Rob Will, Chief Architect at IBM, presented the future vision for Portal and WCM today. He started out talking about how the concept of customer experience has been evolving over the past few years. A core shift has been to enable non-technical users to do more and more with less reliance on IT.
A slight change with profound implications has been the change from a Web experience to a Digital experience, which implies support many more devices and output streams. Portal and WCM has always been about web sites, not mobile applications. Portal is now in the mobile web site business to enable multi-channel web site business. Portal is still the integrating platform for content, applications, etc. Everything done in Portal and WCM is now done with mobile in mind.
IBM Worklight is the hybrid application platform that integrates with Portal and WCM. Worklight enables access to all the mobile device features through portlets. Its easy to create a Worklight adapter to grab content from WCM to display in a native application. WCM’s personalization engine can also be leveraged from Worklight so you see the same promotions on the web as you see in the mobile app.
Mobile Directions
- Improving integration to support device classes
- Fine tuning seamlessness of the theme integration
- Co-deploy Worklight on Portal
Content and Rich Media
- More and more convergence between portal and content management
- Projects and Templates (in Portal 8) are heavily relied on in future releases
- Content Template Catalog 4.1.2 came out last week – uses latest CKEditor for inline editing
- Vanity URLs- in beta now. You can completely control the URL. URLs are stored in WCM to support Syndication. This feature will deprecate URL Mappings in Portal.
- WCM Content Security is more seamless with Portal.
- Attribute based security means you can control access to content based on Attributes.
- Project templates make it easier to set up projects, including predefined workflow
- Now everyone is entitled to EditLive! Enterprise version
- Customers on 8.0.0.1 have entitlement to WebRadar which is content reporting and analytics
- Cross Version syndication is supported to ease content migration. You can syndicate from WCM 7.0.0.2 CF26 or higher to WCM 8.0.0.1 CF09 or higher
- Syndication – improvements in error messaging, error handling, more retry capabilities. Also in the Authoring UI, you can see a status of each object’s syndication.
- Rich Media Edition seamlessly integrates with MediaBeacon.
- Deliver and Stream HD Videos – this includes integration with BrightCove
Personalization and Targeting
- In 8.0 IBM added in-context rules editing. New minor enhancements are coming here.
- Marketing Management is more of a focus for a richer experience, including Unica Marketing Center and IBM Interact.
- New Portlet allows user to enter a few details about the spot and the portlets does all the work to bring in offers from Interact. This reduces the rules that you have to write in portal.
WCM and Commerce
- This is available now.
- You can link content from WCM directly into a commerce site. This also includes preview capability
Social
- Social rendering in 8.0.0.1 takes content from connections and delivers them inside portal mixed with other content and applications. WCM presentation templates are used to make the social content look like other content on the page.
- In the next version, IBM provides a bunch of enhancements. Discussion threads hosted on IBM Connections, but linked to WCM content. Here the visual experience of the discussion is controlled by WCM.
- Now you can Like, create posts, comment, etc right in line.
- Dynamic filters for social lists – these lists cooperate with other page components to filter content and drilling down in lists.
- This is all available in mobile web too.
For a sample of how well Portal, WCM and Connections are integrated together, take a look at the Connect 2014 Site:
- News and updates are blogs in Connections
- Events are in WCM.
- Session info is in WCM,
- Speaker profile is in Connections.
- Downloads are in Connections Files.
- Session add is a DB2 application
Digital Data Connector (DDC) – this is a new concept and we’ll more information on this shortly.
- Extends social rendering and WCM to any type of data source.
- Can take most data source and bring into Portal through social rendering
I had to leave this session early, so I will follow up with another post on the rest of the new features coming in the future.
A beta version of Portal is now available if you want to try out some of these features.
