Managed Pages in WebSphere Portal 8
Wed, May 23rd 2012 8:12p Glenn Kline Managed pages are one of the many new capabilities in WebSphere Portal 8. A key goal of this capability is to provide a great user experience for business users managing pages and content. I attended a session at the IBM Exceptional Web Experience on managed pages which was lead by Stefan Hepper, Portal / WCM Lead Architect and John Harris, User Experience Design Lead of IBM. Some of the key notes that resonate with what I’ve seen in the industry include the following:
User Experience is [read] Keywords: ibm
notes
community
portlet
websphere
websphere portal
xml
19
Creating A Business Case for Social
Wed, May 23rd 2012 11:12a Michael Porter Live Blogging at the IBM Web Experience Conference: Mary Bird Nance does a great job working with a variety of companies to define vision and create a justification for the use of portal and social technologies. She’s a pro at working with clients to understand their needs and where they should go. Anyway, she and Palma Bickford spoke on creating a business case for a social business.
Social Business are more engaged, agile, transparent, and innovative. They listen better. They interact [read] Keywords: administration
collaboration
ibm
blogging
integration
server
6
Optimizing Your Portal Experience: Tuning Tips and Techniques
Wed, May 23rd 2012 7:12a Glenn Kline This session from the IBM Exceptional Web Experience is on portal performance tuning techniques. It is hosted by Hunter Presnall and Denny Pichardo of IBM. This particular post does not summarize the entire session but instead focuses on key points and topics that resonate with what I’ve seen happen in the field with customers and performance challenges and solutions.
Performance Benchmarking Best Practice
Goals must be defined to measure success. It isn’t possible to measure perfo [read] Keywords: ibm
applications
best practice
database
portlet
server
web 2.0
32
Getting Users Engaged With Requirements – Coming Up
Wed, May 23rd 2012 6:13a Michael Porter I’m at the Web Experience Conference today and will be speaking. Here’s the information:
Tech-B09
How to Get Your Social Portal Users Engaged from the Beginning with Interactive Requirements
1:45 PM Meeting Room 406
You’ve seen it before, a project kicks off, everyone’s excited and then you hit requirements sessions, a mind numbing attempt to define the scope and vision of your social portal. Your business users disengage, your timeline takes a hit, and your troubles incr [read] Keywords: connections
ibm
integration
Integrating External Content with IBM Web Content Manager V8
Mon, May 21st 2012 10:12p Mark Polly Stefan Hepper presented a session at the IBM Exceptional Web Experience Conference on techniques to integrate external content management systems with IBM WCM. He first presented on integration of ECM systems into WCM. There are several use cases where this integration is important:
Author content in external ECM system and deliver it using WCM
Target documents to the right people at the right time (aka Content Targeting or personalization)
Let users tag, rate and search/retrieve content in c [read] Keywords: connections
ibm
quickr
archive
integration
23
Migrating to IBM WebSphere Portal V8
Mon, May 21st 2012 3:12p Mark Polly Now that WebSphere Portal V8 has shipped, you should wonder what is the migration process to get to Portal 8. I’m attending the IBM Exceptional Web Experience Conference session titled Migrating to IBM WebSphere Portal V8, so I’ll pass along what I learn.
First, the upgrade is going to require additional servers because it is a side-by-side upgrade process. The process can be done in place on the target and it will work on the database and profile information. Before starting the [read] Keywords: ibm
aix
database
dojo
linux
profile
server
websphere
websphere portal
IBM Exceptional Web Experience 2012
Sun, May 20th 2012 6:12a Jonathan Distad Aside from the watching the lunar eclipse, there is another reason why hundreds of people are making their way to Texas today – the IBM Exceptional Web Experience conference in Austin, TX. The preeminent conference highlighting the great web experience tools the the IBM product suite such as:
IBM Portal
IBM Connections
IBM Experience Modeler
IBM Collaboration Suite
IBM Web Content Manager (WCM)
They will also be talking extensively about the release of IBM Portal 8, which Mark Polly ha [read] Keywords: collaboration
connections
ibm
blogging
eclipse
websphere
websphere portal
80
Age old question: Buy or Build?
Sat, May 19th 2012 9:13p Richard Taylor As I often come across in my engagements at Perficient, there comes a juncture where the client must make a decision between whether to pay us to write a custom application or purchase software that satisfies some business requirement(s). Depending on who I am working with, the conversation typically goes one way or the other…adamantly. If I am with a developer, the consultant will go right into a discussion about how he/she will be able to satisfy the requirement (and sometimes attempts t [read] Keywords: application
development
63
Tips for Installing SharePoint on a Windows 7 laptop
Sat, May 19th 2012 10:12a Richard Taylor One of the things that can come in handy for a SharePoint consultant is to install SharePoint on one’s personal laptop. I speak at many conferences and sometimes do not have the luxury of an internet connection to a virtual server and my laptop only has 6GB of RAM, so a virtual machine running on my laptop would be a *D-O-G*. The other two options I have, then, are installing Windows Server 2008 R2 on my laptop (not happening), or installing SharePoint on my Windows 7 OS.
First you shou [read] Keywords: blogging
database
laptop
network
server
sharepoint
sql
xml
53
Collaboration is a Culture, Not a Set of Tools
Fri, May 18th 2012 8:12a Michael Porter Troy Larsen at Business2Community.com has an article entitled, “Collaboration is a Culture, Not a Set of Tools” (Thanks to Erin Maloney for pointing me to the article) In it he speaks to a recent quote from RedHat CEO Jim Whitehurst giving that short and spiffy little sound bit.
while collaboration is an important characteristic of successful companies, tools alone won’t get you there. Whitehurst believes that if collaboration isn’t already something ingrained in the corporate cu [read] Keywords: collaboration
office
redhat
77
IBM Mobile Strategies
Thu, May 17th 2012 9:13a Mark Polly IBM recently published a new presentation on their mobile strategy for social businesses. This presentation is a comprehensive look at the available IBM mobile technologies across their broad spectrum of systems, including WebSphere Portal, Lotus Notes, Domino, IBM Connections, Sametime, Sterling Commerce, Cognos and Coremetrics.
