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Digital Transformation

Portal Excellence Conference – Keynote

We are at the Portal Excellence Conference which has now been appropriately renamed to the Web Experience Conference.  IBM is explicitly admitting that it takes more than just portal software to create a web experience so they’ve expanded the discussion to portal, web content management, search, web analytics, user experience, and a number of other technologies.

Larry Bowden

Larry kicked off the keynote with the agenda.  Goal: we are here to help you create the interfaces for interactions with your employees, customers, and partners.

It’s probably obvious but change is and has been in the air:

  • 22% of all online time being spent on social networks
  • second most popular search engine is YouTube.  It’s value as an educational tool is increasing
  • Social Media revolution: Facebook got to 100 million users in 9 months.  That’s huge growth compared to almost any other technology.
  • 1 billion downloads from iPhones in 9 months
  • Generation Y will outnumber baby boomers by the end of 2011
  • 96% of Gen Y will use social media
  • 80% of all companies say they used linkedin to do recruiting

Social Business is the next evolution

Quote: the big thing now is the collision of portal and social business.

This means that an in this increasingly social world exceptional experiences matter.  48% of people following someone on a tweet actually act on that. (I would love to verify this stat)  Just think what that means to marketing people who are used to 2% response rates being fantastic.

Key note on need to improve: per Forrester Research only 6% of companies garnered an excellent rating.

Gary Dolsen

Gary starts out with a company discussion point on what is an exceptional web experience: Engaging, Relevant, Trustworthy, and Portable.

Quote: Over the past 25 years we’ve gotten really good at delivering systems of record.

However, we need systems of engagement now.  This influences how IT Architects these types of solutions.  It means the key investment is in social, mobile, analytics, and integration.

Integration: People use on average 11 different connections to different systems with WebSphere Portal

What’s coming

Open ID support in WebSphere Portal.  Login from facebook without lots of additional development.  This will be a something in the catalog

Mobile will be a tiered strategy. Build out multiple channels with web, iphone, android, blackberry etc.  IBM will support this with their Web Experience Factory

Cognos has a new product called Cognos Consumer Insight.  This product tells you about sentiment and affinity analysis so from a social standpoint you get a lot of value

IBM is working on deeper Sharepoint integration with a set of tools which include

  • New exchange portlets
  • Integration via CMIS
  • portlets to surface up sharepoint in WebSphere Portal

Lombardi will be able to be accessed through the Universal task list Portlet

IBM now offers a Forms NOW and WCM now to get sites with specific functionality up and running quickly.

IBM continues to create industry templates.  The idea is to give you more value in functionality and site layout without a lot of time and effort.  All of IBM’s industry templates will be available via the solutions catalog free of charge.

Demo

It’s hard to describe a demo in some sort of real time fashion.  That said, I can give you an idea of the general philosophy.  Social and integration with existing systems need to become a seamless experience.  IBM may have separate products but the web site takes the bits and pieces and puts them together to create a cohesive experience.

except for when the mobile site logged him out and he had to take a minute just logging back in………………

I will say that the new mobile themes are much less clunky than what we’ve seen before. This bodes well for those who want to develop in this and not have to spend a lot of time creating the baseline foundation before actually building things of value.

Portlet Factory is now Experience Factory. This tool is now geared towards developing much more than portlets.  Nicole Carrier showed a real time demo of taking a web site and:

  1. Applying a mobile theme for mobile phones
  2. apply geolocation functionality to revise the UI in the portlet for the phone form factor
  3. Create a native iphone, android and other applications
  4. Use the iPad to create content and publish it. This is a use of the IBM WCM api’s to create your own authoring environment.
  5. Publish via RSS feeds to anywhere including your facebook page

Forms 4.0 suppports the iPad. It has a lot of new web 2.0 functionality. It of course, includes all the secure signature and other functionality. The demo actually showed taking a signature via the iPad so that’s pretty cool.

Quote: this is 100% real working code.  It’s not something that hasn’t been released yet.

sneak preview of upcoming functionality

WebSphere Portal will support the concept of a community page which allows pull in content from Connections.  When you create a page, you can choose what community you want to use.  Then, all the Connections portlets will automatically scope to the chosen community.

Future functionality will allow for users to get real time data on site usage from the site itself.  So you can go to a page and then choose to see the stats for the page.

 

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Michael Porter

Mike Porter leads the Strategic Advisors team for Perficient. He has more than 21 years of experience helping organizations with technology and digital transformation, specifically around solving business problems related to CRM and data.

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