First of all wish you all a very Happy New Year .

There have been lots of posts around Fatwire and Google Analytics integration but none with much information. Here are some of the details which might help to provide some insight around integration:

There are four different types of tracking defined with the integration tag:

• Tracking the use of a particular asset; be a PAGE or any other type.  A PAGE asset will trigger a page viewed tracking event
• Tracking when a recommendation has been selected or clicked by the user
• Tracking when a list of recommendations is requested. The object type is set to RecAsked.
• Tracking when a recommendation is listed for display purposes. The object type is set to RecListed.

Based on above tracking system, two modes of operations are defined:

• Basic which tracks physical page views using the GoogleAnalytics (GA)  _trackPageview function and the request to display Assets using the GA Event facility function _trackEvent. This basically covers first tracking type.
  • Examples:
    • <Asset Name> [<Asset Type (c)>=<Asset ID (cid)>]
    • FSII Home page [Page=1223456789]
• Advanced is extension on top of the basic tracking system to record Engage Recommendation information. This mode makes extensive use of the GA Event Tracking facility to record asset related information for recommendations and segments. The three components of a GA Event (category, action, and label fields) are used to store FatWire information. This covers the last three tracking types.
  • Examples:
    • Recommendation Listed
      • <Recommendation name>  [recId = <recommendation Identifier>]
      • FavouriteBlogList [recId = 123456789]
  • Segment information with list of assets
    • FavouriteBlogList [segId = 123424325435], shishankinfo [Blog = 987654321], apoorvinfo [Blog = 1357924680], contentprise [Blog = 2468013579]

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There are lots of information available around features available with IBM’s WWCM.  What I have tried is to highlight are not so good features of WWCM. This list is based on my experience and will be looking  forward to hear from WWCM experts: 

• Versioning:
  • No control of number of versions to be maintained at content type level. It’s all or none
  • No control over which content type needs versioning and which not. Its either all or none
  • No versioning at component (Image, Menu, Navigator etc.) level  
• Syndication/ Content Publish:
  • All the syndicators will be either scheduled or none of them. You cannot choose few syndicators to be automated while leaving others as manual process
  • Once the content becomes live/published it is moved across from one to other environment. There is no way to control approval of the content for specific publisher/syndicator as with other products
  • Tough to debug the cause of failure of syndicator
  • If there are some failed items with syndicator, it is tough to determine which content items failed
  • Lack of customization
  • Syndication/Publish history view is not available  Read the rest of this entry »

Recently ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) approved the introduction of the complete Internet domain names in non-latin specific languages (Non-latin characters in domain names)

Extract from one of the Press release:

“Up to now, domain names had to use the 26 Latin letters in the English alphabet as well as 10 numerals and the hyphen.Technical efforts have enabled display of parts of Internet addresses in other scripts, but the two-letter suffixes had to be made up of those 37 characters.The approval for non-Latin characters applies for now only to domain names connected with the two-letter country codes, like .ru for Russia and .cn for China.Languages that could become available in 2010 for Internet-site names include Arabic, Mandarin Chinese, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Hindi and Korean.he so-called generic top-level-domain suffixes, like .com, .net and .gov, will remain Latin-characters-only for now.”

Tha above announcement could bring in number of changes in current industry. Here are few of them:

• Web Content Managment: With new non-latin domains getting registered everyday, WCM demand will increase than ever before with the focus on multilingual support. In my experience with WCM, I have not come across many implementations that support multilingual. So, its going to be a challenge for both the product vedors as well as System Integrators. It is important to test the current implementations for non-latin languages and becoming a Must Have feature for any implementations going forward. The same will hold good for e-commerce .
• Translators: The market for translators will increase and will become more prominent. The content will start becoming more localized to regions and translators will come to rescue to retrieve any such localized information to outside world. And there is a good chance that translators becoming one of the offerings of WCM products.
• Search: Local/regional seach will start occupying the search space. This might lead to emergence of lot of localized search engines and will provide stiff challenge to some of the bigger players today in the industry
• Social Networking: With Web 2.0 and social networking the key in todays world, I can imagine local facebook, twitter etc. versions emerging in the market. Localized social search is other area to watch out.
• Migration tools: Emergence of tools which could help to migrate your existing site to localized version

The announcement will:

• Bring in new business opportunities and whole new dimension for non-latin countries
• Internet users will increase exponentially
• Internet will start becoming the preferred source of communication for non-latin countries through localized email and social networking sites
• System Integrators local market in non-latin countires will increase many folds
• Add more challenge to the big brands as they will be pressured to register their current domain names in any number of non-Latin-script languages to prevent fake sites
• Another potential issue highlighted is that some characters in non-Latin scripts appear similar to those of Latin-alphabet characters. So, if we substitutea non-Latin character for the similar Latin character, it will createa unique URL — and the potential for site-spoofing

What are your thoughts about it?