IBM has a three prong strategy when it comes to mobile:
Extend & Transform – extend existing systems to mobile devices to create new business opportunities [read] Keywords: connections
domino
ibm
lotus
notes
sametime
symphony
traveler
xpages application
mobile
security
websphere
websphere portal
41
WebSphere Portal 8: New Modular Theme Framework
Thu, May 17th 2012 7:12a Mark Polly IBM has been reworking WebSphere Portal themes for a long time now. The feedback I get on themes in Portal 7 is they are too complicated, too slow, and not well documented. With WebSphere Portal 8, IBM is addressing these concerns with a new theme architecture. IBM is touting the new theme as very modular, which should lead to a flexible framework that improves download times and minimizes the number of requests going from the browser to the server.
In my last post about Managed Pages, I s [read] Keywords: ibm
ldd
lotus
dojo
portlet
profile
properties
server
websphere
websphere portal
83
3 Ways to Improve Your User’s Web Experience
Thu, May 17th 2012 6:13a Michael Porter I had the opportunity to guest blog at the Social Biz blog. Here’s a brief excerpt.
Everyone wants to be treated as someone special. Don’t you get a thrill when you check in to your hotel and they thank you for the 20+ nights you’ve stayed there this year and give you a “free” upgrade?You can feel the same when you hit a web site and they show you what you want to see rather than what you don’t need. Some of my biggest pet peeves on the web revolve around complexities.
[read] Keywords: connections
ibm
office
websphere
websphere portal
46
Creating Managed Pages in WebSphere Portal 8: First Look
Wed, May 16th 2012 7:11a Mark Polly I’ve starting playing with IBM WebSphere Portal 8 (see Installing Part 1 and Installing Part 2) and the first task I attempted was to create a new page. If you haven’t heard, WebSphere Portal 8 includes a new feature called Managed Pages. With this feature, you can create Projects to hold changes to Portal, such as new pages, new content, modified content, etc and publish them at one time. My goal was to create a new page using a project without reading the documentation.
So the [read] Keywords: ibm
portlet
profile
properties
websphere
websphere portal
118
IBM Connections Suite
Tue, May 15th 2012 12:12p Jonathan Distad IBM released today the IBM Connection Suite that combines the features and functions of:
IBM Connections
IBM Sametime Advanced
IBM Sametime SUT Lite
Lotus Quickr
FileNet
There are some nice videos on the capabilities which really start to see some of the Project Northstar coming to fruition.
Click here to view the embedded video.
Now, there is nothing that you couldn’t do before but the vision here is clearly defined and you will likely see some pricing that will enable the enterprise to [read] Keywords: administration
connections
ibm
lotus
quickr
sametime
applications
enterprise
137
Understanding IBM Worklight
Mon, May 14th 2012 7:12a Mark Polly IBM’s new Worklight software is a what we call a Mobile Enterprise Application Platform (MEAP). MEAPs allow you to create exciting mobile applications by integrating multiple existing web and service applications. Using this approach you can easily deploy one integrated application to multiple platforms and multiple device types. In fact, IBM Worklight allows you to deliver your applications in four different ways:
Browser based – using HTML 5, CSS and Javascript
Hybrid Web & [read] Keywords: ibm
application
applications
css
eclipse
enterprise
integration
java
javascript
mobile
server
websphere
websphere portal
82
Installing WebSphere Portal 8 Part 2
Fri, May 11th 2012 5:12p Mark Polly Well, if you a regular reader of our blog, you’ll know that I started my WebSphere Portal installation (see Installing WebSphere Portal 8) but forgot to check the system requirements. So I stopped when Installation Manager told be that Windows Server 2003 was not supported. Well I got a couple of comments that basically said, come on you baby, just go ahead and install it on Windows Server 2003 Server, it’ll probably work.
So I restarted the install. Never mind that I didn’ [read] Keywords: ibm
network
password
profile
server
websphere
websphere portal
118
Installing IBM WebSphere Portal 8
Mon, May 7th 2012 7:12a Mark Polly I’ve started experimenting with the new IBM WebSphere Portal 8 (Enable version). My first adventure that I’d like to share with you was downloading and installing this new version. I’ve installed previos versions of Portal many, many times starting with version 5.0. So I jumped onto the IBM website, found the install images and started up the download.
First, the download is bigger than in previous versions. In previous versions, I downloaded 6 images for a total of aro [read] Keywords: ibm
enterprise
linux
network
server
vista
vm
vmware
websphere
websphere portal
136
Zaarly – crowdsourced commerce
Thu, May 3rd 2012 11:12p Jonathan Distad Yet another, ‘why didn’t I think of that’. Actually, the other evening I did talk with a friend over dinner about something similar to Zaarly.com. I am an addict of looking and sometimes buying stuff on Craigslist but it is certainly not too visually appealing. Zaarly is a the fix. As a test, I posted that I needed a part of my house painted, set a price and within MINUTES I had my first request. The homepage is a mix of LivingSocial and Pinterest
And you can search [read] Keywords: application
164
WebSphere Portal 8 has finally arrived!
Wed, May 2nd 2012 2:12p Mark Polly IBM formally posted WebSphere Portal v8 information on their website: http://www-01.ibm.com/software/websphere/portal/. With this new version, IBM is expanding their portal-based suites to address both customer experiences and employee experiences. IBM Web Experience V8.0 is targeted toward your extranet audience, while IBM Intranet Experience Suite V8.0 is targeted toward employees. In addition to these suites, IBM continues to offer the standalone WebSphere Portal Server product.
IBM has [read] Keywords: connections
ibm
community
facebook
integration
server
websphere
websphere portal
164
IBM Worklight and WebSphere Portal
Tue, May 1st 2012 3:13p Mark Polly IBM recently purchased Worklight to add to its portfolio for mobile devices (see our blog post). You can see the details of IBM’s acquisition here. Worklight is a an HTML 5 based product that provides nice integration from your mobile device to your website.
Mobile is a hot topic in the portal world. However, mobilizing portal presents significant challenges. Screen size is an issue because most portals aggregate multiple content and applications into a single page. With our mobile [read] Keywords: ibm
application
applications
integration
interface
mobile
server
websphere
websphere portal
142
Total Economic Impact of IBM’s Exceptional Web Experience
Tue, May 1st 2012 1:13p Mark Polly Forrester recently released a study on the Total Economic Impact of IBM’s Exceptional Web Experience solutions. You can obtain a copy of the full report here after you register. The study was commissioned by IBM and they did have some input into the study, but the analysis was completed by Forrester.
