Dave Jones

The Power of the Journey A customer journey is really two things for marketers: A plan to engage customers along a marketing pathway A picture of what activities the target audience does and when they do them Sounds simple, right? But it’s fueled by a lot of variables working in harmony. The Importance of Alignment Elements like technology platforms, qualitative […]

I really didn’t expect to see the day when Rational Application Developer would be supported on Mac OS, but it appears that RAD v9.0 will do just that. While tablets have been taking a big bite out of the laptop and desktop sales across the broader consumer market, developers still generally need some real horsepower […]

My colleague Martin Ridgway recently posted on how your web site’s performance is important to the user experience. Of course this is true for WebSphere Portal sites as well, so I wanted to steal…er, leverage his recommendations and elaborate with some specifics on how we see those implemented within WebSphere Portal sites. Before I go […]

I recently posted about how to make your IBM WCM environment easier to use for content authors. In many cases, that may be sufficient for your needs, but sometimes it may be appropriate to augment that with more formal training. This training would be specific to your WCM environment – not on generic WCM authoring. […]

One of the key areas we focus on with many of our IBM Portal/WCM implementations is the authoring of web content within WCM. Let’s face it – while the out-of-the-box interface isn’t difficult to use, it is easier for technical users to learn than for non-technical content authors. However, there are a number of things that […]

Splunk hosted a webinar earlier today on their Splunk for WebSphere Application Server 2.0 application. This is an application they wrote that extends Splunk’s already powerful capabilities to provide WebSphere-specific searches and reports. If you’re not familiar with Splunk, you should take a look. In a nutshell: Your IT infrastructure generates massive amounts of data. […]

If you don’t regularly check the IBM Portal wiki or subscribe to updates via RSS, you might not have seen the WebSphere Portal v7 Tuning Guide that was just released.  Many of the sections are similar to the previous editions, but there are also new sections for areas such as: Disabling features you might not […]

Every non-trivial implementation of WebSphere Portal (are there any trivial ones?) will need some degree of automation, mostly around release management.  Most customers have three or more portal environments: Development, Production, and one or more in the middle.  In the last few years, we’re seeing a greater demand for Disaster Recovery environments as well.  Promoting […]

Jason Wicker of IBM has posted a comprehensive set of security concepts and considerations for IBM WebSphere Portal.  While much of this information exists in various forms throughout the v6.1 and v7.0 InfoCenters and Redbooks, Jason captures it all in one place. I’d recommend that Portal customers and consultants use that article as a security-related […]

A nice article was recently published on IBM’s WebSphere Portal wiki about using a mixture of HTTP and HTTPS pages on a WebSphere Portal site.  The reasoning for that approach is basically that you need to encrypt certain sensitive traffic, but don’t want to encrypt traffic for the entire site for performance reasons. Before you […]

In the past few years, we have seen a lot of our new and existing customers show interest in having someone else run their WebSphere Portal infrastructure.  They’re happy with their investment in Portal, but may have any number of reasons why they don’t want to manage it themselves anymore. As you start to talk […]