Episerver Content Delivery API empowers you to expose your content via HTTP protocol. This enables  Recently Episerver enterprises to use their content in the mobile apps or any third party which needs the content of your website. Episerver released a beta version of Content Delivery API recently and can be used via Nuget Package. This would be a big step for Episerver to add the ability to Enterprises to go toward the concept of Content as a Service (CaaS).

What features does it have? It allows you to expose all content of your site via HTTP using JSON

That scary!? Na, you already exposing your content via HTTP using a browser! That is correct, some content is restricted content and should be exposed to all and that is facilitated by authenticating users via OAuth.

Query the content, that could be slow? The API will leverage Episerver Find to query the content and this means query will be run efficiently without affecting your website performance.

Mmm..So what I need to have to start? It is quite simple, create new Episerver Alloy Sample and go through below steps:

In this stage Episerver Content Delivery API would be just one package but I expect this would be change

1. Register a new Episerver Find service and put the content into the sample website
2. Install Content Delivery API Nuget Package

    Install-Package EPiServer.ContentDeliveryApi

3. Add below code to your ‘ConfigureContainer’ function:

   context.InitializeContentApi();
   context.InitializeContentSearchApi();
   
   GlobalConfiguration.Configure(config =>
   {
       config.IncludeErrorDetailPolicy = IncludeErrorDetailPolicy.LocalOnly;
       config.Formatters.JsonFormatter.SerializerSettings = new JsonSerializerSettings();
       config.Formatters.XmlFormatter.UseXmlSerializer = true;
       config.DependencyResolver = new StructureMapResolver(context.StructureMap());
       config.MapHttpAttributeRoutes();
       config.EnableCors();
   });

    

CaaS is standing for Content as a Service. Means a content provider stored some kind of content and then sell the content to others! Or even the provider may store others data and then sell it back to you! But why this is important? Bellow is some scenarios:

• Centralize your content: An enterprise has many channels of user engagements and each channel stores data separately. No one aware of the data existence and these data stored in many places. For example, user’s feedback comes from different channels (website, post-purchase support, in-store feedback, …) and each feedback stores in the different systems. Having a service to stores all feedbacks in one Content Management System, you can use data to analyze how good you are doing, or moderated feedbacks on the website.
• Omnichannel content: When you have a content stored in a centralized location, then you can easily handle how is the best way content in different channels! Yes, it is all about omnichannel. If you present a lightweight image with fewer details on the mobile device, your customer would be much happier!
• Personalization: If you have all above next step would be to personalize the content for your user. Refer to Janrain, 74% of online consumers get frustrated when digital content has nothing to do with their interests. And based on Evergage study, 73% of advanced organizations who utilize continuous personalization saw huge increments in client engagement and bring down bounce rate. Sooner or later personalization become a must for your enterprise.
• Continuous Improvement and Machine Learning: As you see above the process should improve more and more. The user needs more relevant data and this needs to be real-time across multiple channels. If the user has an abundant shopping cart, the system needs to send an email and motivate the user to complete the purchase using a discount coupon or provide more relevant product to the user and this needs machine learning.

 

As above you can see, you need to think more about your content strategy and leverage all facilities from your platform to provide the best user experience for your customers. Episerver recently provided new services that can bring future to you now. To achieve the best content strategy and giving users best experience, Episerver provides many services:

• Episerver Content API: Set of APIs to expose your content to outside world. API client can query the content and get the result with good performance. This service is very useful to share content with mobile apps and other websites.
• Episerver Social: A real-time APIs to store, moderate user-generated content (e.g. comment, rating, …)
• Episerver Campaign: Cross-channel campaign management too. (e.g. SMS, Email, …)
• Episerver Advance: Machine learning powered tool for content recommendation
• Episerver Reach: Machine learning powered tool for the content recommendation via email. Personalized email recommendations and message triggers, based on visitor browsing behavior, such as product interest
• Episerver Insight: Keep track of user interaction with the application. This tool helps content and marketer strategist to segment clients and use the data to feed other services.
• Episerver Personalized Find: This tool helps to improve and personalize the Episerver Find outcome.

In series of blog post, we are going to speak more about what Episerver bring to you and your enterprise and how you can integrate it.

In these series we are going to speak about content of CaaS:

 

The first item we cover is headless CMS:

 

Headless CMS

Headless sounds like the crazy concept! NO HEAD like above picture! But when you dig into it you will see this is a quite new concept and maybe a start of Content As A Service (CaaS)! Content marketing is fast growing business and for some online business is crucial to provide relative content for their customers in the proper view based on their channel (website, mobile app, …) in right shape! Seems crazy!!! Let’s look into some examples.

As a user, I surf a website using my mobile. The website provides me huge images which takes time to load a page and images with many details which I can’t see on my mobile:

 

Another good example, I have a brand new eCommerce website and my products do not have a proper rating and related content. I would love to purchase product reviews, user’s images, and rating.

You can see the importance of the content and content marketing. Site owners now need to pick a CMS/eCommerce platform which provides facility to use other’s content and expose my content. As part of the series, I want to speak about the CaaS concept and it’s important and how Episerver provides facility to leverage CaaS. In next post, I want to dig into the concept of CaaS and some statistics about this concept. Next to speak about how each aspect of CaaS fit into Episerver services.