In the study, Forrester interviewed four actual customers and built a ‘composite’ company on which to develop the TEI. The resulting composite company was modelled as a large [read] Keywords: ibm
125
Healthcare Portals – Perficient’s Health BI
Tue, May 1st 2012 7:12a Mark Polly Perficient’s outstanding Healthcare team just posted a video on YouTube that highlights our Health BI portal offering. You can view the video right here in this blog post.Click here to view the embedded video.
This system is based on Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and provides very dynamic insight into your Healthcare data. It is designed for physicians, nurses, hospitals, MCOs, IDMs, ACOs, HIEs, etc.; so it covers a broad range of end users. The flexible archtecture lets you start small [read] Keywords: microsoft
security
sharepoint
Google Drive to compete with Dropbox, Box and others
Wed, Apr 25th 2012 7:12a Mark Polly Google just announced its cloud storage service called Drive that offers 5 GB of free storage, mobile access (except iOS, but coming), and integration with Google Docs. Drive is the latest entry in a growing market of cloud storage providers. My colleague Michael Porter recently posted a story about VMWare’s plans to create a private enterprise version of cloud storage.
Google Drive seems to be similar to many other services, but it does offer some nice extras such as a search feature [read] Keywords: enterprise
google
integration
mac
microsoft
mobile
vmware
159
The 10 Biggest Mistakes Made With Amazon Web Services
Tue, Apr 24th 2012 10:12a Michael Porter Techcrunch has an interesting article about the top 10 biggest mistakes made with Amazon Web Services. While I don’t want to just copy what they say, I can see a lot of easy mistakes. For those who think in terms of an internal data center that has to scale to meet all future needs and spike, the tendency to over-build is huge. We have to do that in our own data centers. AWS and other cloud services change that model and we need to change with it. That probably also means you have [read] Keywords: notes
application
security
server
widget
123
Webinar on Responsive Designer
Tue, Apr 24th 2012 10:12a Michael Porter Over 75% of our portal or web site related projects these days have some mobile component. If they aren’t doing it then they are making some serious plans for it. That brings up a lot of questions on how to design a site to fit all the different channels that will hit it. The new term is “Responsive Design” Martin Ridgeway from our Experience Design (XD) group will host Responsive Web Design: One Size No Longer Fits All and it’s probably worth the time to see what h [read] Keywords: application
applications
desktop
development
mobile
123
Social Networking Snitches
Fri, Apr 20th 2012 12:12p Mark Polly I recently heard on the news that some employers were asking job seekers to provide their Facebook ID and password so the company could see what they were posting. To me that’s outrageous. I don’t have anything to hide from my own posts, but who knows what some of my friends might put on my wall.
A new phenomenon (or maybe not so new) is the social network “snitch”. This is a person with whom you are connected that takes your posts and sends them to your company, es [read] Keywords: policies
facebook
network
networking
password
125
Driving Value with SharePoint Search
Thu, Apr 19th 2012 5:13p Mark Polly Over on CMSWire, Christian Buckley posted an article about SharePoint Search. Buckley’s post talks about a presentation given by Michal Pisarek at the recent Australian SharePoint Conference.
The post and the presentation focused on the business value of search and hoe you should organize your content in SharePoint to create better search results. Pisarek argues that enterprise search is not equivalent to consumer search. By that he means that there are different rules, different secur [read] Keywords: enterprise
security
sharepoint
104
Pinterest is Twitter for the visually inclined
Thu, Apr 19th 2012 7:13a Jonathan Distad My brother in law, Aaron Keller, penned a nice article on Pinterest and Twitter. Now, he is a design type and does all things great in branding so I would expect nothing less from the man. Nothing that I guess one hasn’t thought about for a while but what this has raised is the capabilities of using the concept of pinning in the enterprise with the likes of Sharepoint or IBM Connections – a visual tag cloud per-se. At a glance you could see the essence of a community or a newl [read] Keywords: connections
ibm
community
enterprise
linkedin
sharepoint
twitter
127
Newsgator in Good Mobile Browser
Wed, Apr 18th 2012 6:13p Jonathan Distad One of the great add-ons to the Sharepoint stack is Newsgator Social Sites. I was on a recent client who is a highly regulated healthcare company and even though the Newsgator has a great mobile app, it wouldn’t work within their security model. That model required that all BYOD (bring your own device) employees needed to use Good. Fair enough and we see that rather consistently – that is what Good is great at. But the out of box experience with Newsgator didn’t looks [read] Keywords: blackberry
bug
microsoft
mobile
security
sharepoint
207
VMWare to Create Dropbox for the Enterprise
Wed, Apr 18th 2012 7:12a Michael Porter CRN has a note about VMWare’s intention to launch a more secure Dropbox for the enterprise. Both Dropbox and Box.com have nifty solutions that make it really easy to share and sync documents. Their offerings shouldn’t be confused with other collaboration vendors who allow you to share your files via a web based interface or via a connected folder. Dropbox in particular does a fantastic job of automatically syncing your files to your Mac, PC, iPhone, Android, and other systems. [read] Keywords: agent
collaboration
desktop
enterprise
interface
iphone
mac
security
vmware
157
SharePoint and User Experience, Part I: Why UX Matters
Tue, Apr 17th 2012 10:12a Michael Porter It looks like Rich Wood is well on his way as this is the second time I’ve posted on a nice post of his. I’ll let Rich’s post stand by itself and just re-iterate my thoughts on the importance of UX. User Experience counts the overall experience a user has on a specific site. It includes the look and feel, the seamless use of search, the ability of a user to complete key tasks quickly and easily, etc. Failure to take all this into account means you just spend a lot of mone [read] Keywords: microsoft
sharepoint
147
Perficient Launches New IBM Blog
Mon, Apr 16th 2012 9:13p Michael Porter So while our portal blog cuts a broad swathe around the various portal vendors, we have posted a number of times on IBM related articles and best practices. Perficient just launched our IBM Blog. You will see us blogging here and there with some cross-posting mixed in. For now, IBM posts of any kinds across a wide range of topics like portal, SOA, Business Intelligence, and other topics can be found there. [read] Keywords: ibm
blogging
soa
139
Should You Allow Your Users to Customize?