Scenario: WWCM migration from V6.0.1.3 to WWCM 6.1.0.2.  We have a current install of WWCM 6.0.1.3 where all the content reside and is available to end users. We have setup WWCM 6.1.0.2 and the scenario is to migrate just WCM content across from older to newer version.Here is a quick guide to the steps we followed:

• Setup desktop implementation of WWCM and Portal (6.0.1.3), using DB2 and connecting to shared LDAP. Lets refer this setup as “WS6013”
• Make sure that JCR schema is separated as a database instance
• Setup syndication from source (Environment to pick content from) to WS6013
• In parallel, setup desktop implementation of WWCM and Portal (6.1.0.2) on SAME MACHINE, using DB2 and connecting to shared LDAP. Lets refer this setup as “WS6102” 

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With Workplace Web Content Management (WWCM) 6.0.1.3 API , the performance had been not as expected. To give a scenario, following are the implementation steps for retrieving a piece of information:

• Retrieve user’s workspace
• Get Authoring Template Id
• Retrieve Site Area Id
• Content Search based on Authoring Template, Site Area
• GetIds of all the content list retrieved from Content Search
• Retrieve Content based on specific requirement from the Content Search result
• Return back the content item

The average amount of time taken is between 0.4 to 0.6 seconds. Out of which % of time taken for retrieving Document Ids for Authoring Template and Site Area forms 50 % of the time to retrieve information. So, if a portlet/page has 6 calls for content, the total time for just WCM is between 2.4 to 3.6 seconds which doesn’t meet SLAs for a page load. This basically lead to defining WWCM Site Structure caching design pattern.

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Migration projects are always challenging due to their uniqueness and my blog migration was no different. To add to the complexity was the change in domain from pcmspace.com to shishank.info. Here are the steps which needs to be  followed:

1. Installed Wordpress v 2.1 which I was using on pcmspace.com
2. Migrated pcmspace Database making minor changes to the domain/user details
3. Update install path to map domain path
4. Check point 1: Unit test the migration
5. Upgrade Wordpress to V 2.8.2
6. Run migration tasks
7. Check point 2: Unit test the migration again

Its important to come up with the right migration strategy else you can invest lots of time. For example: in migrating my above blog, I started with installing the latest version of Wordpress and tried all sorts of options – just moving content and not database schema, running sqls etc. But in the end, it was too much of work and it doesn’t provide the feeling of doing right.

I have not fully finished the migration, as I need to point my old domain to new. Also changes to my install path means, I need to play around with some of the urls that are not working on the website. I hope I can complete that fast and can be back in blogging  world

Google has added new dimension to blog search: “Search your blog world”. The
new blogger search, which is in the draft stage, uses Google Ajax Search
powered by Linked Custom Search Engine. It searches your own blogs
content as well as anything you have linked to in your blog posts, including
link lists and blogrolls. The search results follows the CSS rules of the blog
itself.

This search widget can be configured in your blog’s Template | Page Elements
tab, in the “Add a Page Element” popup.

JBoss releases much awaited Portal 2.6 version. The new release bring in significant improvements in personalization, security, workflow, usability aspects along with integration with Google Gadgets. The new features of JBoss 2.6 portal includes (from Red Hat’s JBoss Releases Portal 2.6):

• “Usability Improvements: These include portal and user administration as well as content management. Portlets may be managed overall or for individual instances including default definition. User administration simplifies user creation, provides a list-based view, and includes user search. Basic content management provided out-of-the-box now includes action-based management within a familiar directory view.

• Advanced Personalization: Now users can personalize individual portlets, including themes, layouts, and portlet content, to increase the productivity of specific roles and people within a business process or collaboration effort. Further enhancements include user created user interfaces, drag-and-drop portlets, personalized dashboards and more granular controlled access at the portlet level.

• Content Management System (CMS) Workflow: JBoss jBPM provides content management approval workflow in a configurable process that enables or disables this role-based approval capability.

• Additional Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) Support: WSRP support offers expanded functionality beyond the basic producer and consumer profiles. Version 2.6 adds implicit cloning capability to both the producer and consumer and supports advanced WSRP profiles.

• Identity: With JBoss 2.6, developers have pre-built LDAP integration with LDAP server. Supported servers include Red Hat Directory Server, OpenDS, and OpenLDAP.

• Google Gadget Integration: Now, developers have a simplified way to drop any Google Gadget as portlets. Google Gadgets are mini-applications that work with the Google homepage, Google Desktop, or any page on the web and can range from simple HTML to complex applications. Examples include a calendar,a weather globe, or a media player.”

 Here is my take on new release: There has been a significant change in the product usability but I still feel it lags in front of its competitor open source product, Liferay. Though the drag and drop feature is implemented but its no where near what Liferay provides. Google Gadget integration has added much life to the portal which lags the number portlets available out-of-the-box. Pre-built LDAP integration is nice and JBoss jBPM is really capable to handle pretty complex workflows. Above all one thing that remains same from many versions is that it works only on JBoss Application server and this totally defeat Liferay’s SOA point of view (Service Oriented Liferay). 

There is lot of talk about Web 2.0 all around with focus on making web as a platform, enhanced user experience etc. with DATA as the primary focus area. But one thing that is still missing in Web 2.0 is about translations – from one language to other. There is lot of data in different languages which might be useful for me, but due to language constraint I am not able to really utilize that. Google is making head-ups in this area as well where they recently added new languages to their blogger including Hindi. They also came up with the concept of file a search in one language and you specify the results language. I am sure soon Google’s blogger will give option where you type post in one language and it will give you option to translate post in other languages using automatic translators and your post will appear in different languages to different people based on their Geography settings. Is this going to be Web 3.0?
How CMS will adopt this?