What do you think of email marketing?

People consistently say, I don’t like spam; I don’t read email from companies selling me stuff; email is intrusive; or, my inbox is already too crowded, so why would I want more?

While each complaint has some validity, email is still one of the most important tools marketers have.  There are many reasons why: it’s measurable, easy to test, easy to improve and refine, customers have asked for it, it is easy to segment and it is cheap. And, when it’s done right – when an email offers value and/or a relevant message – people do actually like receiving them, no matter how crowded their inbox is.

Great Measurement

Emails have always been trackable, but today’s email marketing and automation solutions can track just about every little detail on your message. From the subject line to the opt-out percentage, it’s all measurable – you can track whether someone clicked on the blue button or the red, whether they like subject line “chance to win” or “win tickets now,” and so on. From there, you can easily track results, and refine your message for next time. This means that every email you send can be improved for the next campaign.

This is a valuable opportunity to learn about your subscribers’ interests and needs, and ensure that the next time you send an email, you’re delivering real value.

Getting Opt-ins is Critical

Today with junk and spam filters we all know it is fruitless to send out unsolicited email. However, opt-in emails have proven to be very successful – and providing an easy, one-click opt out also generates trust between you and the recipient. The good companies provide recipients with a one click opt-out process. Sending an unsolicited email, or making it difficult to opt-out, is a great way to poison a potential relationship before it even begins.

How to Build Your House List

What if you don’t have a large email list or a ‘house’ list? This is a great opportunity to leverage your partners. Why not see if you can advertise on their list? If you ran a contest in a partner’s email blast, these email addresses could become yours. You can always return the favor when your list is built up.  In addition, there is a ton of advertising space with third party companies’ email house lists. Just remember to always include an opt-in button when acquiring those addresses, to ensure you are gaining their permission to email.

“Renting” anonymous lists is an option, but not usually a great one; first, because they can get quite expensive and second, they are not necessarily relevant. But partnering with companies that serve similar target audiences, who have a strong relationship with their base, can be affordable and effective.

Most Will Give Brands a Chance

Most people will give brands a chance. Look how quickly Groupon took off – their whole business is based on you opening those daily emails. Furthermore, their emails are segmented by location and neighborhood. This is all based on information users have provided them – because their emails have provided value, users will stick with them.

Email Marketing Works

Email marketing can be one of the most effective marketing tools in your toolkit. Once you obtain an opt-in, it is critical that you develop the relationship with your customers, and provide value to them, in order to build trust; if you do, you can be sure they’ll keep on opening your emails. If they’ve given you their permission to speak to them, don’t ruin it by sending out irrelevant emails.

Continually focus on improving the quality of your email. Leverage partnerships to expand your list, and segment your list on an ongoing basis by rewarding users for information provided.

Remember, permission to communicate with you is a reward your users have given you. Ensure you value this reward and use it wisely.

But moving from theory to practice is easier said than done. Read on to see what goes into a digital ecosystem, and the steps you need to take to ensure a successful deployment that will help you enhance your demand generation activities and drive leads to sales.

It’s not just about the Web

The truth is, “digital marketing” isn’t just about the Web anymore—it’s certainly not just about Web sites. If your only method of interacting with your prospects is through your Web site, you’re left with partial toolset.

What about e-mail, mobile, social media or online communities?  Don’t forget about digitally-enabled offline channels like CR codes and QR codes!  There are a wide variety platforms to engage your audience how and where they want to be—each an essential part of complete digital ecosystem.

The challenge is, how do you bring the different capabilities and platforms into perspective?  What is a complete ecosystem?  What about platforms with overlapping capabilities?

This is where we need to apply a systematic approach that, when followed, can lead us to the right mix of capabilities, and eventually, platforms that we would implement.

The approach is based on three steps. Some require a bit of work, but the results provide the clarity needed to make thoughtful platform selections that impact your marketing performance.

1. Understand your Prospects and Customers: Understand their industries, roles and needs; their buying cycle, pain points and motivators.
2. Identify Needed Capabilities: Informed by your customer understanding, what are the fundamental capabilities you need to market and engage your prospects and customers?
3. Identify the Supporting Platforms: Your required capabilities dictate potential platforms.

Let’s take a closer look at the first of these three steps.

Understand your Customer

In order to engage your prospects and customers, you need to understand them.  Understanding them sufficiently requires three efforts.

