Meryl's Notes Blog

Time for a visit Marqui’s CMS specifically the Console and Calendar Events tabs. I logged into the demo account as an administrator. It thinks I’m some guy named Dave, but I took care of that in the screen shot. Notice it has five tabs and five buttons in the Console tab. I start with Task Manager and wow, I had no action items. That’s a first!

Note: when you move around the interface, a line appears following your cursor. No, the browser police isn’t after you. At first, I thought it was annoying. It didn’t take long for me to realize it’s usefulness. It helps me ensure I click the right place. Tough to put in words - see the screen shot. If I want to add a new page for Human Resources, I can be sure I click the right “Add Page” rather than end up adding a page for About Us.

Settings allows you to modify the skin (English or German - danke), language (English is the only choice), time zone settings (it’s on GMT +0, so I changed it to GMT -6 and ticked on auto adjust to daylight savings time (annoying - you hear me up there in DC?) since I’m on Central Daylight Time), and finally my availability status (available, busy, away, on vacation (I wish!).

In Release, I need to release, discard, or cancel four new subscribers. I ignore them. Don’t do this in the real world if you want to keep your clients, professional drivers were used in this test.

I am not good enough to access Analyzer. I’ve shot off an email begging the powers for permission to play with it. To be continued…

I’ll skip Web Pages this time since it’s got a lot happening there and I’ll address it another time. I need to comment, however, that it wasn’t readily clear where to create news releases. I thought Web Pages was the place, but it’s under Calendar Events. I believe if you want to add articles or general content, it is done through Web Pages. I have not quite figured this out and can’t access the Help file at this time as it says I need to login (I am logged in).

Let’s go write and schedule a News Release to go out after the New Year. Switching to the Calendar Events tab, I change the calendar to January 2005 and click on January 7. That looks like a good day to make a big announcement.

I select “News Releases” and the interface changes to automatically select subscribers who are assigned to receive news releases. I leave the expiry date as “Never Expire” as news releases stick around for a long time and click the “Create Event” button.

Though I’m entering a news release, the page calls it “Event Content” as this content will go online on the date I selected—January 7, 2005. This page is straightforward. Give it a title, write a smashing release using the Word-like toolbar to help with formatting, let it appear in the “What’s New” section (yes), the date is already set, and then enter magic keywords for search engine optimization. Employees who know HTML can switch to view the HTML markup or stick with the WYSIWYG layout. [ This is a big screen shot of the event content page ]

Now refer to the buttons at the bottom. Submit saves the release and it goes through the approval process and then awaits for its magic date to appear online. Task allows you to create a to do item much like an email with priority included and an action type of N/A, request review, request page deletion, and page submission rejected. The originator can be notified when the task has been executed.

I sent a test email to myself (you can enter whatever email address) in both HTML and text formats. Both emails arrived in my inbox within a minute. Looks good. Save Draft means not ready for publishing and I will finish it later. Preview shows you the page as it would appear in a browser. Cancel… well, you changed your mind and decided not to publish a release smearing your boss’ name.

Subscribers shows a nice and simple chart of new subscribers. Oh man, no one has subscribed during the period from August to present. You can view the stats in your browser or export the data in HTML or Excel formats. This page is also for managing subscriber groups. This is a nice and important feature. If you’re looking for a job and you’re interested in National only for its jobs, you can subscribe to their career openings list to receive related notices. Create groups for people who want stock and financial data, tip of the week, news releases, and everything.

That’s it for our tour today. Thank you for visiting meryl.net’s Marqui Tour.