Mon, Apr 16th 2012 7:12a Michael Porter Probably eight out of ten clients start out asking for customization of some kind. Usually, the customization broken into two categories:
Give users a page like My Yahoo! or iGoogle. Let them add portlets or widgets at will and let them customize the portelts themselves like we do with weather or stock
Let users define their interests in their profile page so they can receive targeted content and feeds
Let me tackle the second item first. If you have users you know well enough to let the [read] Keywords: application
portlet
profile
widgets
186
Apple and Facebook Should Be Terrified Of Google-Tinted Glasses
Thu, Apr 12th 2012 2:12p Michael Porter Techcrunch has an article out about why Apple and Facebook should be terrified of Google Glasses. I think the idea of the glasses has merit although I suspect the first iteration of these things will need a lot of work. But given what they could do for you and how they could integration voice, map/directions, search, and other services, it has the potential to be compelling.
If you haven’t heard, Google today announced it is beginning public tests of augmented reality glasses with the co [read] Keywords: apple
facebook
google
integration
twitter
120
Does $1B make mobile mainstream?
Wed, Apr 11th 2012 1:12p Jonathan Distad The New York Times had a nice article about the purchase of Instagram by Facebook for $1Billion. Whether you think its worth it or not, it begs a bigger question – especially for the larger enterprise community. Does that make mobile mainstream? This purchase didn’t kickstart the mobile revolution but for a lot of IT and business leaders, this might have validated their working assumptions and budget bets for 2012/13. The enterprise IT conversation will revolve around a few i [read] Keywords: ibm
community
enterprise
facebook
mobile
oracle
unified communications
Adding Gamification Concepts to Sitecore
Tue, Apr 10th 2012 1:13p Jamie Stump Lately the topic of gamification has been getting a lot of press. Even here on the Perficient blogs, we’ve had some great gamification posts and white papers, covering a full spectrum from specific technology platforms (IBM Connections), entire solutions (Intranet) to the broad industries (Healthcare). As an avid gamer, I love that something I have had a major interest in since I was a child, and invested countless (seriously, countless) hours doing could have some legitimate business appl [read] Keywords: connections
ibm
applications
community
wiki
88
6 Pillars of Social Commerce: the psychology of social enagement
Tue, Apr 10th 2012 6:13a Michael Porter Brian Solis has an excellent post on the psychology of social engagement. It’s worth your reading his entire take on things and the research he references. A lot of you might read it and say, “Duh!, I already knew that” but I would say that when someone codifies it, we are the better for being able to plan for and create social engagement using these principals. That said, I do like his beginning, especially the part about how NOT engaging in a social conversation is wors [read] Keywords: exchange
exchange
network
networking
184
SharePoint Online Myths Debunked
Mon, Apr 9th 2012 8:13a Mark Polly Mo Omar posted a video on YouTube that debunks three myths he has been hearing regarding SharePoint online. Mo is a Perficient Senior Technical Consultant and SharePoint MVP. Click here to view the embedded video.
Mo talks about three myths in the video:
On premise version is more has more features than the cloud version
Developing solutions is more limited on the cloud
You can’t have a single sign on environment
I won’t give away how he debunks each of these myths, so you can [read] Keywords: sharepoint
96
Version 8 Beta Feature Focus Session 4 – Upgrading to Version 8
Mon, Apr 9th 2012 6:13a Michael Porter Lauren Wendel has posted on an upcoming Beta Education Session on IBM’s WebSphere Portal’s next generation. Everyone is always worried about upgrade so this is your chance to get the early scoop.
We’ve been very pleased to host collaborative education sessions that provide our Customer Experience Suite, WebSphere Portal, Web Content Manager and IBM Forms Beta audiences an advance look at specific upcoming release features, designs and strategy. The next Feature Focus ses [read] Keywords: ibm
websphere
websphere portal
85
Planning Communities In Newsgator Sites
Sat, Apr 7th 2012 6:14a Michael Porter Over on our Microsoft Blog, Rich Wood has a post on Planning Communities in Newsgator Sites. I’ll pop in a teaser but Rich does dive deeper. In general though, his best practices are applicable across all social sites. Social tools of all types need to focus on communities as a way to share the information and find the experts.
At Perficient, most of our customers are looking for a SharePoint interface that provides functionality familiar to users who live their lives on Facebook, Linked [read] Keywords: facebook
interface
linkedin
microsoft
sharepoint
A Sitecore Book? A Sitecore Book!!!
Thu, Apr 5th 2012 3:13p Jamie Stump Yesterday I pre-ordered my copy of Professional Sitecore Development, a book being written by John West, and releasing on May 22, 2012. I have to say, I couldn’t be more excited to receive it in the mail. As an experienced .NET and Sitecore developer, I can safely say – you never know everything, and probably never will know everything. It’s always great to have another source of information to help you troubleshoot an issue, or understand a tool, or just get a tip on how [read] Keywords: blogging
development
google
197
Bootstrapped Startup Saves Over $100K By Dropping IE
Thu, Apr 5th 2012 9:12a Michael Porter Interesting article at Techcrunch. The only thing I’ll add is that supporting earlier versions of IE can be expensive. One clients wanted a web 2.0 interface with support for IE 6. We told them it would increase the cost of the project significantly. After we launched I sat down with the architect and learned that most bugs were related to IE and an overage of 30% was largely attributable to IE 6 support.
It’s not every day that you start a business and quickly decide to say “no [read] Keywords: consulting
development
interface
web 2.0
85
IBM Connections not indexing your files ? Check this out ….
Thu, Apr 5th 2012 6:12a Michael Porter Thanks to Dave Haye at a Portal to a Portal Blog for this.
Copy Search conversion tools to local nodes to enable full indexing of data.
The Search conversion tools make it possible to index Files and Wiki attachments. However, the conversion tools are initially deployed on a network share so you must copy them to each node in the Search cluster.
If you are performing this task after you have added a node to an existing cluster, as described in the Adding a node to a cluster topic, you need [read] Keywords: connections
ibm
ldd
lotus
network
wiki
80
Personalization in Gamification
Mon, Apr 2nd 2012 6:12a Mark Polly That’s a lot of ‘ation’s in one title. However that is the title of a post over at the gamification blog and they are referring to new features in Bunchball‘s Nitro v4.3 system. Personalization is a key pillar of most portal systems, so this caught my eye. How are personalization and gamification related?