Buying Cycle Analysis: All customers make their way through a buying cycle—whereas the sales process is how we see them move through the funnel—the buying cycle is from the customer’s perspective.  It helps us understand how they get from “awareness” to “commitment” within the buying process.

Segmentation Analysis: Here we identify the parameters that are relevant when targeting your customers—their role, industry, income and other potential segmentation parameters.

Pain Point and Motivators Analysis: Pain points and motivators are identified per buying cycle state and segmentation parameter—this enables you to create a context-driven engagement.

All these layers, when overlayed—the buying cycle stages, segmentation parameters, pain points and motivators—provide a matrix that enables you to precisely target your audience.

This matrix is like an empty Christmas tree without ornaments; your next task is to identify marketing messages — the ornaments — to populate the tree for each common permutation for each stage of the buying process, segmentation, pain points and motivators.

When you understand how your customer buys from you, and how to precisely match their journey with targeted messaging, you’ve taken the first step to figuring out how to engage with them.

Tackling Steps Two and Three

Now that you’ve got a better understanding of who your customers are and what motivates them, you’re ready to think about how to effectively engage with them.

From our experience in helping law firms select a CMS platform, let’s take a quick look at some of the ways law firms are leveraging their CMS platforms in their digital marketing efforts, and some of the features you should look for in a CMS; and then we’ll review eDynamic’s approach to CMS selection and how it can help you when it comes time to making a decision on a new CMS.

What can a CMS do for you?
At its most basic, a CMS helps you deliver the right content, to the right audience and at the right time.

As a law firm, you no doubt have a great repository of knowledge and content at your fingertips.

Your CMS will allow you to align your content creation and editing environments with the skill sets of your internal users, no matter their level of technical expertise. An effective CMS empowers your staff, at all levels, to become “content experts,” by providing an easy-to-use platform for all of your users to push content out to the Web and other channels.

In fact, many CMS systems offer a “write once, publish anywhere” environment, with support for multi-channel publishing from the same content. With your CMS, you’ll be able to publish content, like thought leadership, news and alerts, to mobile, Twitter, LinkedIn and more.

Multi-channel publishing of your content adds a “richness” to your Web presence that allows you to stand out from your competition.

Optimize the Experience
Digging a bit deeper, a CMS can act as a “personalization engine” and deliver experiences to visitors based on their individual preferences.

This is especially important in law firms where a lot of material is available for site visitors, so delivering the right content to the right audience can drive engagement.

By leveraging the integrated analytics of a CMS, including browsing history, time-on-page, download stats and more, you can determine which visitors are viewing which content. From there, you can segment them into categories and evolve your content delivery based on visitor response and traction.

Furthermore, your analytics can help you develop strong content attributes and taxonomy to enable great search experiences. You can also add detailed metadata attributes to your content, helping ensure that search results align with visitor expectations.

All in all, your CMS helps ensure your visitors have a great experience with your Web site, no matter if it’s their first time on the site or if they are a regular visitor.

Delivering Opportunities
In addition to improving the experience of your web visitors, a CMS can provide plenty of opportunities for your firm to improve as well.

Overall, the better and more relevant your content, and the more “findable” it is on your Web site, the higher your page will rank on the leading search engines; this, of course will help increase your organic search results, and as you’re no doubt aware, the higher you show up in search rankings, the more traffic you’ll see.

Internally, your CMS can help your team members become contributors. As discussed earlier, a CMS can enable anyone to be a content provider – by empowering your staff, attorneys, talent and HR to publish content, you immediately make them feel more invested in your firm.

How to Choose
eDynamic believes the foundation of a CMS selection process starts with your firm’s unique needs.

What are the ways that you want to communicate with your clients and Web site visitors? And how can a CMS help you execute and improve those strategies?

With that in mind, our strategic approach eight essential steps:

• Digital Strategy Review
• Identify Vendor Universe
• Score Vendor RFIs
• Vendor Demonstrations
• Vendor Short-List
• Vendor POCs
• Final Selection
• Selection Completion.

Each of these steps is fairly self-explanatory, but let’s take a closer look at the first. This is where you truly build the foundation for your CMS deployment – where you identify your goals and outline the CMS capabilities you need.

The Digital Strategy Review is the keystone on which the entire platform selection process rests. It’s here that you identify and refine your strategy – your goals and requirements, and the key capabilities you need from a CMS in order to meet those requirements.

From there, you can decide on the best vendors, review and shortlist them, before moving into the final stages.

