Mark Polly

We often encounter companies who are trying to improve their web sites by implementing some sort of content management system.  Portal vendors will sell them on the benefits of using portal technologies to integrate applications with content.  Non-portal vendors will sell their products based on traditional content management features, such as site management, page creation, […]

Many of our Portal clients face the same dilemma:  They are implementing a new portal platform, but need to bring content into portal from a variety of places.  In most of these situations, they have an existing content management system that they can’t (or won’t) migrate into portal’s CMS. Last month I blogged about how […]

WebSphere Portal 7 includes two new cool features: tagging and rating.  With these new features you can easily allow users to tag and rate portal pages and web content items.  Lets take a look at both of these features in action. Tagging a Portal Page   When using the new Page Builder theme, tagging is […]

IBM recently released their updated Multilingual solution for Portal and Web Content Management V7.   If you are familiar with previous versions of MultiLingual Solution, you will be comfortable with this latest version. The basic concept behind localizing content is to have multiple WCM libraries, each set up to serve a different locale.  One library is […]

Facebook recently announced the Comments Box Plugin.  This new plugin allows you to add the Facebook Comments feature to any website.   The plugin makes it easy to include a comment thread on your website, allows for comment moderation, and integrates the Facebook login. But the really cool thing is that when a user enters a […]

I just went through a presentation on Adobe CQ5, which came to Adobe via their recent acquisition of Day Software.  Wow!  CQ5 has outstanding features that compete with the best Enterprise Web Content Management and Portal systems.  At the heart of CQ5 is Apache Sling and a Java Content Repository (JCR).  Main features of CQ5 […]

Liferay Portal 6 includes a Web Content Management system that integrates really nicely with the portal.  After reviewing Liferay Portal, I’ve come up with my list of highlights and shortfalls of the Liefray’s Web Content Management feature.  My comments are based on what is available in the standard UI.  Of course you could extend Liferay […]

If you haven’t heard, IBM offers a cloud-based service for WebSphere Portal  7.0 via their Smart Business Cloud offering.  In this article Paul Kelsey provides step-by-step instructions to implement your Portal 7.0 in the cloud. Some highlights of IBM’s Smart Business Cloud for WebSphere Portal include the following features that always seem to cause initial […]

WebSphere Portal can easily display content from its own robust web content management system (WCM).  But surveys have found that more than 50% of companies have more than one content management system they want to integrate with Portal.  There are several out-of-the-box solutions that you can use to pull content from other systems and display […]

Here are portal-based conferences coming in 2011: Gartner Portals, Content and Collaboration Summit – March 28-30 2011 Liferay East Coast (U.S) Symposium – May 10-11 2011 All Liferay Symposiums World-wide IBM Exceptional Web Experience Conference 2011 – May 15-19 2011 Microsoft Sharepoint Conference – Oct 3-6 2011 If you know of others that I missed, […]

Here is one of my pet peeves about Web Content Management systems.  After you get the beast installed, configured and running, you almost never can start creating and displaying content right  away.   You have to figure out what data fields you need to capture from authors and then go build the authoring templates.  Then you […]

I’m participating in an IBM Social Business Jam and one of the participants referenced a concept called “Narrate your work” as a metaphor to help people understand the value of sharing status updates. (Since the IdeaJam is private, I won’t divulge the particpant’s name.) The idea of “Narrate your work” was first proposed by Dave […]