Lyris, Inc. announced that its Hot Banana Web content management solution (CMS) was ranked highest in overall ease of use by The 2007 Gilbane Group Survey on the Web Content Management User Experience.

The survey results ranked Hot Banana highest in overall ease of use, interaction with other systems, and application design. Hot Banana also ranked in the top three for its navigation and feature functions and for its incorporation of rich media.

Survey respondents noted that Hot Banana enables users to create content in Office applications or in Adobe Photoshop and then easily transfer the content and graphics to Web pages. Hot Banana was also recognized for its integration with other systems such as CRM, ERP and business intelligence solutions, and for its easy, intuitive application design. Respondents reported that the Hot Banana CMS solution made it easy for them to incorporate rich media into Web pages and that its interface was straightforward and easy to navigate.

“This is the kind of validation that every company strives for – highly positive feedback from actual Web CMS users, responding to the usage issues that matter most to them,” said Krista LaRiviere, Director of Professional Services for Lyris, Inc. and General Manager of Hot Banana. “We are committed to providing the best e-marketing solutions to our clients and we continually strive to improve usability, connectivity and communications within our solution set.”

“Hot Banana did well in the survey,” said Tony White, Gilbane’s Lead Analyst for Web Content Management. “Ratings in categories such as ease-of-use and application design often have an inverse relationship with ratings in other areas like application integration. But Hot Banana users gave it top ratings in all three. That’s rather unusual.”

The survey was conducted in recognition of emerging trends whereby companies are prioritizing their selection criteria around the ease with which users can create highly usable Web sites with rich content.

The survey ranked eight vendors in addition to the Lyris Hot Banana CMS, including Acumium, CrownPeak, EMC, Interwoven, Oracle, OpenText, Percussion and In-House.