If your law firm is looking to take its digital marketing to the next level, a Web CMS is a great place to start.

At this point, we know content marketing is a top priority for organizations. About 90 per cent of organizations are marketing with content, according to a recent MarketingProfs/Junta42 report, “B2B Content Marketing: Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends”
(http://www.contentmarketinginstitute.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/B2B_Trends_2010.pdf), with 26 per cent of their budgets allocated to content marketing.

But is that money being spent effectively?

Since it’s not hard to see economic uncertainty continuing into 2012, we can all agree that marketers – indeed, most departments – will be under increased scrutiny when it comes to budgeting.

Over the years analytics and digital marketing metrics have made it a little easier for marketers to show just where the marketing budget is being spent, and how effective marketing initiatives are. But today’s content-rich marketing programs present new challenges of scale – for all this “stuff” we’re creating, what are we getting out of it?

An effective content management strategy, including web tracking and analytics, is key for realizing return on ROI and demonstrating effective use of resources. For marketers, a straightforward way to look at whether or not you’re making money on your content strategy is to look at how many of your leads are making it to sales. A recent Aberdeen Group Report, “Analytics for the CMO” (http://aberdeen.com/aberdeen-library/7065/RA-marketing-business-analytics.aspx), noted that best in class firms see 60% of their sales pipeline coming from marketing, and that 59% of these firms have implemented content/asset management tools.

Compare this to the industry average, where only 10 per cent of the sales pipeline is marketing driven, and only 35 per cent of firms are using these tools.

Delivering compelling, cross-channel digital marketing experiences to prospects and customers can have direct impact on your conversions. Personalization – delivering the right content, to the right person, at the right time – can help drive leads to sales.

Content management solutions, working alongside marketing automation and your CRM platform, can provide the backbone of these personalized experiences. Analytics, Web tracking and social media monitoring tools can help you determine how effective your efforts are. All together, they can be integrated into a “digital marketing ecosystem” that engages prospects and provides measureable, results-based data.

If you’d like to learn more about how digital marketing tools can help you connect your content to revenue, eDynamic is sponsoring an exclusive NYC Analyst Seminar in New York City this month (November). Join Stephen Powers, Principal Analyst & Research Director at Forrester Research and Rolf Kraus, Director, Content Management, Portals and Collaboration Practice at eDynamic, at City Hall Restaurant, for a discussion on how improving your online customer experience can help you drive conversions and deliver highly qualified leads to sales.

Learn More: http://cms.edynamic.net/Customer-Digital-Experience.aspx

In order to keep up with the data demand, developers need to find new ways of looking at and working with large datasets. Read on to learn about one such method and how you can leverage it to make working with large datasets a breeze.

The Large Dataset Challenge

Large datasets can be a challenge, but they’re a fact of life in the digital world we live in. Fortunately, there are methods to overcome those challenges.

As a real-world example, let’s look at a bookshop that sells books (in a variety of formats) in brick and mortar stores, online, and through a call center. The limitations of working with large datasets become readily apparent when they come from different sources and in different formats. All of these database sources are optimized for the particular application they accompany and not for centralized analysis. It becomes more complicated once you want to compare that sales data to budgetary data.

Normalizing the data and writing the query that would tell you what the most popular book among women aged 16-24 is could be done in a traditional relational database model, but it wouldn’t be long before it became slow and cumbersome. Adding in a few queries, and filters of queries of more un-normalized data, and then asking for an analysis over time, and things would quickly grind to a halt.

Before we can work to beat this problem, let’s look at what causes it under the hood. The limitation of relational databases is that the fundamental data structure that they use is a two-dimensional table. It does this for a reason, derived from Set theory; independent sets of data contain information connected only by keys. This makes for fast querying of stored values like order information, but does a poor job of describing the relationship each piece of data has to the other. The more queries and filters required, the slower it gets.

The data cube solves that limitation.

What is the Data Cube?

While we refer to it as a “data cube” for simplicity, the mathematical construction is of a hypercube (think hexacontatetragon) or multi-dimensional array. Numeric information such as sales figures (facts) is categorized by dimensions (“Customer”, “Date”, and “Product” etc.) and stored, allowing indexes to be built through the structure of the cube – overcoming a key limitation with relational databases. This allows for large queries to be executed quickly on a large dataset.

Figure 1: Graphical representational view of data cube

Working in More Than one Dimension

There are a couple of unique data concepts that working in additional dimensions introduce.

