other sections of the site automatically. News and events are probably the
most common and they both have full permissions enabled.
If you only want a single box or feature area to be controlled by specific individuals,
then the quickest way to implement this is using HTML snippets or sub-templates.
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Creating pages in this way ensures that the workflow, versioning and permissions
can be controlled even down to a single paragraph.
CMS Administrator’s Perspective
Groups/Roles: Groups, or roles as some people may like to call them, are an integral
part of the permissions system. Normally when assigning permissions you will be
assigning them against particular groups. These groups may have just been created
in Contensis or could be groups that have been synchronised and already exist in
your Active Directory.
The management of users in groups is very flexible; it can be managed through AD
or through Contensis, sometimes even a combination of the two.
There are currently three different types of group:
Organisational Units - If you use our Who's Who module, organisational units
can be used to group and categorise your staff into departmental structure within
the organisation.
Security Group - Security groups are there purely for the purpose of permissions
assignment; all group types can be used for permissions assignment, but this is
the default type of group.
Community Groups - Community groups are there to support our Social
Networking, Forums and other modules.
Groups can be nested within groups to any level in much the same way as you have
come to expect with services such as Active Directory from Microsoft. Having “group
within group” functionality makes permissions straightforward, flexible and scalable.
Group Integration: As standard, Contensis integrates with Active Directory. When a
group is AD integrated it will show up slightly differently all over the system. An
example has been demonstrated below.
Active Directory User Group Icon
Wherever groups are available to assign, create, delete or
edit, you will instantly recognise the type of group by the icon.
Standard User Group Icon
Wherever groups are available to assign, create, delete or
edit, you will instantly recognise the type of group by the icon.
You can use our API to integrate with any other group membership system.
Previously, customers have integrated with CRM or even bespoke internal systems.
Integration is straightforward.
Users: Users are probably one of the most important areas we can look at. Users are
going to be at the heart of your content management system, making it come alive
and deliver what your organisation requires from it. At the other end of the scale,
users of the published solution, which may be an extranet, intranet or website, are all
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managed through the same user management interface, which gives you a high level
of control and a simple approach to user management.
Because we are catering for both system users and end users, there is a lot of
functionality available for users;
Self-updateable user profiles both through the CMS and website interface.
Ability to opt-in and out of different system notifications both for traditional CMS
purposes as well as activity from social networking and forums, as an example.
Full user integration with any third party user management system that can be
interfaced in some manner through .NET.
Full native support for Active Directory synchronisation.
User-level permissions available to assign to any piece of content.
Personalised dashboards at CMS level, as well as full personalisation options.
Google integration for Google Mail, Docs and RSS.
Who's Who integration to show and provide searchable interactive organisational
staff or user directories.
When we are looking at users purely from a permissions perspective, we can assign
any permission to an individual user, but more commonly we would assign
permissions to groups of which users are a member.
Membership & Personalisation
Personalisation Framework
The Contensis Personalisation Framework is part of the Contensis API. It provides a
framework that allows web developers to introduce explicit and implicit
personalisation into their website with ease and with no limitations.
There are two options for delivering personalisation using the framework, through
either explicit or implicit processes.
Explicit personalisation is fully catered for through the provision of authentication
controls. You can find details about the log on control, registration control and profile
control by visiting the Control Gallery on our website. Contensis also provides built in
AD integration.
Implicit personalisation is handled using components available from the Contensis
Personalisation Framework. Every page on the site will have the implicit log-on
control available, provided through the base template. This means that when a user
hits the site for the first time, an implicit user account is set up automatically.
Rules are configured through the use of custom code; these are typically a single line
of code to record the fact that a user has visited a section of the site for example and
to attach them to a personalisation group. Individual items of content, listings,
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galleries can then be controlled to display or not through the membership to the
personalisation groups on an individual basis.
The implicit log on control also captures any referral information, Google/Bing/Yahoo
search terms, IP address and regional settings. This allows for the use of suggesting
lists of content when the user first hits your site based on this initial hit.
The framework also provides options to utilise both session storage for single visits
or cookie storage for multiple visits. When cookies are used, the framework prompts
the user of this use so that it conforms to the EU directive on the use of cookies. If
the user declines then the framework automatically switches to session storage.
User Login - Creating a login is straight-forward
In many systems creating a full login and authentication system would be complex. In
Contensis you can have permissions and a login system up-and-running in minutes.
