Cloud Suites for the C-Suite
Wed, Jun 19th 2013 11:19a Michael Porter IBM announced yesterday their Cloud Suites for the C-Suite. CRN also ran an article on it where they dive into the implications of it rather than the detail of “more than 100 offerings in the Cloud” that IBM delivers. I like the following quotes:
While CIOs and IT managers are often making cloud technology decisions, IBM is taking the position that C-level executives are increasingly adopting cloud applications for front-office tasks. When line-of-business executives have made th [read] Keywords: ibm
applications
database
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14
Adobe AEM’s Main Differentiator
Wed, Jun 19th 2013 10:18a Robert Sumner Have you ever been asked about the differences between Adobe CQ5 and Sitecore? Sure, at first glance the stark difference is the platform…one is J2EE based and the other .NET, but apart from that, it is actually hard to tell the difference since they pretty much do the same thing. Sitecore has a user experience that most people are familiar with due to its Microsoft influence and ribbon interface, but adobe CQs runtime preview environment, along with its sidekick functionality is not too s [read] Keywords: integration
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80
Loyalty 3.0 is Out
Tue, Jun 18th 2013 6:19a Michael Porter Rajat Paharia just released his new book, Loyalty 3.0: How to Revolutionize Customer and Employee Engagement with Big Data and Gamification. Bunchball is a partner of ours and focuses on the gamification space. We’ve presented with him on this very topic several times. I just picked up my kindle version and will follow up with a review.
For now, feel free to pick up your version. I’ve always found his content interesting. [read] Keywords: linkedin
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Do or Die Questions Boards Should Ask About Technology
Fri, Jun 14th 2013 4:18p Michael Porter McKinsey recently posted a set of 9 questions all board should be asking about how technology is being used in their companies. It’s worth a read for all the questions and the additional detail they provide. I want to focus on the first four and some of the implications.
How will IT change the basis of competition in our industry?
What will it take to exceed our customers’ expectations in a digital world?
Do our business plans reflect the full potential of technology to improve our [read] Keywords:
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Becoming a Customer Company
Fri, Jun 14th 2013 10:18a Michael Porter Vivek Kundra, EVP at Salesforce and former United States CIO, talked about becoming a customer
Quote from IBM 2012 CEO Study
For some time, busienss have been refining and optimizing their networks of suppliers and partners. But something revolutionary has been happening — the sudden convergence of the cloud, social, and mobile spheres — connecting customers, employee and partners in new way.
This will involve fundamentally rethinking how you connect with your customers, partners, [read] Keywords: ibm
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Social Uses of Data
Fri, Jun 14th 2013 8:18a Michael Porter I’m at the Salesforce Customer Company tour. Before they started their main session, they brought a couple people up to talk about uses of social. Here are some quick notes on those interviews.
They started with a great example of a company which provides vaccines to a variety of third world countries. They use Salesforce Chatter and sensors in vaccine refrigeration units to track that the vaccines are viable when they arrive. If you want to talk about a use of social that pushes [read] Keywords: notes
12 Technologies That Are Improving at Insane Speeds
Fri, Jun 7th 2013 8:22a Mark Polly Business Insider published an article titled “12 Technologies That Are Improving at Insane Speeds” describing a McKinsey report about technologies that are disrupting the global economy. The image shown here summarizes the 12 technologies and provides a glimpse into the amount of technological improvement provided over the years.
Not surprising to me is that areas that affect Portal and Social are at the top of the list. Mobile Internet is the first example of technology that has [read] Keywords: mobile
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Social Technologies: The Business Payoff
Thu, Jun 6th 2013 1:18p Michael Porter I’m at an eWeek Sponsored half day session that focuses on Social Business. Marcia Connor was the first speaker. She’s a Principal at SensifyGroup (@marciamarcia). She focuses on helping people work at jobs that don’t suck.
One of the key problems is the sheer amount of data out there. The internet adds 34 Gigabytes each day. This information deluge means that 1 in 2 business leaders say they don’t have the information needed to do their jobs.
Our brains transf [read] Keywords: connections
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The Social Business Payoff
Thu, Jun 6th 2013 1:18p Michael Porter Jennifer Okimoto, an Associate Partner with IBM spoke about the social business payoff and gave a lot of examples on where it’s happening.
The knowledge based economy was originally coined in 1996. It came with the realization that computers and knowledge change how the work is done. Jennifer highlighted that a knowledge worker is not just someone in a cubicle farm. It could be an oil field worker, a sales person, a chemist., people in health care, and yes, people in cubicle farms.
em [read] Keywords: collaboration
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What is the pre-requisite skill set for learning Adobe CQ5?
Wed, May 29th 2013 11:18a Robert Sumner I am asked by clients all the time….what pre-requisite skill set is required to learn CQ5? The answer depends on the role.
In the web experience management world, there are several roles to consider: WCM/WEM architect, J2EE Integration Specialist, and CQ5 developer.
First the WCM/WEM Architect:
You need someone who’s done it using other WCM platforms. Someone with prior WCM implementation experience will know what to look for and what to avoid…and will have a good sense for h [read] Keywords: css
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SAP and IBM WebSphere Portal working together
Wed, May 22nd 2013 4:18p Mark Polly Integration is a long-standing requirement satisfied by enterprise portals. Over the past 10 years, integrating SAP and IBM WebSphere Portal has been top of mind for a lot of people. Marty Lechleider spoke at the IBM Exceptional Web Experience Conference on the offerings IBM has for integration.
Both IBM and SAP have multiple products, so Marty put them into buckets and described which products integrate with which products in each bucket. In fact, SAP has a portal and IBM has a portal. [read] Keywords: ibm
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Considering Open Source Options for Your Portal Solution?