Slice: A slice is a subset of a multi-dimensional array corresponding to a single value for one or more members of the dimensions not in the subset.

Figure 2: Graphical representation of a OLAP slice

Slice and Dice: Slice and Dice is a user initiated process of calling data by specifying slices via roll up, rotations and roll downs.

Figure 3: Graphical representation of OLAP Slice and Dice

As datasets increase in size and scope and large sets become the norm, learning different ways to overcome their inherent challenges becomes high priority.

Using the data cube concept – moving from a two dimensional table to a multi-dimensional data representation – can help you work past the limitations so you can start using large datasets effectively and efficiently.

At eDynamic, we see the trend shifting towards delivering not just content, but relevant, timely content that fully engages prospects. With that in mind, we think it’s more accurate to say that “Context-Sensitive Content is King.”

That’s a mouthful, but the idea rings true. If you’re creating content just for the sake of putting it out there, it’s just noise; people are getting overwhelmed and tuning it out. To effectively engage prospects, you need to deliver content that matters to them.

In a recent Junta 42/MarketingProfs Spending Survey, respondents said that 33 per cent of their marketing budgets were being spent on content creation.

However, a second Junta 42/MarketingProfs survey (B2B Content Marketing: 2010 Benchmarks) noted that 36 per cent of responders said that producing engaging content was their biggest challenge.

So how do you bridge the gap?

eDynamic has identified four steps to successfully engaging clients in order to deliver content that meets and exceeds expectations:

1) Employ a closed-loop engagement cycle: Build a profile of the prospect; analyze it; and respond to the prospect in their language.

2) Characterize prospect: Properties include buying cycle state and segmentation parameters.

3) Develop content to align with the prospect expectations: Content that speaks directly to the prospect profile, with a consistent message.

4) Automate the closed-loop prospect engagement: Use a content management system and marketing automation platforms to automate the engagement cycle, creating an effective process for engaging all future prospects.

Content without context is just noise. A Unified Engagement Strategy – integrating content management, marketing automation and CRM – can help you deliver timely, context-sensitive information, across multiple channels, to your prospects earlier in the lead processing cycle, resulting in highly qualified leads moving through the sales process faster and more efficiently.

Demand generation remains a top priority among B2B organizations.

By now, most enterprise-level organizations are leveraging Web content management systems and marketing automation systems to help drive their lead generation strategies.

However, many enterprises continue to operate these two platforms separately, in their own unique silos, not realizing that CMS and marketing automation platforms work extremely well together.

By leveraging the strengths of both platforms together, organizations stand to see significant improvements in their demand generation activities.

Here are five steps to generating highly qualified leads using an integrated web content management and marketing automation platform (MAP):

1. Leverage Analytics Data

Both your CMS and your MAP return analytics information based on your prospects’ behavior. How did they find your Web site? Which links did they click, what pages did they visit? How much time did they spend on this page?

When this information is kept in separate silos, it’s valuable… but integrating this data together can help you create a much more complete view of a prospect.

2. Segment Based on Behavior

Once you’ve established a better understanding how visitors behave, you can segment them based on that behavior.

Leveraging the visitor data gathered by your CMS and MAP platforms, you can determine who your visitors are, and in turn, segment them into groups based on industries, company size, roles, common pain points or motivators.

3. Deliver Valuable, Relevant Content

The content a prospect sees can make the difference between a “bounce” and a lead; thus, what each segment sees must be relevant.

Your MAP can push the visitor into the right bucket, and your CMS can deliver the right content. For example, if the visitor is looking at a specific product, the CMS can push a link to a demo of that product to a dynamically delivered sidebar.

4. Deliver Content At the Right Time

The data collected by your CMS and MAP platforms can help you understand prospects, and can also help you understand where the customer is in the buying cycle. In turn, this helps you determine the ideal time to deliver the ideal content.

Is the prospect still in the “research” phase? Your CMS can push use a dynamically generated Web page to register for a White Paper to them. Are they already engaged, but still not sure? Your MAP can deliver a personalized e-mail calling them to action.

5. Use all Available Channels

Today’s CMS platforms include blogging tools, multimedia (video, slideshows, PDFs) content publishing tools, and more. And of course, your MAP can handle e-mail campaigns.

All of these channels can be useful in keeping prospects engaged as you move them through the buying cycle, but it’s important to keep your messaging consistent across all methods of communication. If your Web CMS and your MAP are in separate silos, you might be sending inconsistent messages, or too much repetition of the same message, both of which are surefire ways to drive a customer away.