This screenshot shows the standard login control with the simple theme applied;
The Login Control
The login control can be added to any page, but typically you would create a page
called "access-denied" and a page called "login". Once this has been done, simply
add the control to the page and it is now configured. The login control supports
remembering login, and password change requests based upon password expiry, for
example. When remembering a password, the system stores a 3-Des encrypted
cookie on the users browser.
Getting to a login
Typically users of a site will get to the login page because they have clicked on a link
that requires authentication. You may, however, want user to be able to login to a
typical member's area, at any time whilst they are on the site. If this is the case, we
have a control that supports this called Login/Out link. This control allows the user to
quickly either logon or logout based upon their current login status. This control is
fully cache compliant and will work even if you have caching enabled on your site. At
any point a user can login or out from the bar they have implemented into their
templates.
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Active Directory Integration
If you are using Internet Explorer, you can configure the site to automatically login
from the credentials of your local Active Directory. In other words, your users don't
even have to logon because they are already logged onto their computer. In other
browsers, or circumstances, such as accessing an extranet over the internet, this is
not possible, as the user may be in an Internet Cafe, for example. In this case the
login functionality is fully supported using the Contensis standard login control, and
the user will be able to authenticate using their Active Directory credentials.
Open API
Many of our competitors will say that they have an extensible API that you can use.
Our product is architected in such a way that our User Interface and Services use our
API.
This means that anything that we can do in the UI you can do through code. You may
wish to automate processes; you may wish to create a specific tool for a specific
department to contribute content in a tailored manner. Whatever your needs, the
tools are there. If you come on one of our Developer Training courses we will give
you the knowledge and examples to create almost anything you desire.
The system also has a plug-in architecture that allows you to extend it e.g. add new
buttons or create new reports. This gives you the flexibility to cater for very specific
needs and you can do all this without affecting the ability to upgrade the system at
any time you desire.
The system is written in the latest .Net framework 4.0 which means that your
developers can use Visual Studio to interact with the API and utilise all the
Intellisense and features that Microsoft provide for us out of the box. The nonchargeable Express versions of visual studio can deliver on all of the standard
requirements you are likely to have.
Although our API is not open source, we are more than happy to provide our
customers with code if required. In a recent case, a University customer requested
the code to one of our navigational controls so they could extend it slightly. Naturally,
our first call was 'can we include your requirement in an upgrade?'. However, after a
detailed analysis, it was deemed that the change was so bespoke that no other
customers would benefit, so we simply provided the developer in question with the
source code of our control and they went on to update and extend it to meet their
locally-specific requirements.
We are very open with our customers and, as long as we are not giving away core
sensitive code, we are more than happy with this kind of approach. We are even
considering the idea at present of making our non-licensed web control code
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available so any of our customers can see how things are done - a route that
Microsoft themselves have taken with great benefit to the community.
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Service Definition: Information Assurance
Zengenti Limited is accredited to ISO 27001 which means our Cloud-based services
can be compatible with IL2 certification with little effort.
And our SaaS services are capable of being delivered up to IL3 if appropriately
accredited datacentres are used.
Contensis is certified to ISO 9001:2008 and we have internal policies and procedures
including Risk Management and Disaster Recovery that are followed by our staff, to
ensure a first class service is maintained throughout.
We can also confirm that our systems are regularly exposed to penetration testing
carried out on our instructions, but also carried out on request from our high profile
clients.
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Service Definition: Service Management
On-boarding
Contensis provides you with many facilities to get you started; they include migration
tools, sample sites, co-ordinated training, fully-documented online support site, with
video and textual tutorials.
Our migration services can operate on the basis of any electronic content format.
From sign off, a new system can be installed and ready to go within one week.
Off-boarding
In the rare event clients leave the Contensis system, there is a full XML based export
option. This allows selective export of all the content, structure and meta data that is
held within the system enabling clients to move onto another platform.
Service Level and Constraints
All servicing and maintenance within the cloud environment will be carried out during
out of hours (UK) and will ensure that service availability is maintained at 99.9% and
above.
Support Service Level Agreement
Zengenti Limited provide a comprehensive support service for the Contensis CMS
and any related modules.
The formal arrangements for support follow the provisions of the matrix below, which
forms the basis for our support contract. It is the client’s choice to determine the
severity of the support issue, and hence the response level required.