Wed, May 22nd 2013 11:18a Glenn Kline Potential WebSphere Portal customers often consider whether they should leverage an open source technology or purchase a leading horrizontal portal product such as WebSphere Portal. The 2013 IBM Exceptional Web Experience Conference had a session titled “Considering Open Source Options for Your Exceptional Web Experience Solution?: Explore TCO and How Free” delivered by Robert Lezon, East IMT Business Value Assessment Leader, IBM; Mary Byrd Nance, Executive Consultant, IBM. The s [read] Keywords: ibm
community
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2013 IBM Exceptional Web Experience Opening General Session
Tue, May 21st 2013 9:15a Glenn Kline The 2013 IBM Exceptional Web Experience Conference takes place from 5/20 to 5/23 and was kicked off by a Larry Bowden, Vice President, Portals and Digital Experience Software, with a overview of the progression of portals from 2001 to 2013. The session focused on IBM’s digital experience direction and how various technologies and concepts are converging today. Mobile, content and rich media, analytics, social, integration and cloud are at the heart of this of convergence. A few of [read] Keywords: connections
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Digital Asset Management in IBM Digital Experience
Mon, May 20th 2013 10:14a Mark Polly I mentioned in a previous blog how IBM is integrating Digital Asset Management (DAM) into WebSphere Portal and Web Content Management. At the IBM Exceptional Web Conference, IBM’s Stephan Hepper is demoing this integration. The DAM is actually the MediaBeacon product and IBM and MediaiBeacon has created seamless integration between the products. By combining both products, you get a really great DAM solution in IBM’s flagship product. IBM is also planning to integrate this with [read] Keywords: connections
ibm
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But Don’t Stalk Me
Fri, May 10th 2013 6:21a Michael Porter Back in March, I mentioned a Global Survey Oracle did on customer experience. That’s been a hot topic of late in my world. As part of that survey, they continue to build off of the nuggets of information found in that survey. Emil Fernandez pointed me to an update on that survey that includes a video on millenials and how they wish to engage or be engaged. The short video highlights a few way they would prefer to engage. I found it hilarious that at about 45 seconds, one teenager say [read] Keywords: oracle
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Portal Beauty and the User Experience
Thu, May 9th 2013 6:18a Michael Porter Dr. Marci Stochak-Chavez just posted an article on our health blog somewhat related to yesterday’s post. She focuses on whether beauty is in the eye of the beholder for a portal. In here article, she references a design a portal challenge in New York City. This challenge pushes contestants to create a nice interface while also using key standards like the Blue Button and the Direct Protocol to transmit medical records.
Dr. Marci makes one quote it’s easy to agree with.
I be [read] Keywords: interface
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If You Build a Patient Portal Why Won’t They Come?
Wed, May 8th 2013 6:21a Michael Porter Joe Jacobellis, a member of the Design Experience team at a client pointed out this interesting article about patient portals by Steve Wilkins. It’s titled, “If You Build a Patient Portal Why Won’t They Come?“ Before you read it, let me give you some history:
The Affordable Care Act mandates that all patients have access to their medical record (lab test, allergies, discharge instructions, etc.)
In various stages, hospitals and clinics need to give you electronic acc [read] Keywords: community
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Salesforce Communities: The Portal is Dead…Long Live the Portal
Thu, May 2nd 2013 6:18p Axel Newe Today Salesforce.com announced its long awaited release of Communities, which in Salesforce’s own words ended the era of legacy portal software. These are heady words, but Salesforce may have actually created something that is taking the portal concept into a different direction. The motor that is driving Communities is Chatter, Salesforce’s social collaboration platform. Salesforce.com used to have distinct offerings for Partner and Customer portals. With Communities, Partners, [read] Keywords: collaboration
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Gartner Keynote: Don Norman on emotion
Wed, May 1st 2013 4:18p Jonathan Distad Don Norman is well known cognitive scientist who has spoken and written extensively on emotion and design in everyday things. Today he is speaking at the Gartner Portal, Content and Collaboration Summit in San Diego. He talked about how why and how emotions drive our decisions and our behaviors. Something that we all know is important but in IT we often focus on the function and too little on the emotion.
Employees are people. If they are seen as a cost center that is a missed opportunit [read] Keywords: collaboration
application
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microsoft
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Gartner Portal, Content and Collaboration – Opening Session
Mon, Apr 29th 2013 10:17a Jonathan Distad Live blogging from the Gartner summit in San Diego, CA
Engaging at the nexus of Social, Mobile, Information and Cloud. Innovation supports a new reality.
The threat to China is the 3D printer and the reality is innovation is around us that are trivial and some that are game changing. They need to be in the context of our lives. Disruption is around us. We have to react to the disruptions. We need to apply disruptions in a positive way. Don’t be a deer in headlight when it comes [read] Keywords: collaboration
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Salesforce: Customer Company – Chicago
Thu, Apr 18th 2013 9:16a Jonathan Distad McCormick Place – Chicago
Waiting for Marc to hit the stage in this ‘intimate’ town hall here is Chicago. A client of ours, Cars.com, is talking about how they use Salesforce to help sell and crunch data:
Adding value to the data through customizing reporting back from the dealer giving a better experience for the consumer.
“we love chatter” – it is THE tool that makes work better. Onboarding has never been more fun that using Chatter.
Every person at t [read] Keywords:
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Sitecore a Strong Performer in WCM according to Forrester!