Content management systems and marketing automation platforms are proven solutions for B2B demand generation. Working together, these platforms are even more effective. By leveraging their data, segmenting visitors, and delivering relevant content at the right time, across all channels, you’ve gained an understanding of your prospect that will help you lead them down the sales path, and allow you to deliver a highly qualified lead to your sales team.

In addition, Drupal can run on many database platform such as MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQLite, giving business owners flexibility to choose the platform that suits their licensing and infrastructure requirements. It also supports several major releases of PHP, namely PHP 4 and PHP 5 and can run on Linux, Mac or Windows servers.

However this flexibility comes at cost. Having an extendible API, which suits each and every use case and capability to run on different technical platforms, creates some performance bottlenecks which become visible on high traffic projects with thousands and thousands of visitors a day. However there are many large scale projects which still run on Drupal to take advantage of its flexibility. So how do those projects handle high traffic loads?

The answer is Pressflow!

Pressflow is a Drupal distribution which was built to take advantage of Drupal’s flexibility and leading industry practices in high-performance web applications. Pressflow is still the same good-old Drupal, but with some performance tweaks under the hood.

How is Pressflow different from Drupal? Here are some differences:

• Optimization for MySQL. While Drupal runs on multiple storage systems, the majority of websites run on MySQL. Therefore to eliminate the cross-database support overhead, Pressflow is tuned to work only on MySQL which gives significant improvements on the database access level.

• Database replication. Pressflow is built to support MySQL database replication out of the box. What MySQL Replication gives is multiple database support on a single web application, resulting in reduced load on a single database, thus improving the performance of the application overall.

• Reverse proxy caching. A reverse proxy cache is a technology which helps to reduce the load on the web server, application and database servers by caching content between the visitor’s browser and the server. When a request is made, a reverse proxy cache returns data from its own cache if available, instead of making a request to the server, thus reducing the load on the latter.

• Optimization for PHP 5. Drupal provides wrapper functions to provide PHP 5-style operations to PHP 4. Although this provides support for PHP 4 to run advanced features, it comes with an overhead and often slows down the application. Pressflow supports only PHP 5 so it replaces those wrapper functions with higher-performance PHP 5 alternatives.

Pressflow can even be a drop-in replacement for an existing Drupal project and since it still runs the same core, those 8,000 contributed modules are compatible with Pressflow too. So if you anticipate that your project will receive thousands or even hundreds of visitors a day, eDynamic highly recommends that you go with Pressflow instead of pure Drupal. And if you need Drupal and Pressflow consulting, contact us here.

So if everyone is offering content, and there are fewer buyers, then clearly content on its own is not enough to differentiate you. You can produce all the content in the world, but if it’s not relevant to your prospects and customers, it’s just noise.

But when you fully engage with prospects, and take the time to understand their mission, goals, and values, then the content you deliver will ultimately be that much stronger. Your ability to align your marketing expertise with the customer’s needs becomes your key differentiator.

Unified Customer Engagement

Some prospects might have a very clear vision of what they want; in that case, lucky you, they just made your job easier. But more often than not, it’ll be up to you to help customers streamline their content goals. They may not always be able to sum it up in one tidy sentence; it requires personal interaction on your part, to understand their priorities, what they want, and what they need.

This interaction can and should occur across multiple channels – phone calls, e-mails, Web sites, sales.

Of course, these efforts might require more commitment during the early part of the sales cycle than you’re used to. It might seem like a lot of effort, without any guarantee of a close. But in making that commitment, you’re showing the prospect that you’re not just shoving them into a queue and creating some generic marketing fluff – you’re demonstrating your commitment to providing the best content for them.

It might take longer to close the sale, but an engaged prospect – one who is confident that you can deliver content that speaks directly to what he or she needs – becomes that much more likely to sign on the dotted line.

And the more qualified, more sales-ready leads you can deliver to your sales force, the better.

Context-Driven Marketing

eDynamic has identified four steps to successfully engaging clients in order to deliver content that meets and exceeds expectations:

1) Employ a closed-loop engagement cycle: Build a profile of the prospect; analyze it; and respond to the prospect in their language.

2) Characterize prospect: Properties include buying cycle state and segmentation parameters.

3) Develop content to align with the prospect expectations: Content that speaks directly to the prospect profile, with a consistent message.

