Martin Malenovsky on Kentico Kontent's Web Spotlight Update

Matthew McQueeny  
Welcome to Konaverse, this is Matt McQueeny. And we are joined here today by Akshay Sura, a partner at Konabos, and Martin Malenovsky, a product manager at Kontent, which is a headless CMS or content management system, for those who might not be so in the know. Kontent had a big announcement today related to its web spotlight functionality. Martin, welcome. Can you talk about this update, as well as what web spotlight allows users to do?

Martin Malenovsky  
Yeah, definitely. Thanks for having me here. So let me briefly introduce the web spotlight. The overall picture, the thing behind the web spotlight is actually the, all developer love actually the headless CMS, because it's very flexible. It's detached from the from the front end so it's more agile. But for some time, we were hearing the voices from the other spector of the users and some someone we can call a business user. Actually, the content creators market, they're the guys really creating the content, and in most cases, still managing a website. And they will just doing things like, Okay, back to the headlines, we're just losing the flexibility. Whereas what what do you see is what you get editor and etc. So so we we were thinking about that, and we've realized that the even with headless, there's no reason to lose all those

benefits of the of the parish CMS, because it's just a different, different view to the same thing. So we actually introduced the web spotlight, which actually, the spotlight means that they were just looking at the same content, but in different two different optics actually. So if so, if you are managing the website, web spotlight, it's still still headless CMS, there's no question about that. It's a structured content but it's it's removing the necessary knowledge from the competitors about the structure content or structure project and name conventions of the content items or content types. Because they can again, use the hierarchy to manage navigation, for example, or they can, they can have a preview, connected with the hierarchy and being able to quickly go to the to the website, and then just start editing in moments when they see something they want to edit. Because they're setting context editor, which is something like a full thing editor, connectivity, the preview mode. So that's our way how we can actually tell that business persona, so content creators, marketers that there's no reason to think about the content as a only developer, CMS, because it's not true that we are really focusing a lot on the business user experience. And that spotlight is one of great examples for that. So so so that the the scope of features I can describe where we're actually part of the original raise. So we just looked at even though one year ago, and so just nine months, and today, today, we are released a new addition to the spotlight feature set. And it's something we call the add button, which actually means that instead of only editing or the existing texts or the or changing the values of the webpage, you can just go and through the add button which can be displayed on the different places and directly within the preview mode. So the editor directly see where actually is, is creating a new content and through this button, he can position the new block of the web page and place directly into this into this place. And he he or she doesn't need to leave the preview mode at all. So it's able to build the web page visually from scratch. Only within the preview mode, there's no need to go into item editing and scrolling up and down and working for the field and reading guidelines, which will be filled there. Because you can just see, okay, there's your banner and go there. There's a pause button. So if you click on the pause button, there are several section, though there was about a section is another pause button. And that can be a, for example, highlighted features section. And then that that's actually our way, or, yeah, that's our way how are we are we trying to communicate to users that even with the headless CMS, there's no reason to think that it there is some kind of lack of flexibility or agility, it says, still just a bit different approach, because we still are pure, headless CMS, and that's something got to work, we are not going to change so we, we are providing those experiences through the, through that a different interactions with you providing to users. And as I mentioned, we are focusing a lot on the awesome businesses experience. So we are investing more to understand the interactions understand the processes, and then then we are we are able to provide those interactions in a way that customers are used to have. And they're expecting those things. 

Matthew McQueeny  
Martin, I'm more of a business user, obviously, Akshay is more of a technology being very obvious here. But I'm really fascinated by, you know, having the headless CMS having content, and just how quickly the need to create something like web spotlight last year became like, how, how soon into having the product, was it like we got we have to we have to create something like this

Martin Malenovsky  
is actually a very good question, it was very soon. And as maybe, you know, the Kentico won't experience that development of the CMS. So we do know how actually the ... CMS works. So we were expecting that and the fact is that still even with headless a headless world, the vast majority of customers still managing a website. And, and it will be we tried, we've tried, but it was very difficult to explain to them that you don't need to see actually things and you can just rely on the structure content and understanding of the structure project and the use of proper naming convention. So we've just decided that we shouldn't leave those users behind because it in the in the long run. I am aware that a lot of the example that we had the new customer, and mostly it was it was purchased by the by the technical people Akshay, for example, they were very happy about that. We receiving only positive feedback. But then after some time, after half a year or a year after the the project was really adopted by the rest of the team, we've started receiving the feedback that okay, but that's not something that we were expecting and thats something we do not like and the whole onboarding is very complicated. So I think that it was, it was pretty clear to us. It just took some time to figure out how to solve the solve the problem.

That makes sense, Akshay, I'm going to put you on the spot a little bit as a guest here. I know you're almost like a Kontent evangelist now too. But why is web spotlight so special to you, as a solutions architect in this space? And just what has content kind of meant to you as a partner?