Tue, Apr 9th 2013 2:14p Jamie Stump Forrester Research recently released the “The Forrester WaveTM: Web Content Management For Digital Customer Experierence, Q2 2013”, which is a report where they evaluated 10 of the “most significant” WCM providers. Forrester evaluated the providers in their current offerings, strategy and market presence. The paper is specifically geared towards developers; however it is not so technical that a non-developer couldn’t read through it with good comprehension. I would highly rec [read] Keywords: applications
google
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microsoft
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Developing SharePoint 2013 Apps
Mon, Apr 8th 2013 7:16a Mark Polly I recently purchased the book Microsoft SharePoint 2013 App Development to try to get more familiar with the changes coming about in SharePoint 2013 apps. The link points to the O’Reilly site, but you can also get it from Amazon too. (As a side note, I find it very hard to read a printed book anymore; everything I’ve read in the last two years has been on one of my mobile devices.)
SharePoint 2013 introduces a new application model that Microsoft intends to correct several of the [read] Keywords: application
applications
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microsoft
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McKinsey survey shows social tools usage continues to rise
Fri, Apr 5th 2013 9:14a Mark Polly Anthony Myers posted an article on CMS Wire with results of McKinsey & Company’s latest survey about the use of social tools inside corporations. I highly respect McKinsey & Company, so I want to pass this information along. The main results are shown in the image here.
What I found interesting is that over 70% of the companies use social technology internally and externally. The external usage at 74% is somewhat remarkable as many companies are still trying to figure out how [read] Keywords: enterprise
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Chatter to become the primary interface for Salesforce.com
Mon, Apr 1st 2013 7:15a Mark Polly We continue to follow closely the developments at Salesforce.com because of the now wide range of solutions available through their platforms. For example, I recently blogged about how to use Force.com to build a portal . Salesforce also has Chatter, which is an extremely powerful social platform that runs on browsers, desktops and mobile devices.
In a recent talk, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff spoke about how they plan to use Chatter as the frontend to Salesforce. You can see his talk in t [read] Keywords: interface
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What is new in IBM Connections 4.5
Sat, Mar 30th 2013 7:13a Mark Polly In January, IBM announced an update to IBM Connections. Now called IBM Connections 4.5, the major new feature is the addition of a document library. The document library feature is based on IBM Filenet, and includes the standard features you would expect to see: check-in/out; upload documents; search; the ability to set document types, and more. Since this library is integrated with Connections, you also get the ability to like and follow documents, two key social aspects of Connections. [read] Keywords: connections
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Global Study On Customer Experience
Thu, Mar 14th 2013 6:15a Michael Porter Oracle has a very interesting study them commissioned on the importance of managing the customer experience and how much progress companies are making. The short version is that it’s very important but not many have really made much progress, especially in the social side of the customer experience.
The study is too long to give you a blow by blow so it’s worth it to register and get access. (Yes, they want your information) However, I did clip a couple interesting items.
Poor Cu [read] Keywords: email
oracle
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Read the New Redbook on Social Portal
Wed, Mar 13th 2013 6:15p Michael Porter IBM recently released a Redbook on “Building and Implementing a Social Portal“ As you know, Redbooks are basically technical guides on a variety of subjects. This one was written by eight different IBM’ers and IBM Business Partners.
Why is this of interest you might ask? When IBM released version 8 of Websphere Portal, they solved one thorny problem that has plagued them ever since they released IBM Connections, the two products just didn’t integrate all that well. [read] Keywords: connections
ibm
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lotus
community
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gadget
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Keep Your WCM Project On Track – Mobile First
Tue, Mar 12th 2013 9:14a Earl D. Moore, Jr. Even highly experienced teams who adopt Mobile First practices can still “fall off the wagon”. In a recent post, I discussed 5 Things Project Managers Can Learn From Their First WCM Project. This post expands on one of those topics in more detail: the importance of Mobile First and Responsive Design.
Your project is more likely to stay on track if you and your team understands, adopts, and maintains a Mobile First mentality.
The fact is, it’s pretty easy to Google “Mobi [read] Keywords: application
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Evernote’s Security Breach and A Good Reaction
Wed, Mar 6th 2013 7:14a Michael Porter I’ve been seeing a lot of news about hackers taking their game to the next level. You can see this with Twitter’s recent blog post and forced reset of many users passwords. In keeping with the trend, Evernote just posted about similar attacks and recommended that all users reset their passwords even though they don’t think they attacks got anywhere.
Both responses have a few things in common:
They used social media, specifically blog posts, to tell what happened, give more [read] Keywords: security
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Salesforce: Can I really build a portal on the platform?
Mon, Feb 25th 2013 11:12a Mark Polly Back in 2012, Gartner included Salesforce.com in their Horizontal Portal Magic Quadrant as a Visionary. Since that time, many people have scratched their head wondering how is a CRM system a horizontal portal? In fact, Michael Porter recently blogged about Virgin Airline’s new employee portal built on Salesforce. But the real story behind Salesforce as a portal is that the Salesforce platform is the star of the show.
The Salesforce platform consists of Force.com, on which Salesforce [read] Keywords: application
applications
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Implementing Cookie Based TAI for the Developer
Fri, Feb 22nd 2013 10:11a Charles Mahoney As identified in another post Full login filter testing for local developer environments, the requirement may arise that developer environments need to fully test implicitLoginFilter without deploying code to another environment. This post walks thru the code and setup of a form based TAI.
Create a new class which implements TrustAssociationInterceptor. In this class we will pull 1 property from the WAS configurations of the interceptor. The name of this property is “cookieName” an [read] Keywords: firefox
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Implementing Form Based TAI for the Developer
Fri, Feb 22nd 2013 10:11a Charles Mahoney As identified in another post Full login filter testing for local developer environments, the requirement may arise that developer environments need to fully test implicitLoginFilter without deploying code to another environment. This post walks thru the code and setup of a form based TAI.