Definition Receipt
Response Resolution
1
Business Standstill/ Immediate 30 Mins
Critical
8 Hours
2
Major User Problem 60 Mins
4 Hours
2 working days
3
Minor Problem/ 4 Hours
Enhancement
Request
8 Hours
3 working days
& prioritise
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Receipt is defined as acknowledging the incident has been logged.
Response is defined as a suitably qualified consultant contacting the client to start
investigations.
Resolved is defined as having produced and implemented a solution, which is
working in the production environment.
Escalation
The client may escalate a call at any time. The following escalation path is listed for
guidance;
Level 1:
Head of Development
Level 2:
Support Manager
At each escalation point, the company will respond with an action plan and timescale
for implementation, in agreement with you.
Support is normally provided for system administrators and developers and this
would be provided by our Support site, telephone and e-mail.
Support cover is provided during normal office hours, usually 8am – 6pm UK time.
Outside these hours, support will also be available but not guaranteed. However,
Zengenti as a matter of principle would always make every reasonable endeavour to
assist you whenever practically possible.
Whilst high-level support will only be provided for the Contensis system, assistance
will also be provided for any other software tightly integrated with Contensis, but
advanced level support for this software is not guaranteed. (e.g. SQL Server, IIS,
.NET Framework).
Backup & Disaster Recovery
We utilise VEEAM to backup all Virtual Machines. Typically backups are carried out
once every day. If you require more frequent backups then this is normally achieved
using either increased schedules in VEEAM or SAN level snapshots of volumes.
SAN level snapshots or volumes are particularly useful for services such as SQL
server as we can for example set up snapshots automatically every 5 minutes if
needed without any loss of performance.
Backups are all written to disc and discs are cycled and taken off site weekly.
In the event of total failure at the primary Data Centre we have the provision to
restore the live web servers at another location. If you need this level of DR we can
even configure VEEAM to keep a replicated server at another one of sites.
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How to raise a support issue
Support issues can be raised directly through our online Helpdesk. Priority 1 issues
are immediately messaged to relevant support staff by SMS. You can also phone or
email to alert us to an issue, but this will then need to be entered into the Helpdesk
queue.
Service Roadmap
Contensis is constantly being developed in line with customer expectations. These
are gauged partly through our constant, multiple contacts with clients and the
requirements and enhancements they identify. We also provide a specific Wish List
forum, where users record their ideas, including their urgency and priority. We collate
these and feed them in priority order into the development path. And the frequent
User Groups also act as direct input to our development plans, both in terms of
functionality and priority.
The Contensis Development Team operate according to the Sprint development
cycle. As a result, the software is subject to one major and two interim upgrades per
year.
In addition to these stable versions, we also release monthly hot-fix roll-ups. There
are regular knew versions posted by the development team, so if you need to get
hold of functionality we are currently working on, it is immediately downloadable from
the support site.
Zengenti Limited will apply all upgrades to the service, in a manner designed to
eliminate downtime.
Help Facilities
Contensis has a full on-line help facility which covers virtually every aspect of the
system and is fully searchable. Whilst most on-going (after launch) support is
provided by e-mail through a ticketed system, telephone help will always be provided
when appropriate. It is normal for the relationships built during project build to
continue as an on-going dialogue which is maintained by careful account
management.
Training
We offer a full range of training packages covering every aspect of the system. Our
on-line help system contains a set of video tutorials which are a valuable training
resource which can be accessed as and when required. From a user perspective this
means that newcomers to the system can quickly get up to speed and learn at their
own pace.
The actual training requirement is carefully assessed during the implementation
phase when we will propose a training schedule based upon individual project needs.
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Wherever possible, we work on a cascade training basis, in order to minimise cost
and time commitment.
Training Modules
Training is normally split into the following sessions. Each of these sessions focuses
upon different aspects of Contensis; however, there is inevitably some overlap
depending upon the role of the user.
User training (‘Train the trainer’ sessions) – creating/editing/publishing
It is recommended that users having user training have basic IT skills including word
processor knowledge.
Administrator training (Requires user training) – system administration of the
Contensis CMS.
It is recommended that users having administrator training have basic IT skills and
the understanding of how systems are controlled through permissions and
restrictions.
Contensis Templates and Controls training (Requires both administrator and user
training) – implementing designs in Contensis templates using (X)HTML & CSS.
