EPiServer Relate, the package to EPiServer CMS containing Community and Mail, is released in a new version today - EPiServer Relate R2. As you may have noticed, we have removed the plus sign and you will from now on forward only hear us talk about Relate when referring to our social offering.

Relate can be used for many different types of sites, but they can usually be divided into the following three categories:

• Social website
  Make conversations happen, drive actions and earn revenue by adding social attributes to your website.
• Social  community
  Interact with your fans and grow the community around your brand with campaigns and targeted offers.
• Social Extranet/Intranet
  Enable collaboration that that drives innovation with a real time news feed and social networking.

With EPiServer Relate R2, you will notice that we have focused a lot on making the integration between all products seamless. Here are some highlights:

Social Pages

CMS pages just became social, which means that they can be tagged, commented and rated. Click on "EPiServer Composer" in the tag cloud and you will not only see all the user contributed blogs about the product, but also the product information produced by the editors. If the page describing the personalization features in Composer R2 gets too many comments the editor can disable further commenting. He/she can also decide if the comments should be approved before shown on the site.

Search

The search now not only searches among the user submitted content, but also in articles and files created by the editors. This makes it possible to create facets that spans across all content.

Personalization

Personalization is the main theme for the R2 wave. In Relate we have included a personalization criterion for community members. This criterion makes it possible to target content to members in the community based on their profile information. For example, let's say you'd like to give all members living in Stockholm that have a Gold Card a special offer on the front page. You can now do this using the profile criterion in combination with the CMS. The power of the profile criterion is that a partner can easily add for example information about member level (bronze, silver, gold) and it can immediately be used by editors throughout the CMS, as well as for creating mailing lists in EPiServer Mail. This is very similar to the advertising system used by Facebook.

EPiServer Mail in OnlineCenter

EPiServer Mail is now part of OnlineCenter, making it easier to find and use.

Summary

With this release we’re bringing all our products closer together. The personalization is also one of the most asked for features in a community. Look at the possibilities for a travel company as an example. Anonymous users enter the site and get targeted content based on where they coming from and/or what they've searched for. When they've booked their first trip we can now target content both based on their surfing behavior (looked at Sheraton Stockholm 3 times) as well as previous booked trips (from London to Chicago for 2 persons). Hey, the next time they come to our site we just need to ask "What date would you like to travel from London to Stockholm?" or just go straight to booking the trip.

Next steps

• Check out the Relate demo site
• See how Relate can be used to build an Intranet.
• See how Relate can be used with Personalization.