Create a new class which implements TrustAssociationInterceptor. In this class we will pull 3 properties from the WAS configurations of the interceptor. These three properties and a description of the inform [read] Keywords: properties
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Full login filter testing for local developer environments
Fri, Feb 22nd 2013 9:11a Charles Mahoney A majority of enterprise portal implementations utilize some kind of external authentication mechanism. To meet the ever demanding requirements in these same environment the need rises to execute custom code during login process. Starting in WebSphere Portal 6.1 opened up this capability with the Implicit and Explicit loginfilters. (http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/websphere/library/techarticles/0905_buchwald/0905_buchwald.html)
Many environments do not require different code in the implici [read] Keywords: ibm
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IBM announces Mobile First
Thu, Feb 21st 2013 1:10p Jonathan Distad Today IBM announced a (re)new(ed) mobile focus with MobileFirst. Those of us in the IBM ecosystem know that IBM has been getting serious about mobile with their acquisition of Worklight and the push for great mobile experiences through their IBM Portal and IBM Connections product with responsive templates out of the box and integrated mobile web and app experiences, respectively. What is bigger about this is that IBM is taking a very serious look at making the mobile ecosystem easier to work [read] Keywords: connections
ibm
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Virgin Airlines Doesn’t Think Salesforce Chatter is Just Social
Fri, Feb 15th 2013 6:11a Michael Porter Matt Weinberger at citeworld.com has an article about Virgin Airline’s new employee portal built on Salesforce Chatter and Force.com. It’s a great example of the power of Social and SaaS. I fully believe that employee intranets should have social components but those social components should not overlook the fact that you still have to meet other needs.
I found two parts of the article interesting.
Interestingly, Microsoft SharePoint was barely even considered for this unde [read] Keywords: collaboration
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SaaS in the Social and Portal World
Wed, Feb 13th 2013 7:14p Michael Porter We’ve all seen a lot of hype in the world about software as a service. Every major and many minor software vendors are rolling out SaaS solutions. In the SharePoint 2012 conference Microsoft pretty much said that their main push will be to the cloud through Office 365 first and Azure second. IBM has made some large strides in taking many of their tools and putting them in a more manageable platform. (e.g. IaaS, PaaS, MSP). They also have SmartCloud for Social Business and recently bo [read] Keywords: ibm
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A Webinar for Digital Marketers on Increasing Website Relevancy
Tue, Feb 12th 2013 2:11p Jamie Stump On February 27th, 2013 Erin Moloney, Perficient’s own Director of Digital and Social Media Marketing will be presenting a webinar about how Perficient increased our own site traffic nearly 150% by redesigning our site and building it on top of the Sitecore Content Engagement Platform! Erin will be covering topics such as how we used UX experts and designers to create a more engaging website, how we leveraged out of the box functionality from Sitecore to build a highly scalable site, and [read] Keywords:
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Non-Sitecore Posts about Sitecore Topics
Sun, Feb 10th 2013 2:10p Jamie Stump One of the great things about working for Perficient is being surrounded by a great deal of very experienced, knowledgeable and motivated technologists – many of whom are working in a completely different technology than I am working. Another reason is that a good deal of these co-workers are not only willing to be open and share experiences within our company, but to freely express their thoughts and views on blog posts that anyone can view. Of course, with that many great colleagues blog [read] Keywords: blogging
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Making internal collaboration work: Interview with Don Tapscott
Wed, Feb 6th 2013 3:11p Michael Porter I always love to hear Don Tapscott speak. He’s the author of Wikinomics and Radical Openness. McKinsey recently interviewed him and he has a number of quotable gems so it’s worth a viewing.I can summarize his approach as pragmatic. Don’s not afraid to advocate for things like the sunsetting of email or why knowledge management usually fails.
“Knowledge management has failed,” says University of Toronto professor Don Tapscott in the video interview “Making internal colla [read] Keywords: collaboration
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Sitecore Calendar Module Thoughts
Tue, Feb 5th 2013 6:11p Jamie Stump I recently got to play around with the Sitecore Calendar Module for the first time and thought I’d share my thoughts about it here. My first impression was pretty good, as there was clear documentation about what the module offered and I was happy to see that it specifically had the view that I was interested in (the Agenda View). I was also impressed by the amount of views it offered, as well as the editing capabilities, even though I didn’t really want to use those capabilities f [read] Keywords: css
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IBM Connections Metrics
Thu, Jan 31st 2013 9:12a Glenn Kline Miguel Estrada and Nan Shi presented the session Getting the Most Value Out of Metrics in IBM Connections 4 at IBM Connect 2013. Metrics and analytics are critical to understanding your customer, employee and partner behavior and interactions. Some of the key points in the session include:
Metrics Overview
Connections provides quantitative and qualitative metrics in Connections. Quantitative metrics are measurements and qualitative metrics are descriptive
They are presented using charts t [read] Keywords: connections
ibm
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IBM Connect: Social CMO
Thu, Jan 31st 2013 8:11a Mark Polly Michael Porter (@porteronportal) and Saren Sakurai (@saren) of Perficient spoke at the last day of IBM Connect 2013. The title of the talk is the Social CMO: Engaging the Consumer. The goal of digital marketing is the right message to the right audience at the right time on the right device.
4 primary objectives of social: Awareness, Engagement, Acquisition, and Retention.