Akshay Sura  
Yeah, no, thanks, Matt. So for me, Kontent has been the best partner we've ever had in my entire life, to be extremely honest. They've gone above and beyond every single space, whether you're talking about helping us from a marketing sales perspective, technical perspective, just being there to support us. Throughout the process has been a very refreshing change. We haven't felt this way with any other partner. So props to everyone at Kontent for making this happen. The other thing which I constantly say about Kontent is it's one of the best supports I've ever experienced in my entire life. Again, I've been working in the IT industry for 21 years. This says something. So we, to give you an example we were on a live RFP demo and I was showing the prospective customer I asked a question I was supposed to ask anyways in Kontent. Opened up the doc. site, as well as the actual content admin, asked the question, and it took a minute but then you started seeing messages come in and the customer was just floored. How fast a question was answered whether it was technical or a regular one, right? So to me, there's nothing like it when you can tell a customer Hey, if you have a question about entering content, and you're having trouble, ask them if you're having trouble, from a technical perspective, ask them. The support can deal with anything instantly within minutes, which is just amazing. And then from our perspective, we're currently implementing several projects on Kontent and just being an all of these lift and shift kind of projects, right. So I have never been able to enter content so fast ever. And Andrew from our content team can attest to it, where it's just seamless it flows, it's super, super easy, it takes a few minutes to enter a page of content so that I have to give props to. Now coming back to web spotlight, I think I echo what Martin was saying. So then no matter how well you built a site, in a traditional monolith, or a headless, you do have some set of users who would like to do it from a content perspective, where they have a bunch of fields, they fill it in, they know how it's gonna look, they just, you know, publish it or check it on the site to see if it works or not. But there's a good percentage of people, especially business owner, users, content authors, marketing specialists, who want to see the content the way it's supposed to be seen. And that was one of the first things we noticed about content, because we spent about six to eight months looking for a headless CMS, which we like and which checks most of the boxes. A lot of the headless CMS is have similar functionality. But what set content apart for us one was the web spotlight, we didn't have to rely on a third party in order for us to be able to edit the UI. The second was being able to not only do all of the headless capabilities, which you know, every headless CMS does it in different ways. But being able to manage your team assign them tasks, more of like a content hub with content calendars. It's just, it just checked, the most amount of boxes for us and Kamruz, and I really strongly felt Kontent was it. Now coming back to web web spotlight. Yes, ability before this was mainly you know, you can enable these buttons. So you can look in preview mode and update content. And this made it easy for content authors. And when we're dealing with RFPs, that's one of the first questions they ask is How easy is it to enter content. With today's update, we don't even have to mention it, we could just show it to them. So we typically show customers web spotlight, being able to edit content, but the piece to be able to add new content without leaving the web spotlight is a just an amazing update, which is well needed. And it just sets content apart from the rest of the people in the field.

Matthew McQueeny  
So again, more as like a business user. Last last question or two with with you, Martin. You know, headless is really all the rage and I know it's been it probably feels like it's been out longer in both of your cases for as long as you've worked on it. But Martin, and then maybe Akshay can do a follow on. Just what is it about headless that is serving a market need that that wasn't being served maybe four or five years ago?

Martin Malenovsky  
Yeah, I think the main that really main benefit is, is really the decoupling the content from actually the presentation, because it's very easy to connect it together. But it's very difficult to part it again. So in case you want to do some redesign, which is a pretty common task for every website one, once perfect few years. Whenever the present presentation layer is connected with the content, it is very complicated, because you actually have to go through all the content, you have to update everything inside workwise again, etc. So it's very expensive. And it's very tedious task with a headless CMS. Thanks to decoupling the actual content, the core content, the valuable thing, which which you're investing in, then you can just change the presentation layer and you don't need to touch the content at the core content at all. So it's much much easier and much quicker and definitely less expensive.

Matthew McQueeny  
So our last two here, Martin, I said there were two but this is together so you can end it on this one. Just We got some of the updates, but we just want to make sure that you covered everything that was released today. And then two, what what's next that you can tell us that you can let us in on what's next for web spotlight and maybe headless in general?

Martin Malenovsky  
Yeah, so so that there's a few things. Few things were raised actually, today, the add is that is the main thing. It's actually the updated SDK, which I can provide some more link to so you can share it with the audience later on. But there's another improvement connected with this race. And that said, so far, the Edit buttons were possible to use to focus on specific elements, which is like one text field, or one or one asset or something like that. But starting today, you can use the edit button for the whole control component, or the content item, which is included within the web page. So for example, if you have a list of components used to build the page, you can just have a one button to start editing and see the list of the components within the editor. So you can easily drag and drop them change the order, or remove a component, instead of going into the item. And then doing that those actions inside the item. As I've mentioned that we are only focusing on the needs of the of the content creators. And that's why this is mainly helping the users managing the website. So we didn't know that the there's a few crucial aspects. One is being able to easily find the content I want to edit, which we which we believe was delivered through the preview mode and in context editor. And the second most important thing is actually being able to easily see the results. Because if you're using the traditional CMS, you can immediately see how it will look like if I will change this or or this. Whatever supplies, it's still a bit more complicated because a since its a couple we are not, we are owning the front end, you actually have no clue on the front end looks like so we are going to invest in the way out to help the content editors to see the progress of the preparation of preview and being able to auto refresh the preview.

Matthew McQueeny  
Great. Well, Martin Malenovsky we really appreciate you coming on with us. It's such a late, late hour big updates today from content so we'll look forward now we know who to go to when we have these breaking news podcasts. So thanks again. 

Martin Malenovsky  
Thank you so much for the invitation and enjoy the rest of the podcast.

Outro  
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