ACE – Atex Content Engine

API-First, multi-channel CMS, build multi-device presentation layers with your preferred frameworks and languages.

Developed from scratch to fully leverage multi-platform publishing, it supports all types of content, including videos, articles, and galleries. An expressive GraphQL API empowers organisations with the total flexibility of using their preferred frameworks and programming languages, treating the CMS as just a content repository.

ACE Web adds an optimised Node+Rest based frontend with a rich set of widgets to allow fast no-coding deployment of new sites.

ACE Headless Core features

API First

Atex focuses on documented APIs that enable teams to efficiently and quickly create experiences and products that work across many devices.

Headless by Design

Designed from the bottom-up to be a genuinely headless content management system with feature-rich content creation support.

Fully Scalable

Based on a microservice architecture where each service is run inside Docker containers and can be scaled and deployed independently without service disruption
(e.g. rolling updates).

Flexible and Extendible

ACE implements a data model that allows data transformation and aggregation, which enables high reusability.

Developer friendly

We provide developers with SDKs for Java and for React clients, plus a UI library to develop custom widgets.

High Availability

Micro services that are designed to be resilient to failures and to automatically handle partial system updates on the fly.

GraphQL Gateway

ACE provides a comprehensive GraphQL Content API, allowing you to access all your content efficiently from any language and environment in a standardised way.

Risk-free deploys

Initiate deployments using a CI/CD pipeline triggered by code commits. In case of deploy failures, the system would automatically rollback to the latest stable version.

ACE Web features

Building on top of the ACE Headless Core, the ACE Web module offers online news publishers a rich set of out of the box features allowing them to start publishing with zero coding needs.

Frontend

Rich set of widgets

Manual and dynamic collections (query driven, exclusion rules, de-duping filter), related content and most read content.

Landing Pages

Automatic pages that can display content relating to metadata entities and keywords.

Onsite SEO optimisation

Automatic generation of sitemaps (generic, news, video, images) according to Google specifications.
Automatic generation of Schema.org content annotations.

Image Optimisation

Dynamic image manipulation on the fly to always serve the best combination of scale and format to the requesting clients.

Site Builder

Modular page layout

Easy to use page builder with support for inheritance across pages for automatic content replication.

Extensible permission system

User roles defining which operations are allowed on which content types in which sites / sections.

Multiple sites, one repository

Support for any number of sites in the same installation with zero overhead.
Content re-usable between sites.

Scheduled publishing

Content can be scheduled to go live on website at specific dates and times.

Content workflow

Content review process can be enabled for specific content types, ensuring content has been moderated and reviewed.
Content workflow process is customisable based on content type and user roles.

Taxonomy management

Standardised multi-dimensional taxonomy (entities and keywords) extensible with custom taxonomy. Workflow enabled to avoid tag proliferation.

Front Page management

Specialised tool for manual curation of Home pages, with visual representation of the page layout, drag & drop support and alternative teaser layouts switching.

Integration server

Import content programmatically from any source (feeds, file system, …) using the ACE Integration Server built on top of Apache Camel

User Management

Sign in through social identity providers (Google, Facebook, Amazon) and through enterprise identity providers such as Microsoft Active Directory via SAML.

ACE SaaS offer

Atex is member of the AWS Partner network and has leveraged the AWS suite of services to implement a cost effective and highly performing SaaS offer:

ACE core delivery services: deployed in docker containers orchestrated by Amazon ECS
ACE backend services (content storage, search server, messaging bus): deployed in dedicated clusters (Couchbase, Solr and Kafka)

This architecture implements the best balance between dedicating resources to each specific customer and sharing infrastructure costs across the board.

ACE integrations and plugins

Atex has integrated into ACE best of breed solutions to provide specialised extra features and functionalities on top of the inbuilt ones.

Video platform (on-demand and live)

Convert input video into multiple output formats to support viewing on any device at varying resolution and adaptive streaming.
Global delivery with low latency, high throughput and endless scalability.

Comments

Increases engagement on your website thanks to a Commenting solution designed for journalism, with AI powered moderation, and full GDPR compliance (no data leakage).

Content Recommendations

Real-time analytics powering predictive content recommendations and automatic story placement to increase the overall performance and engagement.

Semantic tagging

Perform semantically boosted text analytics independently of the languages used in the input data, extract the key concepts and entities and obtain the key domains and assign a sentiment.

Case Study:

Crave of Bell Media in Canada

Crave is a subscription-based OTT streaming service by Bell Media in Canada. ACE serves as the main content hub of Crave, delivering content to multiple channels through the Content API and the ACE Spring Boot SDK.

Go to the case study

2 million+ subscribers
Multi-channel – web (crave.ca), iOS/Android, AppleTV and more
Multiple integrations, supporting sites and apps
Content types: series, episodes, movies, collections, rotators etc