Awareness
Saren talked about how to get your message out you must
Define a specific target
Set a specific goal
Craft th [read] Keywords: ibm
community
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exchange
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WebSphere Portal Content Template Catalog IV
Wed, Jan 30th 2013 7:14a Glenn Kline At Connect 2013 I attended Chris Berry’s and Mark Hampton’s session titled Deliver Rich, Multi-Channel Websites in Minutes with IBM Web Content Manager Content Template Catalog (CTC.) The CTC is a large set of predefined templates and content that provides a fully populated content driven site in portal 8 which can be used as is or as a starting point for more customized content driven sites for an organization. Additionally the CTC also implements a responsive UI design which [read] Keywords: ibm
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Florida Blue: Maximizing ROI with WebSphere Portal
Tue, Jan 29th 2013 3:15p Glenn Kline Lisa Crawford from Florida Blue (formerly Blue Cross Blue Shield of FL) presented an excellent session at IBM Connect 2013 on the evolution of their portal platform and the ROI they have received over they years. I’ve worked with Lisa on a number of projects and the work she leads implementing IBM solutions is one of the best I’ve seen. Here are some of the key highlights she presented:
Florida started with portal in 2005 and has evolved over the years.
Started with basic portal [read] Keywords: admin
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IBM Connect: Active Site Analytics and WebSphere Portal
Tue, Jan 29th 2013 2:15p Mark Polly Thomas Stober, IBM Lead Architect WebSphere Portal Foundation, gave a presentation at IBM Connect 2013 titled “Enhance WebSphere Portal Delivery with Real time Active Analytics Insights”. Of course, site analytics tracks user interaction with your site and can be a key input to help you optimize your portal design. It also can play an important role in personalization of the site for each user by tracking what they do on the site.
WebSphere Portal Active Site Analytics (ASA) fra [read] Keywords: ibm
google
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What you need to know about IBM Social Analytics
Tue, Jan 29th 2013 7:15a Mark Polly At the IBM Connect conference, we heard about some of IBM’s approach to Social Analytics. In a nutshell, you can break the strategy into two main areas:
External Customer Analytics
Employee Analytics
In both areas, the overall approach involves social listening, data collection, segmentation and deep analytics. What we heard from IBM was a focus on Campaign Management and how social analytics can be an integral part of your campaigns. The idea is to be able to target individual p [read] Keywords: connections
ibm
policies
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IBM Connect: Designing and Developing Portal Themes
Mon, Jan 28th 2013 1:15p Glenn Kline IBM Connect had a great session on implementing portal themes in WebSphere Portal 8. Stephan Hesmer, Portal Frontend and Design Lead from IBM presented a technical session on implementing themes and skins. Portal themes are an extremely powerful, efficient and effective way to implement user experiences in WebSphere Portal.
Key points that resonated from the session are:
The following technologies and concepts are implemented
Modularization
Portlet and iWidget support
Static html templat [read] Keywords: ibm
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development
dojo
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portlet
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IBMConnect: Driving Web Experience with Digital Analytics and Mktg
Mon, Jan 28th 2013 1:15p Michael Porter I saw an interesting session on how to combine the power of site management, web analytics, and digital marketing. It was given by:
Rob Enright – Strategist Portal Customer Experience Management
Daniel Tabor – Product Manager IBM Marketing Center
I liked what I saw although I have some serious questions on how the integration works.
The proliferation of devices and channels increases the complexity of managing the customer experience. A strategy should work towards unifying the message a [read] Keywords: ibm
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IBM Connect Keynote Part 1: HitRecord and Joseph Gordon-Levitt
Mon, Jan 28th 2013 10:15a Michael Porter Joseph Gordon-Levitt spoke as the “famous speaker”. He’s the actor from Looper, Third Rock from the Sun, etc. He started his open collaborative production company called HitREcord. Has now screened work at Sundance, South by Southwest, put out anthologies, put out DVD’s, etc.
Anyone can join the hitrecord.com site by uploading video, audio, etc. Anyone can download and remix it. To show the results, he let us see a mix video called, “The Man With a Turnip for a Head [read] Keywords: ibm
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IBM Connect Keynote Part 3: Smarter Workforce and Watson
Mon, Jan 28th 2013 10:15a Michael Porter I’m breaking up my posts because there was so much content and they categorize themselves quite nicely. Smarter Workforce is part of IBM’s strategy to redefine the idea of an intranet. Rather than fight competitors in an increasingly commoditized intranet tools market, they want to employ tools like Kenexa and predictive analytics to take intranets to the next level. This will be key to IBM’s success in selling workforce solutions and will have a huge impact to IBM’s po [read] Keywords: connections
ibm
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IBM Releases Update to Portal 8 and WCM 8
Sun, Jan 27th 2013 9:18a Michael Porter IBM released the first update to Portal and Web Content Manager since their major release of Portal 8 back in September 2012. They announced the release on on Friday January 25th. Here’s a brief overview of what they released and we’ll get more detail throughout the week. I should note that this release is in keeping with IBM’s stated intent to follow a more continuous update model rather than a major release every two years.
Faster simplere content creation. The conti [read] Keywords: ibm
applications
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integration
linkedin
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Google’s Password Proposal
Thu, Jan 24th 2013 6:14a Michael Porter Many of you may have read in Wired that Google wants to find ways to authenticate without the old messy username and password approach.
Google agrees. “Along with many in the industry, we feel passwords and simple bearer tokens such as cookies are no longer sufficient to keep users safe,” Grosse and Upadhyay write in their paper.
I can agree with that without a problem or reservation. I have to talk to security guys in companies across the US and no one really loves username/password scena [read] Keywords: ibm
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microsoft
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Going to IBM Connect 2013?
Tue, Jan 22nd 2013 4:15p Mark Polly Are you one of the thousands who will descend on Orlando, Florida next week to attend IBM Connect 2013? If you are, then you may have been trying to make sense of all the information IBM has been publishing about the conference. I know as a business partner, we receive lots of emails on a daily basis.
