Sitecore's Foundry 2.0 Simplifies Multiple Site ManagementSitecore's Foundry 2.0 Simplifies Multiple Site Management

As an organization's needs grow beyond a handful of sites, the complexities of managing them with consistent yet flexible content and design increases exponentially. For businesses with dozens or even hundreds of individual sites, it can get unmanageable very quickly.Sitecore this week released Foundry 2.0, its solution to the multiple-site problem. Foundry's multisite capabilities build upon the foundation of Sitecore CMS 6.0, which was released over the summer. Sitecore's content management system is well-known for its slick user interface, and this focus on usability carries through to the multisite capabilities within Foundry 2.0.

At the heart of Foundry 2.0 is the Foundry Control Center (FCC), which centralizes site management, template design, and creation and content creation for multiple sites. Administration for individual sites can also be delegated to local administrators, while the tool seems to successfully walk the tightrope of balancing strong centralized management with flexibility for end users.

Foundry 2.0 has a number of helpful new features that fill notable gaps from previous versions. The most significant is the new site-creation wizard, which allows a new site to be added in just a few steps. Foundry also does a nice job of balancing distributed administration of the individual sites with granular security so that centralized administrators can define how much or little control the managers of individual sites have.

Sitecore certainly isn't alone in the multiple-site management space, but with Foundry 2.0, it makes a solid case for itself, especially for organizations with a Microsoft.Net back office. Of course, the content management aspects of managing multiple site are just one part of the challenge, particularly when your business has an international reach. But tools like Foundry 2.0 hold promise to make it easier.