Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained […] infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. George Santayana

To understand where we are going in Web Content Management, we must first understand how we got to where we are now. Let’s embark on a semi-accurate and mildly satirical journey through the history of Web Content Management.

In the Beginning…

In the beginning, the web developer created raw HTML without form or process and saw it was bad.

Incantations such as FrontPage and Dreamweaver could produce elegant pages from arcane HTML tags, but code and content were inexorably mixed any changes to words or images required developer support.

Developers grew tired of marketing buzzing on about customer journeys, content velocity, and interactions and decided something must be done to provide separation between content and code.

The Expanse of XML

And the web developer said, “Let there be XML in the breadth of the codebase to distinguish between the content and the code and let the XML be called content and have a system for marketers to manage it so I don’t have to”. Along came enterprise software vendors with solutions to convert large piles of cash into maintainable websites.

The web developer wrote code in XSLT and marketers wrote content in XML and they saw it was bad.

Content and code were theoretically separate, but new features and changes still required coordination between marketing and web developers and interactive web applications and marketing websites were divided by a chasm deeper than the darkest trenches of the seas.

Rise of the Web Content Frameworks

Lamenting the disconnect between web apps and websites, the web developer said “if only I could have one system that would join a content management system and web application framework as one, then it would finally be good”. And came Drupal, Adobe Experience Manager, and Sitecore which provided all of the features the marketer and web developer wanted out of the box. 

Lamentably, the marketer had eaten from the tree of design and saw that the website was naked. The web developer extended the out of the box features and soon saw it was bad.

Upgrades were excruciating and due to the entanglement of custom and framework code, seemingly small changes required many hours and significant costs.

Single Page Everything

Away in the mystic land of Silicon Valley, the one true prophet of technology, introduced the one true Single Page Application framework React. Shortly thereafter, the other one true prophet of technology introduced Angular which is also the one true framework for Single Page Applications. 

These Single Page Applications enabled the web developer to create websites that avoid the one thing that bothers users more than anything else, page reloads and so the marketer and web developer decided to rebuild all of their sites so they would finally be good.

The web developer rebuilt the site’s Single Page Apps and the marketer saw it was bad. No longer self-enabled, every change once again had to through a development release process. 

Let Them GET /cake.json

Storming the bastille of the now-traditional CMS paradigm, a new cadre of headless CMS solutions fomented a revolution to overthrow the class system of static websites and dynamic CMS systems and replace it with an egalitarian, universal Content API.

Swept up in revolutionary fever, the web developer and the marketer again re-implemented half of the website on a new platform before realizing it was also bad. 

No longer able to leverage a base framework, the web developer had to reimplement the wheel, while the marketer struggled to understand the context of the content without visualizing it on a page with the form-based content authoring. Thus the cycle continued and the universe collapsed on itself in an explosion of budgets and technology debt when the web developer mentioned re-implementing with GraphQL.

Learning from the Past

Web Content Management is a discipline which takes a week to learn and a career to master. While at the simplest, it is just putting markup and binary assets on the internet, the inherent contradictions in needs, goals, and capabilities introduce tremendous challenges.

Based on my experience in this industry and many lessons learned I’ve come to the following conclusions:

• One-size-fits-all solutions are rarely completely right, most often the solution involves multiple approaches working together
• If choosing a one-size-fits-all solution, you must be clear on what you are giving up and ensure those compromises are worth the architectural simplification
• When defining the content structure, start with Authoring, not the experience being created. If you understand how content will go into the system and then how it will be exposed, you will understand the optimal approach to content
• The interrelation of code and content in HTML requires balancing the desire to create rich content with the technical debt, complexity, and brand consistency challenges this introduces

What’s your takeaway? Leave a comment below and let’s discuss!

So, it’s probably been at least five years since you last implemented a web content management system (WCMS). More than likely, it’s been more than eight years. The old system is increasingly out-dated, slow, hard to use, and the people who picked it are long gone. Does this sound familiar? This is a common situation with anyone looking to select a new content system, portal, or digital experience platform.

Many people looking for a new platform will start in one of two ways:

• Go to Google and search for “Select a web content management system.” If you go this route, you will find all sorts of “How to choose” articles. In fact, I had 982,000,000 results when I did it. Unfortunately, a lot of the results will be written by a content management vendor who would prefer you just buy their system. On the first page of results, 90% will likely fall into this category.
• Look to Gartner or Forrester for advice. If you have heard of Gartner, you might know they have something called a Magic Quadrant that shows their assessment of several vendors. Likewise, Forrester has the Wave assessment. While their information is good, it may not line up with your particular situation.

It’s Critically Important to Get This Right

We know the selection of a new platform is a critical decision that you have to make – the future of your digital experiences depends on you getting the selection right. Also, large enterprises have to pull together a cross-functional or cross-business unit team to go through the process to make sure everyone buys into the final selection.

If you haven’t been through a large-scale selection process, not only do you need information about the systems, you need guidance on how to create a process that gets you to the final decision. If your company has a formal RFP process, that may only slow you down – Forrester says you will need at least three months to go through an RFP and it will likely take much longer. (See RIP, RFP — This Is Not Your 1990s Vendor Selection Process)

A Better Process

At Perficient, we think we have a better selection process that will get you to your web content management decision much faster. We created a guide that you can download to help you understand how to select the right system. (See The State of Content Management Systems: Finding the Right Fit)

We start by identifying your specific requirements for a new platform. By itself, the process of identifying requirements can be arduous and time-consuming. But here is where our process shines. We have collected over 300 requirements from a variety of companies across a variety of industries over the past several years. So, rather than starting with a blank sheet, we simply ask you to select which of these requirements are must-have, nice to have, or not needed. Along the way, we might find you have a few requirements we’ve never seen before, but it’s easier to add a few new requirements than try to discover 300 new ones. With our process, we can reduce the requirements identification time from months down to a week or two.

