2012 IBM Exceptional Web Experience Conference – General Session

Opening General Session keynote with Larry Bowden

The session kicked off with Larry Bowden touting the biggest launch for WebSphere Portal in 10 years and the key growth components driving it.  There has been a double digit growth in customers in last 2 years.  Key growth components and statistics include:

• Social
  • 60% Discover new brands or products
  • 46% Influence purchase decisions
  • 40% Check before purchase decisions
• Mobile
  • 27%Check prices
  • 24% Reviews
  • 16% Discounts
• Content
• Analytics
• Sales of physical goods through online social networks in US will grow by 93% a year to $14B in 2015

The Northstar vision delivered

Project Northstar was announced a couple of years ago and the initiative has been realized with the integration of key integrated suites which bring essential capabilities together to manage and deliver multichannel web experiences.

• IBM Customer Experience Suite
• IBM Intranet Experience Suite

New Capabilities and Themes in WebSphere Portal 8

There are quite a few new capabilities and themes delivered in portal 8.  A summary of some of them are below:

Social

• Community pages
• OpenID Authentication
• New article, blog and wiki templates
• IBM Connections Files and Profiles entitlement

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Mobile

• New mobile theme
• IBM Web Experience Factory enhancements
• Forms Experience Builder with Android and iPad support

Managed Content Driven

• Managed pages
• Page project draft, preview and syndication
• High performance themes
• New content template catalog

Integration

• ECM
• SAP
• Web Experience Factory content mamagement
• Enhanced Web Application Bridge

Insight Driven

• Web analytics page overlays
• More flexible tagging and rating

Total Cost of Ownership

Several new capabilities have been added which reduce the total overall cost of portal including:

• Installation manager
• Search enhancement
• Configuration wizard for administrators

Having attended many Web Experience Conferences in the past, this one conincides with one of IBM’s most innovative portal releases.  More to come in future posts.