In this release of Nitro (codenamed Flamethrower!), you can now inject additional fields into each user’s profile that can be used to change the gamificatio [read] Keywords: profile
146
Liferay Portal 6.1: More than 500,000 Downloads in 3 Months
Thu, Mar 29th 2012 9:12a Mark Polly Liferay announced yesterday that Liferay Portal 6.1 Community Edition has been downloaded over 550,000 times since it was launched earlier this year. Liferay says this is a record number for any of its products and is more than double that of version 6.0 in the first three months. We reviewed some of the new features in 6.1 in a blog post titled What’s new in Liferay CMS.
In addition, Liferay announced “the start of a new series of multi-city roadshows to bring the recently rel [read] Keywords: community
enterprise
106
Gamification for IBM Connections: Bunchball Level Up
Wed, Mar 28th 2012 4:12p Mark Polly If you haven’t heard yet, IBM and Bunchball have gotten together to develop a gamification system for IBM Connections called Level Up. Gamification has been a hot topic and using it to encourage participation in you new social network deployments makes tremendous sense.
To show how Level Up works with Connections, BunchBall put together the YouTube video shown here. Click here to view the embedded video.
The video does an excellent job of introducing the need for gamification and how L [read] Keywords: connections
ibm
network
Microsoft Entity Frame for the Enterprise
Wed, Mar 28th 2012 8:13a Michael Porter Perficient just published a whitepaper authored by one of our Technical Architect in Indianapolis, Kyle Burns. It’s titled, Microsoft Entity Framework for the Enterprise. I’ll put the description below but for any who ask why my portal blog would care about something like that I say that more and more enterprise SharePoint implementations will accessing data from a variety of sources. Portal are meant to aggregate a variety of transactions, content, and data after all. So [read] Keywords: application
applications
development
enterprise
microsoft
sharepoint
85
Using Sitecore Search for Standard Values
Tue, Mar 27th 2012 1:12p Jamie Stump A quick tip post here, as I go about looking through some of my older posts from my personal blog.
Standard Values are an awesome thing for Sitecore architects. Most likely, anyone who’s developed a Sitecore site has set “$name” as a default Standard Value to at least one field of his templates. The proper use of Standard Values can really reduce the time a Content Manager needs to spend “managing” her content initially. However, with great power comes great r [read] Keywords:
98
5 Ways to Harness the Power of Social in Your Intranet
Mon, Mar 26th 2012 6:12p Michael Porter Thanks for Erin Maloney for pointing this out to me. Tara Clark at Business2Community.com has a quick post on the 5 ways you can harness the power of social tools. I won’t steal her thunder by reposing everything but I will provide a quick list and then commentary on one item that stuck out at me.
Allow it to shape and manage your company culture
Allow it to help you strengthen change management initiatives
Allow it to help you improve execution of corporate strategy
Allow it to let y [read] Keywords:
Customizing Sitecore Workflow Emails
Mon, Mar 26th 2012 7:13a Jamie Stump My colleague Candace recently wrote a guest post on Workflow Security in Sitecore, where she referenced the common desire of a Content Manager to have intelligent, context-specific emails generated around Sitecore Workflows. Here’s her follow up on how to produce such emails.
Sitecore provides email functionality out of the box with its workflows. It’s really easy to add. Just add an Email Action to any command, fill in the standard Email fields and an email is on its way every tim [read] Keywords: database
email
outlook
profile
security
138
Agile Process Diagram with Visualization
Fri, Mar 23rd 2012 6:13p Michael Porter As usual, Dustin Boscher, our visualization king, takes things to the next level when defining how to use visualization tools in a formal project setting. He has a post over on our BPM blog about where and how visualization fits. Check out the link for the text around it. My only comment is that I believe his approach works in a SCRUM type setting. [read] Keywords: enterprise
117
Keep the Fat Off My Sitecore Databases
Fri, Mar 23rd 2012 3:13p Jamie Stump As time progresses, the data being stored on any database application will continue to grow and grow. This will inevitably lead to reduced performance, and most likely some garbage data will be taking up space. Ultimately, the DB may even become unwieldy and unmanageable. Now, this probably won’t happen overnight, and may not even happen until a number of years have passed – but again, in an active DB, it’s eventually going happen. Sitecore of course stores all of its data in a dat [read] Keywords: admin
application
database
desktop
server
sql
164
Adobe CQ5.5 Now Available
Thu, Mar 22nd 2012 11:13a Mark Polly I blogged in February a Sneak Preview of Adobe CQ5.5 and yesterday Adobe announced that this new version is available immediately. With this new announcement, Adobe is providing out of the box integration with many other products in the Adobe Digital Marketing Suite, including:
Insight for analyzing large volumes of data in real-time
Scene7 for converting rich media to dynamic content optimized across channels
Search&Promote for targeted site search and surfacing relevant product an [read] Keywords: collaboration
development
integration
mobile
profile
154
What’s eating your phone’s battery?
Thu, Mar 22nd 2012 11:13a Mark Polly I came across the following post on CMSWire and found it interesting. Free, Ad-Supported Mobile Apps Drain Batteries Faster, Consume More Data by by J. Angelo Racoma (@jangelo). What attracted my attention initially was that it was co-authored by researchers at my alma mater, Purdue University. But after reading it, I thought it was a very informative study.
So it appears that ads and activity tracking in all those free mobile apps can use up to 75% of the energy consumption in your mobile [read] Keywords: application
mobile
network
wifi
70
Don’t Fear a Phased Sitecore Approach
Thu, Mar 22nd 2012 9:13a Jamie Stump It’s a safe assumption to say that any organization looking to revamp its website is going to have some level of hesitancy in adopting a new technology platform to run that website. Even though Sitecore is seen as both a leader and a visionary in the Web Content Management (WCM) sector per the November 2011 Gartner Magic Quadrant, this hesitancy still applies even to organizations that choose to adopt Sitecore as their new technology. There are multiple scenarios where an organization ma [read] Keywords: admin
integration
interface
94
IBM Connections 3.0.1.1 Available and new Plug-in For Windows
Wed, Mar 21st 2012 8:12a Mark Polly IBM Connections continues to be a hot topic with clients. This past weekend IBM released the latest version of Connections – 3.0.1.1. In this latest release, IBM has added support for Redhat EL 6.1, Internet Explorer 9, Firefox 9, and Sametime 8.5.2. There also lots of fixes included.
