Immediacy 6.0 also gives non-technical users more control over their web sites

Web content management (WCM) vendor Mediasurface has launched a major new version of its Immediacy WCM suite designed to further democratise the process of creating and managing compelling web content, and also helping firms' search engine optimisation.

Immediacy 6.0 allows users to publish content directly from SharePoint thanks to the Immediacy SharePoint Connector, making the system of content management more accessible to non-technical users, according to the firm's Matt Goode. Information can also be published directly back into SharePoint, he added.

"SharePoint is a brilliant collaboration tool but is still very technical-focused," he said. "We're enhancing the notion of the best of both worlds here – the technology people like SharePoint but the business people prefer ease-of-use."

Deployment speeds have also been improved according to Goode, with a new Deployment Server designed to speed the transfer of content from staging environment to production server.

Another major enhancement is the taxonomy and categorisation manager, which enables the extraction of key content from a web page and then categorises it against a taxonomy or folksonomy. Ultimately this will make search results for a site more relevant, said Goode.

Firms using Immediacy can also boost their search engine optimisation efforts because version 6.0 automatically generates XHTML-validated code, which is preferred by search engines.

Immediacy 6.0 also features more Web 2.0 functionality including blogging and forum capabilities, and RSS as standard.