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.
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Posted in Collaboration, Content Management, Trends | 1 Comment »
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 »
February 17th, 2011
In recent times there is a lot of spectulation around personalized and targetted content, whether we talk about Search or websites. There is lots of data gathering which happens when we are on internet and that helps to provide the content you are interested in.
And as always Google is pretty good in this area. Recently, Google added a new dimension to this by providing Oscar Search Trends (http://oscartrends.appspot.com/) which provide in-depth summary of the search trends for the last Oscars and a way to predict the Oscar winners for this year.
From Google Blog:
“John Batelle once described search trends as “a massive database of desires, needs, wants and likes.” Looking at Insights for Search data, we were intrigued to find that this “database of intentions” shows consistent search patterns among Best Picture winners for the last three years. Each year, the winning film has shown an upward trend in search volume for at least four weeks, as well as highest regional interest from New York (The Hurt Locker, Slumdog Millionaire and No Country for Old Men).”
I can see such kind of apps getting more and more popular in the recent times to come. What the masses think?
Posted in Search, Trends, Web Analytics | No Comments »
January 10th, 2010
10 Technology Trends You Can't Afford to Ignore – From Gartner
Posted in Trends | No Comments »
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]
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Tags: Fatwire, Google Analytics, Integration
Posted in Content Management, Fatwire, Integrations, Trends, Web Analytics | No Comments »
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 Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: content, features, IBM, issues
Posted in Content Management, IBM WWCM | No Comments »
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 »
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”
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Tags: 6.0.1.3, 6.1.0.2, IBM, WWCM
Posted in IBM WWCM, Migration | No Comments »
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.
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Tags: Design Pattern, IBM
Posted in Content Management | No Comments »
October 22nd, 2009
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:
- Installed WordPress v 2.1 which I was using on pcmspace.com
- Migrated pcmspace Database making minor changes to the domain/user details
- Update install path to map domain path
- Check point 1: Unit test the migration
- Upgrade WordPress to V 2.8.2
- Run migration tasks
- 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 
Tags: Migration
Posted in Migration | No Comments »