Alan Lepofsky has posted a very good article that summarizes all the various IBM websites devoted to Connect 2013. Here is a link to his blog post: Putting Together the Puzzle of IBM Connec [read] Keywords: ibm
blogging
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Personalization: A Rules Based Approach
Tue, Jan 22nd 2013 8:15a Michael Porter The fifth and final approach to personalization utilizes rules to understand users and events and then push personalized content and messages to them. This probably represents one of the most complex aspects of personalization but it can be extremely powerful. I say “rules” because you need some engine, most likely separate from a portal server, to queue up messages based on events that may occur in a number of other systems. Let me give you some examples of how this might work [read] Keywords: acl
development
integration
office
server
widget
Ephox EditLive for IBM Connections
Mon, Jan 21st 2013 5:22p Mark Polly Thanks to Becky Schroeder at Ephox for sending me the following video. EditLive is an outstanding web-based text editor that has been included in IBM WebSphere Portal and IBM Web Content Manager for several years. If you use those products, EditLive is the Advanced Editor out of the box.Click here to view the embedded video.
EditLive brings lots of great features to people who create and edit content on the web. Traditionally, content was edited in desktop applications like Dreamweaver, MS [read] Keywords: connections
ibm
applications
desktop
websphere
websphere portal
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Personalization: Based on Site Actions
Mon, Jan 21st 2013 11:18a Michael Porter Continuing on with my Personalization series, I want to focus on personalization that caters to what you do on the web site. We most commonly refer to this as Amazon’s approach. Amazon does a great, but not perfect, job of recommendations based on your actual actions on the site. Personalization of this sort would focus on the following:
You viewed this article on healthy eating, you might like these three other articles
You bought the Little People video. Other people who bough [read] Keywords: widgets
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Why Developers Don’t Follow UI and Brand Standards
Mon, Jan 21st 2013 11:18a Michael Porter Every so often I read a pretty good post elsewhere in Perficient’s blogosphere. Abbey Smalley just posted a good article on “Why Your Developers Aren’t Following Your Brand Standards” I find this interesting because I keep seeing sites or sub-sites that fail to follow any standard at all. It usually isn’t for lack of a published standard. Most likely, the developers were busy or the company failed to implement a decent set of governance around UI and Brand sta [read] Keywords: notes
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Social Intranet Technologies, Part 3
Mon, Jan 21st 2013 6:22a Mark Polly In the past two posts (Part 1 & Part 2), I list many of the key technologies that make up a social intranet. In this post, I’m going to talk about how you might combine those different systems into an overall social intranet platform for your company. In the next post in this series, I’ll talk about what some major vendors are offering for a social intranet solution.
Assume that you’ve decided to replace your old, circa 2001 intranet with a new social intranet. A good [read] Keywords: connections
blogging
community
email
facebook
instant messaging
interface
mobile
profile
security
social software
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Personalization: An Attribute Based Approach
Fri, Jan 18th 2013 9:15a Michael Porter This is part three of a five part series on personalization.
Security Based PZN
Customization
Attribute Based PZN
The first two options were important but I don’t tend to call them true personalization. Attribute based personalization finally gets to the land of actual personalization. It’s the concept that you choose to display pages, portlets, or content based specific attributes of a user. The attributes can come from a variety of sources. Here are a couple that I’ve [read] Keywords: applications
office
portlet
security
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Social Intranet Technologies, Part 2
Fri, Jan 18th 2013 6:14a Mark Polly In part 1 of this series (see Social Intranet Technologies, Part 1), I talked about many different technologies or systems that make up a social intranet. In this post, I want to expand the list of technologies, and discuss briefly several technologies that often get overlooked, but can be an important part of a great social intranet.
When we talk about the social intranet, connecting people to people is one of the most important features we can provide. In the main list of technologies, thi [read] Keywords: email
facebook
google
instant messaging
office
twitter
wiki
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Guide to IBM Connect
Thu, Jan 17th 2013 12:15p Jonathan Distad New name, new feel, 100% social. Whether you have been to Lotusphere in the past or Connect/Lotusphere 2013 is your first. Here is a good guide to what to do, how to do it and what to expect this year.
1. Be open and social. Really, say hi to people when you don’t know them.
2. Don’t miss OGS (Opening General Session) – its great but get there early. Lines form like a One Direction ticket launch.
3. Get Certified. One of the best things is that you can certified on ne [read] Keywords: connections
ibm
lotusphere
office
twitter
Microsoft SharePoint and Yammer Integration
Wed, Jan 16th 2013 7:14a Mark Polly My colleague Seth Broweleit shared with me news that Yammer has been integrated with Microsoft SharePoint. If you are a Yammer Enterprise customer, you can download the installation package that includes some very nice features. The video here shows many of the features I’ve listed below: Click here to view the embedded video.
Primary Yammer Web Part - Add Yammer feeds, private messages, and notifications tabs to SharePoint sites
Light Embeddable Feeds - Embed a mini feed anywher [read] Keywords: enterprise
integration
microsoft
profile
sharepoint
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What Constitutes Success For a Social Network?
Fri, Jan 11th 2013 3:15p Michael Porter Jonathan Distad (@jdistad) passed this on to me and Mark Polly earlier this week. It’s an article in MIT’s Sloan review titled, They Built it but Employees Aren’t Coming. The article points out one piece of information that you would call the zinger:
The most startling result was that when asked to assess the overall engagement of employees in the company, more than half responded that only 10-20% of its employees were active.
At first glance, that really is a zinger. On [read] Keywords: facebook
network
networking
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Google Analytics Basics
Thu, Jan 10th 2013 8:14a Michael Porter Valeria Arguello published a blog post on 7 tips for those just starting out with Google Analytics. I won’t steel her thunder but I liked her last tip.