In addition, IBM just uploaded a newer version of their Connections Plug-in for Windows to the Solution Catalog. The plug-in provides a great way to integrate Connections into your desktop. Click he [read] Keywords: connections
ibm
lotus
sametime
community
desktop
firefox
network
redhat
67
Sitecore: Moving Indexed Content Tree Items
Tue, Mar 20th 2012 11:13a Jamie Stump If you’ve ever worked with large amounts of data within Sitecore, chances are you’ve worked with Lucene Indexes (or the newly branded Sitecore.Search namespace and indexes). If you haven’t worked with these, it’s worth the time (and initial frustration) to learn about them, as they really do improve performance when querying the Sitecore content tree. There are of course some gotchas relating to Indexes though. One I’ve already covered is using a MustNot QueryOccurance. Anothe [read] Keywords:
81
WebSphere Portal Mobile Accelerator Update
Tue, Mar 20th 2012 9:12a Mark Polly IBM announced the availability of v7.0.2 of Mobile Portal Accelerator. Here are some details from IBM.
New features:
Support for WebSphere Portal V7.0.0.2
Updated Multi-Channel Server V6.3
Support for Media Access Server V6.3
Support for IBM Rational® Application Developer V8.0.4
Has built-in theme that provides an enhanced and consistent multichannel experience with WebSphere Portal
Enhanced themes and examples using HTML5 and CSS3 that provide richer web experiences when using lea [read] Keywords: ibm
application
applications
mobile
portlet
server
websphere
websphere portal
113
Workflow Security in Sitecore
Wed, Mar 14th 2012 3:13p Jamie Stump The following is a guest post written by Candace, a colleague of mine who is also a part of the Perficient Sitecore Competency Center.
Initially, I found setting up a workflow in Sitecore confusing and frustrating. I hope this article helps you avoid some of that frustration. Chapter 3 of the Workflow Reference is fairly clear until it covers Security. So I won’t cover setting up the workflow in detail, but will concentrate on the security aspect of it.
Our workflow, “ContentSub [read] Keywords: email
security
82
Gartner PCC – Business Gets Social
Tue, Mar 13th 2012 1:13p Mark Polly This afternoon Carol Rozwell presented a session titled The Social Scenario: Business gets Social. In this session, she points out the drivers behind social media and described scenario planning as a tool to develop a social strategy.
I thought her most interesting points were in in how to go about setting your strategy for Social Media. She offered the following points.
First understand that social is not the endgame. You should look first at your business goals and objectives and then [read] Keywords: collaboration
73
Gartner PCC – 6 Portal Pitfalls
Tue, Mar 13th 2012 10:14a Mark Polly Jim Murphy held a standing room only session this morning covering the 6 pitfalls with portals. I’m curious, was it standing room only because lots of people have encountered pitfalls, or are all these people just starting out with portal and want to avoid these pitfalls? My guess is that many of these people already have some form of portal and want to see before they get to a problem what others have encountered.
Perficient’s Michael Porter and Glenn Kline had a very popular se [read] Keywords: development
enterprise
65
Gartner PCC – Reality is Broken and Gaming
Tue, Mar 13th 2012 9:13a Mark Polly Jane McGonigal was our keynote speaker this morning at Gartner’s Portal, Content and Collaboration conference. Dr. McGonigal recently wrote a book called “Reality is Broken” in which she discusses gaming and its impact on industry.
I’ll admit upfront, I’m not much of an online gamer. Occasionally I play games such as Angry Birds and others, but I don’t spend more than a couple of hours per month playing games. I used to try to play more, but I was more a [read] Keywords: collaboration
linking
88
Do not Neglect Portal Performance and Load Testing
Mon, Mar 12th 2012 5:13p Glenn Kline Poor performance in a portal production environment will quickly become your number one complaint from your employees, partners and customers. Given an option, your user community will look elsewhere and not come back. Performance testing and load testing are often left to the last minute or skipped all together. If 2 weeks before launch you hear “performance is a little slow, maybe we should run a test,” you’re project is in serious trouble. You always need to give yourself ample [read] Keywords: community
database
development
integration
network
portlet
121
Gartner PCC – Employee Portals – Revenge of the Intranet
Mon, Mar 12th 2012 1:13p Mark Polly The afternoon session of the Gartner conference started off with a collaboration by Gene Phifer and jim Murphy talking about Employee Portals. Originally, most portals were aimed at employees. More recently vendors and business have been turning to Customer portals. But with the rise of social capabilities, the Employee Portal and Intranet are again a very important topics.
Gene talked about the must-haves for the modern intranet. Here is the list:
Current must-haves
Social (profiles, ac [read] Keywords: collaboration
policies
application
95
Gartner PCC – Using Generation 7 Portals to Attract and Engage Customers
Mon, Mar 12th 2012 10:13a Mark Polly Jim Murphy and Ray Valdes are presenting on the topic of Generation 7 Portals. Portals have been around since 1998 and have evolved over 7 generations according to Jim. Gen 7 Portals include the following features, which have been built on the previous generations:
Analytics
Portal-less Portals
Context aware
Portal ubiquity
Emerging UXP
Widgets dominate
Mobile dominates
Both speakers dove into the demand drivers for Gen 7 Portals and include the following concepts:
Context aware computing [read] Keywords: community
integration
mobile
widgets
102
Gartner PCC – User Experience Platform Update
Mon, Mar 12th 2012 9:14a Mark Polly Gene Phifer spoke about the trends in what Gartner calls the User Experience Platform (UXP). The big change from last year appears to be a split in the emerging UXP market into Suite vendors and Lean vendors.
Gartner sees many vendors, such as IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle expanding more and more into the Suite side of the market. There are also emerging vendors in Suite side, including Adobe and Cisco. On the lean side, we see vendors such as Liferay, Backbase, Drupal and DotNetNuke.
