Jadu isn’t a name I have come across before… but when anyone promises a ‘revolution‘ in content management, I’m prepared to listen. The company’s claim is certainly ambitious: ‘Websites that previously took weeks to develop can now be compiled in a matter of hours.’ And even more appealing – their Galaxies product ‘puts control back in the hands of the user, enabling non-technical webmasters to create a CMS themselves.’ Blimey.
The Leicester-based firm is smart enough to see the business opportunity in local government, and tailors its product accordingly. The sales pitch talks in terms of ODPM’s ‘required outcomes’, and the Integrated Public Sector Vocabulary (ahem) is fully supported. The E-Government Register hosted by Brent Council lists a dozen councils who use the company’s products. Understandable, when you look at a comparison like this.
The company website deliberately avoids any technical language: so much so, in fact, that it’s hard to pin down exactly what the product is. The heart of their CMS product seems to be the ability to generate customised CSS, building on top of a number of predefined templates. The site itself has filenames ending in .php, so you have to assume that’s a key part of it. A page on Technology talks about Apache, Debian Linux and MySQL. But there’s no denying, it’s an impressive sales pitch, and it’s hard to see what’s missing from their features list.