Goals Overview
Conversion tracking can be added to Google Analytics by clicking on the Admin tab and then on the Goals tab. By adding a goal you can track:
Visits to a specific page, for example a thank you page after registering to a newsletter or submitting a contact form.
Visitors that stayed a certain amount of time on the website.
V [read] Keywords: admin
google
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Personalization: Customization and How I want It
Wed, Jan 9th 2013 8:15p Michael Porter Continuing on with the discussion of the five facets of personalization. Customization deserve mention as the reason most companies buy a portal and the feature most companies never actually use.
What is Customization
Customization is the ability for an end user to create a page and put portlets or web parts on that page in his or her preferred manner. It also denotes the end users ability to customize settings within a portlet. Think of iGoogle or My Yahoo! as perfect examples of this in th [read] Keywords: interface
office
portlet
widgets
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Personalization: A Multi-faceted Approach
Tue, Jan 8th 2013 9:15p Michael Porter In the past few years, I’ve heard a litany of common requirements from client to client. They include social, mobile, and personalization. While social and mobile gather all the buzz, we spend a surprising amount of time focusing on what a personalized experience really means. I find a lot of people understand what personalized is but don’t understand some of the basic and mechanics of personalization. For that reason, I’m going to post a five part series on it. I&# [read] Keywords: applications
mobile
security
workspace
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IBM WebSphere Portal Self Registration Portlet Available
Tue, Jan 8th 2013 6:14a Mark Polly In previous versions of IBM WebSphere Portal, one missing feature had been the ability for a new user to self register. It was one of the standard checklist items in a Request For Proposal (RFP) – does your system allow for self registration? We spent countless hours building this capability for many, many clients.
IBM has implemented a set of portlets for self registration and has made them available on their App Store, the IBM Solutions Catalog. You can download the portlets at this page [read] Keywords: ibm
lotus
email
password
portlet
profile
security
websphere
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Speaking at Connect 2013
Mon, Jan 7th 2013 3:15p Michael Porter Saren Sakurai (@saren) and I will be speaking on Social CMO: Engaging the Consume at the IBM Connect 2013 Conference. For those of you attending, you can preview the session by going to the session preview tool and searching for CMO. We are BP402. Here’s a quick agenda on what we’ll discuss:
Awareness: Defining a target and crafting a message. This has less to do with selling and more to do with making people aware of you.
Engagement: Engaging the consumer in ways they want to [read] Keywords: collaboration
connections
ibm
facebook
linkedin
networking
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Is SharePoint 2013 Good for External Websites?
Mon, Jan 7th 2013 5:14a Mark Polly This question, “Can SharePoint be used for public websites (in addition to intranets)?” comes up a lot. The knock on previous versions of SharePoint (2010 and before) has always been that it can be expensive, it doesn’t do search engine optimization (SEO) well, it has trouble with mobile, multiple language support is weak, etc. While we have been delivering excellent SharePoint sites for a long time, it really takes a good level of expertise to pull it off correctly.
With [read] Keywords: css
javascript
microsoft
mobile
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Official Sitecore Training – Recommendations on Who, What & When
Sun, Dec 23rd 2012 6:14p Jamie Stump As we approach the new year, it’s time for a budget reset for many companies. Those companies who already have or are about to purchase Sitecore may have put money aside in their budget to train their employees on Sitecore. We get a lot of questions from our clients about what Sitecore classes to attend, who should attend, and when the best time to attend the courses is. This post will give you my thoughts regarding taking official Sitecore training classes.
First, when discussing Si [read] Keywords: best practice
development
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Sitecore Idiosyncrasies
Wed, Dec 19th 2012 3:11p Jamie Stump John West has been writing a few posts on Sitecore Idiosyncrasies over on the Sitecore site lately, and I have to highlight them and recommend them to all Sitecore developers. I have a number of coworkers with expansive CMS experience in systems other than Sitecore, and often times a large challenge to learning Sitecore is simply understanding the context of the terminology. John’s blogs should help clear up some confusing terms.
I think one of the most important of this series of post [read] Keywords: community
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Sitecore DMS In Action: QueryStringCondition
Fri, Dec 14th 2012 1:14p Jamie Stump Sitecore’s Digital Marketing Suite (DMS) is obviously a huge game-breaker in the WCM market. Here’s a tool that is seamlessly integrated into your CMS and allows you to track advanced usage analytics, do multivariate testing on your website, and personalize content on your site so that it is the most effective it can be and your site visitors get the most rewarding experience possible. All that, and if you have needs outside of the out-of-the-box functionality? Don’t [read] Keywords: desktop
properties
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Liferay Social Office 2.0 Enterprise Edition Released
Fri, Dec 14th 2012 7:14a Mark Polly Liferay recently released the enterprise edition of Liferay Social Office 2.0. The community edition came out last August. Social Office is a full social platform that includes blogs, wikis, activity streams, profiles, tasks, sites, instant messaging and document collaboration. The enterprise edition is the same as the community edition, but has been hardened for enterprise use and includes additional document and content management features. You can easily integrate Social Office features with [read] Keywords: collaboration
application
applications
community
enterprise
instant messaging
office
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Portal and Social are Two Top Technology Trends in Healthcare
Mon, Dec 10th 2012 6:11a Mark Polly I recently posted an entry about the top technology trends of 2012 according to IBM. Today, I’m linking to Perficient’s Health IT blog, where Jamie Churchill posted the Top 5 Technology Trends in Healthcare – November 2012.