One of [read] Keywords: collaboration
ibm
enterprise
gadget
integration
microsoft
mobile
oracle
sap
widget
68
Gartner Portals, Content & Collaboration Opening Session
Mon, Mar 12th 2012 8:13a Mark Polly I’m attending the Gartner PCC conference this week in Orlando, Florida. After a day of rain yesterday, its nice to catch a glimpse of the sun before plunging into the windowless conference rooms this morning.
The opening session featured speakers Whit Andrews, Carol Rozwell, Nick Jones, and Gavin Tay.
Whit Andrews led off proposing that we are now seeing a nexus of technology combining that has the power to make work fun and engaging. An analogy to games is now becoming universal as sh [read] Keywords: collaboration
enterprise
facebook
mobile
wiki
91
Scheduling Future Item Publishing in Sitecore
Fri, Mar 9th 2012 9:13a Jamie Stump Whenever we work with a client on a Sitecore implementation, it is inevitable that at some point in the process, the question of scheduling future publishes will come up. The question is usually phrased something like “Does Sitecore allow me to schedule an item to be published in the future?” Every time it comes up, I have to chuckle a little to myself, because of the answer that immediately pops into my head. That answer is “Well, out of the box, sort of, kind of, but not really, no [read] Keywords: best practice
database
desktop
server
129
Pitfalls of CMS Implementations
Mon, Mar 5th 2012 11:16a Jamie Stump Sitecore just released a new white paper, Content Management: The (New) Governance Manifesto, which they wrote in conjunction with ISITE Design and non-linear creations. If you’re considering adopting a CMS technology, or have already begun down the path of implementing a CMS, I would highly recommend this white paper. It’s not written to be focused on just us techies either. I would recommend this for not only IT, but those in marketing who are involved in the CMS process, and even fo [read] Keywords:
121
Integrating External Data into Sitecore
Fri, Mar 2nd 2012 2:12p Jamie Stump The Sitecore Competency Center team at Perficient has worked on projects in the past where we needed to integrate data that would not be stored within Sitecore with items from Sitecore. We’ve learned a few lessons from doing this, and I hope to share some with you in this post.
The first lesson is to remember what Sitecore is, and what it isn’t. It IS a tool to help non-coders manage their website content, but it IS NOT a data warehouse tool. If you’ve got large amounts of data that [read] Keywords: database
desktop
development
integration
sql
108
Google Adds Another Update to Google Docs
Fri, Mar 2nd 2012 7:13a Michael Porter CRN has a short article about the latest update to Google Docs and better mobile support, especially for the Android. While anyone who follows the mobile world won’t be surprised by the content, it’s probably a good time to reflect on larger implications………………….
One of my recent clients had taken a close look at Google Apps which includes Google Docs. One part of their business decided to make Google Apps their go to suite of choice for m [read] Keywords: ibm
desktop
google
interface
laptop
microsoft
mobile
office
oracle
sharepoint
80
Is a Portal Administrator the Most Important Person on a Project?
Thu, Mar 1st 2012 5:13a Michael Porter You could make a case for a number of resources being the most important to a project. Off hand I could name five valid reasons why both project managers and portal architects are the most important. Frankly, you can’t deliver a complex project without a team of people committed to the same goal. That said, here are my reasons why a Portal Administrator is the most important person on the project:
A portal won’t launch without him or her
First off, let me state one key assumpti [read] Keywords: admin
application
development
enterprise
java
server
sharepoint
websphere
websphere portal
Implement a Terms of Use Acknowledgement in WebSphere Portal
Wed, Feb 29th 2012 10:13a Glenn Kline A very common requirement in a portal solution is a terms of use acknowledgement (TOU) which gates entry into the portal until the user accepts terms and conditions. The next time the user logs on, they will not be required to accept the conditions again. There is not a built in “out of the box” capability; however a number of tools and capabilities exist to easily implement one. In this example, the following steps will be implemented:
Create a database which has fields to [read] Keywords: ibm
database
mobile
portlet
properties
websphere
websphere portal
91
Sitecore Search with MustNot QueryOccurance
Wed, Feb 29th 2012 8:12a Jamie Stump Sitecore Search, and before it Lucene indexes are great to use within Sitecore implementations when you have a large list of items that you need to query. The new namespace Sitecore.Search allows you to query specific fields for values, and through the use of the QueryOccurance enumerator, gives you the option to choose whether the value you’re looking for must equal that of the item (Must), cannot equal that of the item (MustNot), or can equal that item (Should). The ability to se [read] Keywords:
183
Adobe CQ5.5 Sneak Peek
Tue, Feb 28th 2012 1:13p Mark Polly Today I attended a Webinar given by Adobe showing a sneak peek at CQ5.5. Almost a year ago I blogged about how Adobe CQ5 had arrived. Adobe CQ5.5 will include significant improvements especially for digital marketers. Adobe plans to announce CQ5.5 in March, 2012 and there will be lots more new features than what I cover here.
First, Adobe purchased PhoneGap late in 2011 and has incorporated that tool into CQ5.5. While in the past you could target CQ5 for multiple devices, with the inclus [read] Keywords: google
mobile
widget
Do you see the Ripples?
Sat, Feb 25th 2012 8:13p Jonathan Distad Analytics on social platforms has long plagued us. You can get basic usage statistics like the below:
source: greenhouse.lotus.com
Not bad, but not a ton you can really do with that. Most platforms, out of the box, have pretty poor analytics and that is becoming an issue for companies. We are telling employees, customers, whoever to tag, rate, share, like and so on and really, there is no great way to make this look good without integrating a robust reporting platform that takes the data [read] Keywords: ibm
lotus
enterprise
google
social software
114
IBM WebSphere Portal Gets Connects Profiles and Files
Fri, Feb 24th 2012 4:12p Michael Porter Buried in some of the many announcements IBM puts out on a weekly basis, you will find that they just changed the entitlements for two of their baseline portal packages. Both Portal Enable and Portal Extend now include the ability to use the profiles and file services from the social networking tool, IBM Connections. Here’s the announcement.
If you have IBM® WebSphere® Portal Server, IBM WebSphere Portal Enable, or IBM WebSphere Portal Extend on an active Passport Advantage® Softwar [read] Keywords: connections
ibm
quickr
rich text
community
networking
profile
server
websphere
websphere portal
118
WebCenter Portal 11g PS5 Released!
