Enterprise Functionality in EPiServer CMS 6

EPiServer CMS 6 provides enterprises with a powerful tool for managing large multiple site solutions with delegation of information work to many different contributors in the organization. The Enterprise edition of EPiServer CMS 6 enjoys additional features compared to the Professional edition. In this article we will explore the functionality included in the EPiServer CMS 6 Enterprise version.

Introduction

The Enterprise edition is intended for business critical single or multiple sites with high requirement on resilience and performance. To support this the Enterprise edition includes additional functionality in comparison with the Professional edition of EPiServer CMS 6.

The additional features of the Enterprise edition are:

• Staging
• WSRP (Web Services for Remote Portlets)
• Multi Site Management
• Load Balancing
• Custom Page Provider
• Oracle for Enterprises

Each of the functions are described in more detail in the following.

Staging

Large and complex websites often include staging servers. Staging can be used for both development, testing and content production.This provides a safer way to launch new sites and features of the solution. The staging server is a copy of the public production server, with integrations to the same external systems, but in an offline environment.

In content staging the editorial environment is separated from the public server environment.  All editing is done behind the firewall, and the content is pushed to the public site on the master server. This solution offers both control and security advantages.

With the use of high performance mirroring the staging solution allows you to preview, test and review website revisions on a production server before going live. When content is released in live versions it is automatically propagated to all servers. The Enterprise edition of EPiServer CMS 6 has full support for staging with Mirroring 2.0. 

Example of a content staging setup scenario

Example of the use of staging

WSRP

Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP)  is an interface for interacting with presentation oriented web services. The WSRP technique is useful when integrating systems with built in WSRP support, and offers a platform independent portlet exchange as dynamic plug-ins for portal pages. The EPiServer CMS 6 Enterprise edition has full support for WSRP.

Multi Site Management

With the Multi Site Management function in EPiServer CMS 6, all your websites can be managed in one place, from the Admin mode of EPiServer CMS 6. You can restart sites, and add new websites to your primary site, making them available immediately. Frome here, licenses can also be activated and updated.

NOTE Multi Site Management requires one license per site also for the Enterprise Edition of EPiServer CMS 6.

Load Balancing

With load balancing you can distribute the workload over multiple servers, thus enhancing speed, scalability and reliability of the platform. Load Balancing delivers high performance and failover protection, as well as the optimization of resources making system response time significantly faster. The Enterprise Edition allows for load balancing on up to four servers.

More about performance and load balancing in EPiServer CMS solutions

Custom Page Provider

Custom Page Providers is an integration method where you can access data in an external data store without moving the data into EPiServer CMS. The data will appear as pages in the tree structure but still resides in the original store, and can be viewed, edited and managed through EPiServer CMS. This allows for an integrated user experience with all the EPiServer CMS functions working as they normally would.

An EPiServer CMS 6 Enterprise license is required to add your own page provider to a commercial solution. Note that if you are developing using the in-built Web Server in Visual Studio, you can build Custom Page Providers, but once you run a site on IIS (test and production) they will no longer work.

More about Page Providers

Oracle for Enterprises

The EPiServer CMS 6 Enterprise Edition supports Oracle for Enterprise high performance needs. This is a widely used database solution for enterprises with complex system integration needs and strong requirements on performance and availability. 

Feature availability Enterprise vs. Professional

Below you will find a functionality comparison overview for the Professional and Enterprise editions of EPiServer CMS 6.

More about EPiServer CMS and licensing

References

• EPiServer Partner site (requires partner login) - licensing, pricing and sales tools
• Complex EPiServer projects - introduction to complex EPiServer project aspects, architecture. performance, integration, licensing etc.

Comments

Steven Smith Jul 18, 2012 01:06 PM

Nice overview for me with some interesting links.
Thanks!
Steve