Archive for the ‘Content Management’ Category
Friday, February 25th, 2011
The CMS space, especially WCM or WEM industry, has moved rather rapidly over last few years. With the dotcom boom followed by social media explosion and bogging space expansion, we can see CMS tool in some form or shape being present behind all these changes. That means that CMS tools has undergone rapid changes from being just managing content to managing business processes to social collaboration to campaign management and with the recent addition of mobile web and customer relationsship management.
Its good to see so much development in such a short period of time but I think this rapid change has created gaps in getting the basics right. To name a few:
- Lots of talk over internet around What is WCM or WEM? If you ask me what is WCM, I will struggle to answer that as the WCM space is changing everytime and we have lost what is the core for a WCM product.
- Still struggling with the same issues in almost 90% of the projects even though we are moving at the speed of light. That means we are just innovating new ideas without really solving the everyday problems. There was a recent post on RealStory Group Copy-pasting from Word to hightlight the same.
- Same information getting presented in different ways to express that we are still not solid at our base. Six Critical Ingredients for a Great Website
I think it is time that we get our basics right and define what is WCM? One way could be to divide the core functionalities using MoSCoW method:
* M – MUST have this.
* S – SHOULD have this if at all possible.
* C – COULD have this if it does not affect anything else.
* W – WON’T have this time but WOULD like in the future. Alternatively WANT.
And on top of these the flashy features which are good to attract clients during presentations/demos but are not useful in everyday life.
What are your thoughts?
Tags: #trend, #wcm, #WEM
Posted in Content Management, Trends | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, February 22nd, 2011
Adobe’s announcement around their WEM (Web Experience Management) Suite comprises of :
- CQ 5.4
- Adobe’s Online Marketing Suite (Omniture)
Adobe's WEM. Source: http://www.cmswire.com
Looking at the above list, it could be one of the leaders in the area of WEM providing all the capabilities. I will cover details about each of the modules in my next post. But one important module which I wanted to highlight is CQ5 Mobile. Here is some description about CQ5 Mobile from Adobe’s site:
It is increasingly important that websites offer specific “views” for mobile devices, where these “views” typically are separate sites that share some content with the “normal” website. CQ assists you in creating mobile websites: when authoring a mobile page, the page is displayed in a way that emulates the mobile device, called an emulator. When authoring the page, you can switch between several emulators to get a real view of what the end-user will see when accessing the page.
In the out-of-the-box version, devices have been grouped into three categories – feature, smart and touch – according to the capabilities of the devices to render a page . CQ allows to create new device groups. When the end-user accesses a mobile page, CQ detects the device and sends the representation that corresponds to its device group.
CQ enables you to create a mobile site based on an existing standard site. It can be simply achieved by creating a livecopy of the standard site.
This defintely links back to my previous post :Content Delivery over Mobile: Mobile Apps Vs Mobile Web? this definitely a step towards mobile web over mobile applications for future trends.
Posted in Adobe Day, Collaboration, Content Management, Online Marketing, Web Analytics | 2 Comments »
Monday, February 21st, 2011
In the recent times there has been lots of talk around where the mobile delivery is going? Are we heading towards more and more of Mobile Apps or is native browser going to win in the end?
There is really some good information and comparison available on following sites:
Here are my two cents. I think there is no clear direction around where we are heading: Mobile Apps or Mobile web. And I do not think there is going to be one definite direction but both will continue to stay. But as organizations, I feel that there’s absolute need to evaluate the ROI when going down the Mobile Apps way. Working through various organizations in past years, I have seen cases where organization wants to have a mobile app without putting much thought behind what’s and why’s.
There are lots and lots of mobile applications available in market and from my experience most of the applications are used few times before user switches to other. So, looking at the lifecycle for a mobile application vs its investment, there is not much justification to build them as there a whole set of investment required for hosting and upgrading the application on regular basis.
(more…)
Posted in Collaboration, Content Management, Trends | 1 Comment »
Friday, February 18th, 2011
There was a sudden burst of content over internet in last few years where every other person tried to host their website/ blogs and contributed content over internet. This has lead to lot of duplication of content with the quality of content going downstream.
Internet 2009 in numbers
Internet in 2009
Internet in 2010
source:
http://royal.pingdom.com
Internet is all about content and everything revolves around it whether it is Search, websites etc. Over the last year or so there is more awareness in terms of content quality over quantity. In my recent assignments over an year, I have seen a trend where companies are putting lots of effort in defining the quality content, including their meta information. Some of the typical scenario’s are engaging with creative agencies/ technical copy writiers/ Content guru’s to help define the right content. This has many fold advantages including, better ranking with search engines, readers satisfaction, better bounding with readers which encourage them to return to the site and so on.
So, why not drive our blogs/ sites towards quality content as internet has lots of content and really needs quality around it.
Posted in Blogs, Content Management, SEO, Search, Trends | 2 Comments »
Thursday, January 7th, 2010
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]
(more…)
Tags: Fatwire, Google Analytics, Integration
Posted in Content Management, Fatwire, Integrations, Trends, Web Analytics | No Comments »
Thursday, December 17th, 2009
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 (more…)
Tags: content, features, IBM, issues
Posted in Content Management, IBM WWCM | No Comments »
Saturday, November 14th, 2009
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?
Posted in Content Management, Migration, Portals, Search, Trends, Web 2.0 | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, November 10th, 2009
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”
(more…)
Tags: 6.0.1.3, 6.1.0.2, IBM, WWCM
Posted in IBM WWCM, Migration | No Comments »
Monday, October 26th, 2009
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.
(more…)
Tags: Design Pattern, IBM
Posted in Content Management | No Comments »
Monday, May 28th, 2007
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.
Posted in Content Management, Search, Trends | No Comments »