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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Some days back Google launched a new feature on Google Translate, where search query is in one language and the results can be a from the web pages in other language.

From Google: How does this work?
1. Search for Dubai tours from English to Arabic.
2. We translate your query into “جولات دبي” and find Arabic web page results.
3. Finally, we translate the Arabic web page results back into English for you.

This will bring in a whole new experience in the Internet world. It gives an opportunity to explore all the hidden information which was impossible before due to language barriers. I will expand this article to how it will change in the CMS world.

To what I understand till now about Web 2.0, it emphasize on Search Engine Optimization as one of the main area of concern. Let me try to list down few of the Search Engine Optimizations from CMS implementation point of view:

A utility to detect duplicate content detection at the time of content publish
I do not think that there is any WCM out in the market (commercial or Open source) that provides any utility for duplicate content detection

A spell-checker to ensure that the content submitted online doesn’t have any spelling mistakes
This has become and integral part of WISIWYG editors like FCKeditor. Most of the WCMS tools adopt to such content editor tool.

Content Structure which enforce Alt attribute for Image tag, title, meta descriptions, keyword tags and templates supporting picking up those information while rendering page
A more of a design consideration and rendering aspect. Lets leave this to individual design and implementation. It might be a good idea if in future, CMS provides something out-of-the-box for such considerations

What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) editors for providing facility to content editors to add formatting to text content
Most of the WCM provides WYSIWYG editors that provides basic formatting stuff like h1, h2, b etc. OpenCMS has its own inbuilt editor.

An editor that can clean up unwanted HTML tags and make it W3C compliant
Its again part of the WYSIWYG editors.

An editor that gets integrated with your CSS of the site
Most of the text editors provide this facility. FCKEditor is one such that support CSS for better integration with website. WCM’s are adopting these editors for their content editors frontend.

A utility to help detect duplicate page titles or a mechanism to generate unique page title
I can not re-collect that there is any CMS in the market that provides such utility. At present its taken more at individual implementation level rather than a CMS providing out-of-the-box.

A utility to determine broken links at the time of content publish to avoid broken links
OpenCMS is one that does provide this functionality of validating the links and reporting the broken links. but I do not know many other which does that. Fatwire do provide this in a little different way, if at the time of rendering content, it doesn’t find the link, it removes hyperlink and render content. But I think most of the CMS products doesn’t really provide this out-of-the-box.

Looking at my list above, I feel most of the Search Engine Optimization techniques are taken care at the text editor level which have become powerful over the period of time. From CMS perspective, providing few utilities like duplicate content detection, broken links etc. will sure make them Web 2.0 compliant.

Just wondering how much a name of a product make sense? This strike me when I was reading about Search Engine Optimization and came across how domain name plays a vital role in optimization (will cover SEO in my next posts). Lets have a look at few products from each space and try to understand what they really mean.

Lets start with Portals space:

ATG:
Art Technology Group – A group who created art for Internet world by providing common face to all the applications within the organization/

BroadVision:
Broad-vision = enterprise wide vision? Nicely framed but their vision is really going hey-ward

Vignette:
A decorative design or small illustration used on the title page of a book or at the beginning or end of a chapter. A decorative design for your information capturing from beginning to end, from all systems across the organization.

JBoss Portal:
Java Boss?

Liferay Portal:
Life – ray : a ray of life for all the vendors who can not afford commercial portal products.

Plone:
Anyone out there help me. I have no clue about it

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Fatwire announced much awaited release of Web Content Server 7. The newest release is built around the Web 2.0 jargon’s. It bring in the concept of “tagging” making it easy for everyone to navigate, organize and socially contribute web content. The theme for the new version, as Fatwire states “Content Management for Everyone”.

Another feature that impress is the multilingual support built directly into data model which help global market organisations to expand their presence at no extra cost.

Other thing that comes with CS 7 is three different interfaces for content contributors/editors.
1) Insite editor for people who manages content and page layout. This was already present with the previous versions of the Content Server. Whats new is markers and designers rearrange web pages using a simple drag-and-drop interface.
2) Dash board, a new interface with this version targeted for frequent business users. Much simpler UI with easy organization and quick access to content based on user-defined tags.
3) Advanced or the actual UI which help with Admin tasks along with defining content structure. This interface is the original one which is available though out product life name it is Futuretense or OpenMarket or divine or Fatwire.

Need to wait and see how it impact WCMS world?

Apoorv’s thought about Content Server 7

In recent times, I came across few situations where client need to move from their hosted CMS environment to another CMS environment due to issues like scalability, performance, global strategy etc. What has been amazing is clients are looking for intermediate solutions before migrating to new CMS environments. They look for migrating existing solution to either an open source environment, or changing to static site for few months. How does it help them? Is it a good approach? Here is my thoughts on it:
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