Why Health IT technology trends? Well Jamie points out that two of the five top trends are Social Media and Portals. Here are a couple of comments from Jamie on each of these trends:
Social Media:
Social networking and collaboration tools provide one-to-o [read] Keywords: collaboration
ibm
enterprise
linking
networking
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How to Make Your Enterprise Mobile App More Engaging
Mon, Dec 10th 2012 5:12a Michael Porter The guys over at the Spark Blog seem to be on a roll lately with a number of nice posts. I especially like Amit Malhotra’s post on Mobile App best practices. Lots of companies are creating apps for the mobile web, android, iOS, Windows, and other platforms. Most aren’t even worried about putting them on the official app stores. Wtih much development comes great opportunity to just get it wrong so Amit’s advice is timely. Without copying everything he said, let me give y [read] Keywords: development
enterprise
mobile
networking
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Is Openera the Solution to our Email Attachment Problems?
Fri, Dec 7th 2012 6:11p Michael Porter Erin Moloney (@ErinE) put me onto this techcrunch article about Openera. In a nutshell, Openera hooks up to a wide range of email accounts like gmail, Exchange, and any IMAP standard server to automate taking your attachments in email and putting them in Google Apps, iCloud, Box, Dropbox, etc. What’s cool about that you say? Well, having implemented collaboration tools a couple times, I can say that half the battle is in getting users to actually push content into the tool so others [read] Keywords: collaboration
ibm
email
enterprise
exchange
exchange
google
microsoft
server
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Working With the Sitecore Attachment Field Type
Wed, Dec 5th 2012 6:15p Jamie Stump A client of mine recently had a situation that we decided was best handled by uploading an XML file into a Sitecore item for their Sitecore 6.6 site. Due to some business rules, we decided that we didn’t want the upload to be stored directly in the media library, but instead in a data template that contained some other specific fields. We took a look at the Sitecore OOTB Unversioned File template and saw that it’s field that you upload a file to is of the Attachment field type. [read] Keywords: ajax
bug
xml
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2012 Tech Trends: Mobile, Social, Cloud and Business Analytics
Wed, Dec 5th 2012 10:11a Mark Polly IBM recently released the 2012 edition of their annual Tech Trends Report. The 2012 Tech Trends Report is based on a survey of more than 1,200 professionals who make technology decisions for their organizations (22 percent IT managers, 53 percent IT practitioners and 25 percent business professionals). The respondents come from 16 different industries and 13 countries, spanning both mature and growth markets. The full report is here.
So what are the trends? As the title of this article says, it& [read] Keywords: ibm
applications
desktop
facebook
mobile
twitter
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IBM Completes the Rebranding of Lotus Live
Mon, Dec 3rd 2012 5:11a Michael Porter IBM has a nice SaaS version of their social networking tool. It’s been LotusLive for a while but was rebranded earlier this year as IBM SmartCloud for Social. The complete the rebrand today by changing the url.
For our Business Partners that are currently taking advantage of the IBM SmartCloud for Social Business : Client trial accounts benefit, please note that on December 1, 2012 SmartCloud for Social Business will modify its service domain name. If you access your customer tri [read] Keywords: administration
ibm
lotus
email
networking
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Troubleshooting Sitecore Item Buckets Installation
Fri, Nov 30th 2012 1:11p Jamie Stump I recently installed the Item Buckets packages to my Sitecore 6.6 installation so that I could play around with it and determine if it could be used for a particular business need of one of my clients. After having seen Tim Ward’s presentation at Sitecore Symposium on Item Buckets, I have to say I was looking forward to getting a chance to see it in action. The “100 Items or less in any given Sitecore node” rule can certainly be an IA architecture challenge, and I think th [read] Keywords: admin
desktop
development
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Is SharePoint a Platform for Social Business?
Wed, Nov 28th 2012 5:12a Michael Porter Thanks to Erin Maloney (@ErinE) for this great article by James Dellow at Ripple Effect Group. James starts off by asking the question about whether SharePoint is a platform for social and then delves into all the other things taking place in the world.
Firstly, its important to recognise that Microsoft’s long term strategy is shifting in response to drivers such cloud computing (see Windows Azure), the consumerisation of IT and new technologies that are changing both our relationship to co [read] Keywords: ibm
exchange
exchange
google
microsoft
networking
office
sharepoint
skype
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Information Overload Has a Pause Button?
Tue, Nov 27th 2012 11:12a Michael Porter Stuart McRae linked to an interesting article about information overload. The Guardian Article highlights the Gmail option to essentially pause your email so you don’t feel guilt ridden by all your unread email. I love the Guardian Reporter, Oliver Burkeman’s, initial comments about it.
There’s a new add-on for Gmail called Inbox Pause, which does something utterly simple – it adds a pause button to your inbox – but represents, I think, a new phase in our long war [read] Keywords: application
email
linkedin
outlook
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Keep Your WCM Project On Track – Working With Creative Types
Tue, Nov 27th 2012 11:12a Earl D. Moore, Jr. We all face challenges (both planned an unplanned) on our projects. In a recent post, I discussed 5 Things Project Managers Can Learn From Their First WCM Project. This post is the first in a 5-part series where we will discuss those in more detail.
The first one is working with Creative Types.
On most Web Content Management (WCM) projects, there is no shortage of “creative types”. These are the people responsible for the digital assets, style sheets, and creative framework for the organizat [read] Keywords: mobile
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LinkedIn Ads Worth a Look?
Tue, Nov 27th 2012 5:11a Michael Porter Valeria Arguello on our sister Spark Blog has a short post on LinkedIn ads that was interesting in that LinkedIn gives your far more targeting and more information on who looks at your ads. I won’t repeat everything she has to say but so click through for the entire post.
And now…my favorite features:
Targeting Options: You can target by industry, job function, job title, industry, company name, company size, seniority, gender, LinkedIn group, age, geography and network. This is ve [read] Keywords: linkedin
network
networking
profile
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