IBM’s Web content Manager (previously called Lotus WWCM) is very tightly integrated with WebSphere Portal. The product was originally was acquired by IBM and over the period of few releases it has move forward from just being a simple WCM product to more rich functionality. The support for personalize content and integation with portal’s personalization engine adds new dimension.

Liferay has built in product called Liferay CMS (previously known as Journal) which is tightly integrated within Portal and let you perform basic CMS functionalities though it is not as rich as IBM’s WCM. It does provides integration with jBPM to manage complex workflows. No personalization of content that I am aware of.

Oracle’s UCM is a true WCM product and could stand on its own (not the once mentioned above). It is far more complex and provides a wide range of capabilities – document management, versioning, document collaboration etc. The newest version provides a tag based architecture, allows you to embed services in content regions, runs and scales on WebLogic Server, and has some interesting web app functionality to create content driven web applications without a lot of coding. However, it is not as tightly integrated with any portal in the WebCenter Suite.

Lots of time people have an opinion that bundled CMS are not capable to handle requirements and they start buying bigger CMS products and start integration work. In my experience, it is worth to evaluate bundled option first before even looking out for CMS. Evaluate how much of the requirements are met with the current bundled version and if the percerntage is significantly high stick with it. Integration with other CMS will not only create inegration nightmares but will also add high cost to licences with the gain not in proportion to spending.

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]

AddAnalyticsImgTag is the element that renders tracking request to an Analytics data collection server either FatWire Analytics product and/or a 3rd party product such as Google Analytics.

Example:

   <render:callelement elementname=”Analytics/AddAnalyticsImgTag”>

         <render:argument value=’<%=ics.GetVar(“c”)%>’/>

         <render:argument value=’<%=ics.GetVar(“cid”)%>’/>                                                           

         <render:argument value=’<%=ics.GetVar(“site”)%>’/>

         <render:argument  value=’<%=ics.GetVar(“childpagename”)%>’/>

         <render:argument value=’<%=ics.GetVar(“recid”)%>’/>

</render:callelement>

Reporting on Gathered Data

Once the data has been collected, it’s time to display them in different reports.  There are different options available:

• Directly login to Google Analytics and generate customize reports; this could be displayed within the Fatwire UI accessed through inline frame
• Custom reporting by accessing analytics data through the Google Data Export Protocol. The only caveat with this is that the web page producing the reports be accessible from the Internet.

Limitations of using Google Analytics

Google limits the amount of activity between a client and Google Analytics. Here are some facts:

• Maximum of 5 million page views per month for any Web property (unlimited if the site is a Google AdWords subscriber)
• No more than 500 tracking requests per session.
• No more than 10 requests in any given 1-second period.
• No more than 10,000 requests per 24 hours.
• Data query is limited to 10,000 entries per feed.