It is recommended that users having template, controls and forms training have IT
design skills and ideally experience with Dreamweaver or similar products.
Developer training – new modules & bespoke extensions/integrations/migrations
using the API.
It is recommended that users having developer training are programmers with web
application experience.
Full system documentation and training manuals for Contensis are made available
24/7 via the Contensis support site. The manuals are provided as PDF documents
and are available as articles within our Support site. In addition to the manuals there
are also videos available on our support site, these show how to use certain areas of
the system such as the editor, image library, etc… The videos are available as FLVs
that are embedded in the support site. We can make them available as standalone
videos that can be distributed to users if required.
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Data restoration/service migration
The environment is fully backed up with incremental backups carried out on a daily
basis. Restorations can be made on request although this may incur costs.
A full service migration of content or environment is possible through XML export or
production of a virtual server image.
Consumer responsibilities
It is the responsibility of the client to ensure that there is always a contact available to
prevent delays in service delivery or issue resolution.
Technical requirements
Contensis is a web based product, therefore clients requires one of the following
browsers;
IE 8+
Chrome (latest)
Safari (latest)
Firefox (latest)
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Service Definition: Pricing & Contracts
Licence scaling
The Contensis CMS services are available in four licence levels, which cover the
complete range of project scales.
All functionality described in this document is the same for these four licences, since
they differ only in the numbers of users and websites.
All services include hosting for the CMS and the published websites, and technical
support for the CMS.
Definitions
Users – all licences are based on average concurrent CMS users, not total users.
Website users are not relevant to this definition.
Projects – a project is a single navigation interface to a collection of content. A
project can contain unlimited microsites, designs, secure areas and be accessed with
multiple URLs.
Prices – cost is quoted in GBP per calendar month exclusive of VAT.
LICENCE
Concurrent
users
Projects
Cost per
month
Lite
2
1
£298
Standard
5
1
£723
Professional
10
2
£1,275
Enterprise
Unlimited
Unlimited
£2,550
Expanding the service
During the course of a contract, clients on the Lite, Standard and Professional
services can add additional concurrent users (£35/month) and projects (£84/month).
We undertake a full range of Digital Agency services, including design, IA/UX,
implementation, migration, bespoke development and consultancy. The day rate for
these is £800 per day.
Data extraction
Our standard data extraction rate is £100/hour or £800/day.
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Financial recompense model
Zengenti Limited are committed to providing a service that permanently meets 99.9%
uptime. Where we are unable to achieve this level, we will provide a credit system
that reduces the cost of the service as invoiced to the client.
Where the service fails to reach this level of availability, the expected payment will be
reduced by a percentage equivalent to the difference between 99.9% and the %
which the service did actually provide, on a per month basis.
Ordering and invoicing process
We anticipate invoicing on a monthly basis, under a Purchase Order which remains
in force for the agreed term. However, other arrangements proposed by the
prospective client can be considered. All figures quoted are net of VAT.
Contract terms
Minimum contract period
The minimum contract period for the service is three (3) months.
By consumers (i.e. consumption)
Zengenti Ltd requires notice of three full months to cancel.
By the Supplier (removal of the G-Cloud Service)
Zengenti Ltd will give you at least six months notice of our intention to cease any
service. However, we must stress that this is considered extremely unlikely to occur,
as we have substantial numbers of existing clients using the full range of our
software on our hosting service already (i.e. pre G-Cloud), and need to maintain
these contracts in operation.
Trial service
We have sandpit versions of the CMS available which you can test out before
entering into a G-Cloud call-off contract with us.
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Annex 1: The Zengenti Cloud-based
Hosting Environment
General Overview
Contensis offer a private cloud hosting service, based on multiple UK datacentre
locations. The SAAS offering available through the G-Cloud framework uses all these
UK locations as standard, but clients could choose between specific datacentres if
required.
Infrastructure
The service is powered by utilising VMware vSphere 5, running on the latest DELL
R720 Servers, with 16 cores of E5-26600 2.20Ghz processors per server.
The service is split into Clusters of 3 physical servers, each powered by a state of the
art software based SAN running enterprise grade hard drives.
In each cluster services are split across all 3 servers, but only provisioned for 2
servers. The system is provisioned this way, so that in the event of any hardware
failure, within a matter of minutes, any servers can be instantly available on one of
the other two servers.