Fri, Feb 24th 2012 10:13a Chris DeBracy 11g PS5 WebCenter has been released and can be downloaded from Oracle.
The big changes for this release are around the areas of content management. For more information, see Oracle’s WebCenter Content blog.
Jason Stortz has a nice write up of the new functionality here.
One of the things he points out is changes to JDeveloper for Site Studio External Applications. Previously it was a separate download and application. There are also some nice links to other blogs about this release. [read] Keywords: notes
application
applications
oracle
IBM WebSphere Portal 8 Beta 3 Now Available
Fri, Feb 17th 2012 6:11a Mark Polly IBM released Beta 3 for IBM WebSphere Portal and Web Content Manager recently. Beta 3 has an interesting new feature: IBM Forms. Will forms be included in the base product or is it just part of the full Customer Experience Suite?
Here is the list of new features included in Beta 3:
IBM Forms Beta
Provides an agile and easy to use web experience for building and managing compelling, interactive data capture/forms that fit within the overall Portal web experience.
Offers businesses the abilit [read] Keywords: ibm
applications
development
integration
web 2.0
websphere
websphere portal
171
SharePoint and Identity Management–Part 3 of 3
Fri, Feb 10th 2012 5:13a Richard Taylor In the last post I touched on a few things: Authentication and Authorization (AuthN and AuthZ), Kerberos Authentication, and Claims Based Authentication and how they all have a role in Identity Management. In this final post of the series, I talk to Role Based Access Control (RBAC) .
Access Control
The rules that define what a user can access are essential to enumerate in a comprehensive Identity Management system. In some higher security systems, the rules not only define WHAT a use [read] Keywords: access control list
acl
policies
application
microsoft
network
password
security
sharepoint
126
Integrating UX Into the Backlog
Thu, Feb 9th 2012 11:12a Michael Porter Thanks to Carol Smith from our User Experience group for pointing this out on Yammer. In the portal and social world, we have struggled to pull User Experience activities into a sprint based approach like Scrum. We’ve started down the path on a couple project but Jon Innes has an article at boxes and arrows on Integrating UX Into the Backlog. He goes to a deeper level and I think my next project will have to include something like this.
Best Quote:
The economics are different in sell [read] Keywords: notes
integration
interface
linkedin
oracle
password
187
Is Pinterest really for enterprises?
Wed, Feb 8th 2012 12:12p Jonathan Distad Today, TechCrunch reported that Pinterest, the pinning interest site has hit 11.7 MILLION unique monthly views – faster than any website in history. The questions comes up is: How does this affect my enterprise? Simple, if you aren’t looking at this or you have someone who says this is a fad and not enterprise worthy – they could be very wrong. Obviously if are a retailer, you are missing the boat bigtime. Pinterest drives more ecommerce decisions that Google now. Tha [read] Keywords: enterprise
facebook
google
163
Choosing the right content delivery solution
Wed, Feb 8th 2012 8:13a Mark Polly Often overlooked in IBM’s Web Content Management system is its ability to deliver web sites three different ways:
Pre-rendered – in this mode, IBM WCM creates standard HTML pages for your site and delivers them to a standard web server. For static content or brochureware, this is an excellent way to deliver web content. In fact, this is how many of the other content management systems work.
Servlet rendering – in this mode, content is served directly from WCM using its ser [read] Keywords: ibm
portlet
security
server
websphere
156
Why Security Needs to Catch Up to the New Reality
Wed, Feb 8th 2012 8:13a Michael Porter For anyone who has worked on any portal project, you run into the most common of issues, Single Sign On (SSO). It’s the holy grail of websites that you never do find. No one wants to sign in multiple times. Very few companies have eliminated it. Many companies use more than one SSO tool like Siteminder, TAM, OAM, OpenAM, and Jasig. Let’s face it, it’s a hard nut to crack.
However, we in the IT world make it much harder than it should be and we do this over the raised [read] Keywords: collaboration
policies
applications
email
mac
mobile
password
security
145
A Few Stats From Our Portal Practice
Tue, Feb 7th 2012 5:12p Michael Porter So I usually don’t make blatant references to our Portal and Social practice but we’ve been doing this for over 11 years and the stats start to add up. Here’s a great infographic I thought I’d share. [read] Keywords:
165
Does Your Company Get Social Business?
Tue, Feb 7th 2012 8:13a Mark Polly Over on CMSWire, Oscar Berg (@oscarberg) posted an article describing 5 signs that your company doesn’t ‘get’ Social Business. Social Business was the theme of Lotusphere 2012 and it seemed like everyone ‘got’ it there, but I’m sure there are a lot of companies still struggling with what it means to be a Social Business.
Here are Oscar’s 5 signs that you may not be a social business:
Social Media is used as a broadcast channel. So all those companie [read] Keywords: lotusphere
networking
158
What is social media?
Mon, Feb 6th 2012 1:13p Jonathan Distad This came from a friend and thought it humorous enough to post. Enjoy and happy Monday! [read] Keywords:
153
Pinterest Drives More Traffice than Google +, YouTube, and LinkedIn Combined
Thu, Feb 2nd 2012 11:13a Michael Porter Mashable.com has an interesting article about up and comer Pinterest. I have to admit, I hadn’t even heard about it until about two weeks ago when a colleague raved about how great Pinterest was and how easy it was to capture your interests from a variety of places and pin them to your page. Little did I know that two weeks later I see this article.
Pinterest accounted for 3.6% of referral traffic, while Twitter just barely edged ahead of the newcomer, accounting for 3.61% of refer [read] Keywords: R7
facebook
google
linkedin
twitter
154
People Make the Collaboration, Not the Tools – But Tools Have a Friction Profile
Thu, Feb 2nd 2012 5:13a Michael Porter Michael Sampson has a great article at Plantronics about how important people are to collaboration and how tools need to get out of the way. I’ve said that a number of times but Mr. Sampson does a better job clearly and concisely stating the case. His opening paragraph says it best:
With the many types of collaboration tools available, it’s tempting to think that you have to use a certain collaboration tool in order to be “collaborating.” This line of thinking – which comes a [read] Keywords: collaboration
community
office
profile
workspace
2012-04-20 16:08:02 Failed to parse RSS file. (Invalid document end at line 2, column 1). 
