Let's get personal
I was especially pleased with how Tridion R5 handles personalization, which was very competitive with top-rated personalization products such as ATG Adaptive Scenario Engine. In my first test, R5's implicit profile management watched how anonymous visitors clicked through my site and then it generated content based on this behavior. For example, I created a section of my site for financial products. When the system noticed users clicking links in this area, I easily had a list of case history articles on my home page reordered so clients in the financial sector appeared at the top of the list.

The Bottom Line Tridion R5 Tridion, tridion.com Excellent  9.3 criteria score weight Ease-of-use 9 25% Features 10 25% Security 9 15% Scalability 9 15% Management 9 10% Value 9 10% Cost: Starts at $85,000, with largest configuration about $450,000 Platforms: Content Management Servers runs under Windows Server; Presentation Server runs in J2EE or .Net environments; supports Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle databases Bottom Line: Tridion R5 gets high grades all-around as a Web CMS. The core Content Manager's simple interfaces let end-users easily contribute content and manage Web sites. Structured XML content is then reused for, say, sites in different languages and adapted for alternate functions, including e-mail campaigns and print. This system's Audience Manager lets you gather information about visitors and personalize content to their interests. The system, additionally, builds in strong analytics and integrates with other enterprise systems. About our Reviews and Scoring Methodology

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Audience Manager let me create real-time connections with CRM systems (such as Siebel) and display content based on information stored in a customer database. Once users signed in, I presented a personalized micro site highly tailored to each person's interest.

The WebForms module is very helpful for both personalization and streamlining business processes. First, forms are easily designed by dragging and dropping predefined field types and saved directly to Content Manager. In that way, forms can be reused throughout your site. On the back end, collected information can be used right away to personalize pages, which can be submitted to other enterprise systems (this will admittedly take some help from your IT group), or used as part of other Tridion processes. One such process is Outbound E-mail. This R5 module let me create customized e-mails based on each person's content interests. I had no trouble creating these e-mail templates using Adobe InDesign CS3 and reusing images that were previously published as part of Web sites.

The smell of success
Measuring the success of these campaigns -- and your overall Web presence -- is another task where Tridion R5 excels. In the case of e-mail, built-in statistics showed whether visitors read e-mails. I then drilled down to view the click-through rate for each link in the e-mail. Moreover, R5's general Web analytics match up well to stand-alone products such as WebTrends and Omniture. For example, R5 overlays helpful statistics on each Web page about the popularity of content. When I spotted sections with little interest, the system's A/B testing feature helped me modify the message and verify if changes increased interest in various articles.

Beyond targeting content to different Web servers, R5 provides additional slants on scalability. One, called BluePrinting, let me share (ghost) content, layouts, and visitor profiles from a parent Web site to many other sites, which is essential in managing global sites that require some localization.

Using the graphical BluePrinting interface, I quickly created various country sites and language repositories. But what I liked the best was the how R5 handles most of the logic automatically. For instances, I had Canada English and French sites; the French site automatically displayed English content (based on content pulled from the U.S. English pages) whenever a local translated version was not available. What's more, when the original English content changed, an e-mail notification was sent to employees who managed the international sites so they could update their translated pages.

R5 includes basic content versioning. Still, I believe you should take a hard look at the optional Archive Manager. This module let me retrieve an archived Web page or an entire site for a specific date, time, or visitor profile. It's easy to configure the system to keep records for a certain time -- and schedule or manually remove content. Beyond keeping a site copy for historic needs, this system would also be very valuable for regulatory compliance or in legal liability cases where you might need to prove use of trademarks, say.

I have a hard time finding fault with Tridion R5. It does just about everything I look for in a contemporary Web content manager. Content is easy to create and manage; you can then deliver it in multiple ways. Personalization is perhaps the hottest topic these days, and R5's audience targeting keeps up with the big names in this area. I was also impressed with the way BluePrinting handles global Web sites. If there's a slight weakness with Tridion, it's connecting with other systems. But even here, the business and portal connectors, plus R5's XML architecture, should make integration with back-office systems possible without requiring a complex integration project.