4) Automate the closed-loop prospect engagement: Use a content management system and marketing automation platforms to automate the engagement cycle, creating an effective process for engaging all future prospects.

Know your Prospect, Deliver Value

Without intelligence – learning about the customer, establishing a high level understanding of what their digital footprint is and should be – you’ll deliver one of two things: Either typical, unoriginal content; or content with a piecemeal, fractured, inconsistent message.

But when you’ve put the time and effort into engaging and understanding your clients, you’ll deliver original content, uniquely suited to that customer’s needs and priorities, which will help you stand out in a crowded marketplace.

In the recent Webinar we have discussed Content vs. Context in more detail.

Click here to watch the on-demand webinar now!

Today we’ll take a look at getting started with Sitecore applications, and how to set up custom type applications. With a solid handle on Sitecore applications, you’ll find Sitecore itself to be less intimidating, and you’ll be able to use Sitecore even more effectively as part of your content management strategy.

Understanding Sitecore Applications

A great place to start is the core database; from the Content Editor, you’ll see a familiar content tree environment, and you can expand the “Applications” node to see all of the installed Sitecore applications. Should you need to add in a new application and hook it into the Sitecore start menu, you can do so from this space.

Let’s take a look at the Workbox application. Workbox is a good example to demonstrate how Sitecore applications work; Workbox applications provide you with a view into workflow actions that can be performed on an item.

The black horizontal bar running across the top of the application is the Ribbon (a familiar control method to users of current Microsoft Office applications); underneath the Ribbon is the Workflow Pane.

The first control in the Ribbon is set of checkboxes within a scroll area; the check box represents the workflow name. You can check or uncheck the checkbox to toggle the Workflow Pane below, displaying workflows and items within the workflows.

The second control on the Ribbon is the drop down box, called page size. Performing actions on the any of the control accordingly triggers actions on the Workflow Pane.

Back to Content Editor

From the Content Editor tree, expand the Applications node; expand the Workboxes item, and you will see your Workbox items. As you begin relating them with the Workbox UI, you’ll start to understand the items further.

Take a look at the nodes that implement the “Chunk” template. Chunk templates provide you with a .NET group box like control with borders; within this chunk, you will find a few more nodes primarily implementing the “Panel” template. A panel is more like a placeholder that renders controls. This is where you can do most of your work. You can create and set a .NET Type for a panel item, which will implement your panel. You can either change the “Type” to your custom assembly or add a new Panel (as you control the sort order of the panel on the ribbon) and implement the panel by defining your own custom Type.

Writing a Custom Type

Using a Visual Studio enables you to define a project in the language of your choice as you start implementing your custom type. Once you compile your project into a dll, copy the dll (I do it using post build events) to <root>/website/Bin directory. Specify the type name in the “Type” field of your panel in Content Editor. The custom class you will code should be inherited from RibbonPanel belonging to the Sitecore.Shell.Web.UI.HTML controls.

The RibbonPanel class provides a virtual method “render;” however, within your custom type, you’ll override this method. You can use the HTMLTextWriter within the render method to write out controls as well as writing out materials to the chunk. This is one of the most powerful features available to you for controlling the rendering on the application.

The RibbonPanel class has other useful methods, including the RenderPanelButtons,RenderSmallButton feature, which can be used in your custom class to render Sitecore HTML control. For example, to render the check box control, smallcheckbox, you will need to first recall Ribbons.BeginSmallButtons. You can then create an instance of the smallcheckbox control and then use Ribbon.

RenderSmallButton can be added to control the Ribbon. Once you have added all controls to the panel, you will then call Ribbob.EndEndSmallButton to close the control. The best part of this function is that you don’t need to worry about the control state or event wireup – the SmallCheckBox control has a member “Command” which can be used to specify a method defined in the “Codebeside” class in workbox.xml. You can find this file on the disk under <root>WebSite/Sitecore.

Here, within the folders for the applications, you have the xml files, which are a sort of “design surface” for the UI. This is where you will find the code alongside the customizable attributes.

The Power to Centralize

Once you get a hang of this, you’ll notice that the use of the Sitecore application architecture has huge potential for widespread use within an enterprise. A Sitecore application architecture provides you with highly customizable and powerful class structures that enable your organization to centralize all your intranet applications into a Sitecore desktop; thereby providing you a unified and seamless experience. A familiar windows desktop UI experience can usher a new way to look at your intranet.