When we supply servers, we supply based upon disk space, Memory and CPU
power.
Due to the infrastructure new servers can be provisioned in minutes if required, and
upgrades can be carried out in seconds for areas such as HDD space and memory.
Resilience
The environments are each connected to separate providers using 1GB backbones,
and have 1GB interconnects between them, all using full BGP routing, so failures are
almost impossible.
Power is provided by UPS, and automatic dual redundant Backup generators are in
place to provide an indefinite power supply.
Every server has dual resilient hot-swappable power supplies.
For every 3 servers, a spare server is provided. This spare server allows complete
hardware failure on either of the other two in the cluster. If 2 servers were to be lost
out of the 3, the service would continue to run, but with limited and reduced
resources.
None of our Servers have any moving parts other than fans, as storage on board is
Solid State.
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Central storage is provided by multiple SANs, including both software based and Dell
Equalogics, which has DUAL on board controllers.
Memory, Disks, and even entire controllers can fail without any loss of operation.
All equipment is covered by Dell 4hr response, but in practise losing any component
of the system would not matter for days if required!
The entire system is networked using state of the art multiple switches, configured for
complete redundancy. In the event of any switch being unplugged, nothing on the
entire network will lose connection, as each server is connected into separate
switches.
Our firewall solution is dual honed. Firewalls can also lose all power or have total
failure, without any downtime for the environment.
We don’t just say it is resilient; we actually fully test every cluster, by physically
pulling power on switches, servers, SAN Controllers etc.
Security & Environment
Each customer has their own segregated network, so you can be assured your data
is not accessible by any other customer or service.
From a physical stand point we offer:
Extensive CCTV
Multipoint access control
24/7 security guard patrols
Air conditioning
Overhead cable management
Raised flooring
FM200 Gas Fire Protection.
Operating Systems
We run Microsoft Windows 2008R2 Datacentre edition across the board, which
ensures you have no limitations to what you may want to achieve with the servers.
We patch all servers as applicable for security updates, but once a month for other
updates.
Maintenance
Due to the power of VMotion, we can physically move your virtual servers, between
any server in the cluster or across datacentres in minutes (or seconds depending on
how busy they are), so maintenance to physical hardware, or upgraded such as
adding memory can be carried out at any time, without any downtime.
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Due to the fact that we would provide a clustered, or load balanced web server setup, we can also remove any server at any point without any loss of service. This
means Windows updates for example can be carried out without any loss of service.
We can hot add extra CPU, Memory and HDD space without any disruption to
running servers.
Load Balancing, and server resiliency
Even though in the event of a server failure, which is extremely unlikely, you will only
get a couple of minutes of downtime, we have to ensure that services are split across
physical servers to ensure no downtime at all.
Generally if you run Web Server applications, we will split the servers across
separate physical servers in the cluster and if necessary across different datacentres.
To balance the load across the web servers, we run a cluster of Load Balancers,
which are themselves split across our servers and datacentres. This ensures that it is
near impossible to loose even a second of service.
We utilise a load balancer called HAProxy, which runs on a FreeBSD operating
system.
This load balancer has not had a single security vulnerability in its existence, and is
used to power some of the largest sites in the world, including Twitter for example!
We can configure the load balancer so that it not only balances, but checks the
health of your site, and will stop sending requests to certain servers if the server
generates an issue.
Monitoring
We fully monitor all our operations, from both inside and outside of our network, this
ensures full coverage.
Monitoring covers everything from IP access, to disk space, to CPU and memory
consumption.
In the event of failure, we are notified by SMS and Email immediately. In practise with
the set-up we have, we only get an SMS once a day, for our SMS test, to ensure
monitoring is working correctly.
Backups
We utilise Veeam to backup all Virtual Machines. Typically backups are carried out
once every day. If you require more frequent backups then this is normally achieved
using either increased schedules in Veeam or SAN level snapshots of volumes. SAN
level snapshots or volumes are particularly useful for services such as SQL server as
we can for example set up snapshots automatically every 5 minutes if needed
without any loss of performance.
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Backups are all written to disc and discs are cycled and taken off site weekly.
In the event of total failure at the primary Data Centre we have the provision to
restore the live web servers at the secondary data centre. If you need this level of DR
we can even configure Veeam to keep a replicated server at another one of our
datacentre sites.
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