Bypassing the RFP Process

Once you have identified your requirements, you have to evaluate the various vendors against those requirements. If you go through the RFP process for this step, you’ll have to send those requirements out to each vendor and hope they answer the questionnaire honestly. Then you have to collect the responses, score them, and then try to narrow down to just a couple vendors to go forward.

In our process, we can bypass this arduous RFP process because we rely on Perficient experts to honestly evaluate the vendors based on our real-world implementation experiences. Our experts are also familiar with our standard set of 300 requirements, so they don’t have to go hunt for an answer about how a vendor performs against those requirements. As a result, rather than taking a month or two for the RFP scoring, our evaluation process happens in days.

Targeted Demonstrations are Important

Usually, the last key step in any selection process is the vendor demonstration. Typically, the top two vendors are invited to demo their system to the team. Too often, the team leaves it up to the vendor to show what they want and you can be sure they’ll show the features they think are great, whether you need them or not.

In our process, we ask the vendors to demonstrate your most important requirements. We do this by looking at the requirements you rated as “must-have” and then asking the vendors to demonstrate use cases that show how these “must-haves” will be satisfied. By doing this, you can be sure that you are not seeing a smokescreen.

Finally, if you are new to selecting a new web content management system, the types of systems and the number of capabilities they offer can be overwhelming. We created a guide to help you understand these systems better: Build an Experience Business: Understanding Your CMS Options.

It’s been a while since the last release of Sling CMS. The latest release, 0.14.0, brings tremendous new capabilities and dramatic improvements to the authoring experience to Sling CMS.

New Capabilities

Release 0.14.0 brings some exciting new capabilities to supplement the core content management features of Sling CMS to handle common web use cases.

New Capability #1: Forms

The Sling CMS Reference project already includes a lot of the base components but didn’t have a good solution for building forms. Conceptually, forms are composed of three parts:

Form Value Providers

Form value providers provide the default values for the form. An example form value provider is included in the reference app, which loads the form values from the user’s profile.

Form Value Providers are implemented as a Sling CMS Component coupled with a Java Class implementing the FormValueProvider interface.

Form Fields

Form fields are used to display the actual fields in the form. Examples provided include:

• Honeypot – A simple spam prevention hidden field
• Selection – Support for checkboxes, selects and radio buttons
• Textarea – Simple textarea
• Textfield – Textfields including HTML5 validation

Form Fields are implemented as a Sling CMS Component coupled with a Java Class implementing the FieldHandler interface. The FieldHandler implementation should handle all of the aspects of handing the field including validation.

Form Actions

Form actions handle the results of the form submission. Similar to the other form components, they are composed of a Sling CMS Component and an OSGi component implementing the FormAction interface.

There are three implementations provided with the reference application, including:

• Send Email – Simple text email sender, can include form fields
• Update Profile – Update the logged in user’s profile data
• User Generated Content – Creates a Sling CMS UGC from form data

New Capability #2: Image Transformations

Image transformations were initially introduced in Sling CMS 0.12.0, however, they got a rebuild and enhancement in Sling CMS 0.14.0. The new image transformations are based on Sling Context-Aware Configuration created at /conf/[conf-name]/files/transformations.
Each configuration is a series of instructions on how to transform a source image into the target using the Thumbnailator library. Currently, there are two supported transformations:

• Size – resize the image to fit within a width and height
• Crop – Crop the image to fit within a width and height, specifying a crop direction

Image Transformations are stored underneath sling:File assets as renditions and internally are used by Sling CMS to render the grid view.

Authoring Experience Improvements

I use Sling CMS for my personal site, so the authoring experience has a direct impact on my productivity. The focus of this release was to make tangible improvements.

Improvement #1: Drag and Drop Component Re-Ordering

One of the more annoying features of Sling CMS before this release was that to reorder components, you had to use the move icon and could only move them within their current container.
With the latest release, you can reorder components within a container or into other containers by just grabbing their edit bar.
Some of the authoring experience improvements include:

• Drag and Drop Component Reordering
• Slimmer edit bars
• New grid view for Sites and Static Content

Improvement #2: New Grid View for Sites & Static Content

In previous versions of Sling CMS, the only view of content was a tabular display. This worked pretty well for text content but wasn’t visually appealing for images and assets. The new grid view is the default for Sites and Static content but can be toggled off or set as not default in the user settings.

Improvement #3: User / Group Console

Previously, to modify users and groups, you had to leave the Sling CMS look and feel and use the Composum User / Group management tool With Sling CMS 0.14.0, Sling CMS now has a console for managing users and groups.

Improvement #4+: UI Tweaks

I’ve tweaked the user experience for the editor to make a number of small changes and generally make it cleaner and more modern looking.

Developer Quickstart

Sling CMS is already easy to set up with the Vagrant and Docker images as well as it being a single JAR download. With the release of Sling CMS 0.14.0, developers will be able to create projects for Sling CMS with a single command:

mvn archetype:generate  \
  -DarchetypeGroupId=org.apache.sling \
  -DarchetypeArtifactId=org.apache.sling.cms.archetype \
  -DarchetypeVersion=0.14.0

With the new Sling CMS Archetype, creating a site in Sling CMS creating a new site with Sling CMS takes just over two minutes:

Looking to get started with Sling CMS? Download the latest release from GitHub.

Liferay DXP was created with all stakeholders and touchpoints in mind, creating a scalable platform to ensure brand consistency that is easily customizable for developers, marketers, and designers alike. On June 4, 2019, Liferay launched Liferay DXP 7.2 and Liferay Commerce 2.0. The two systems now integrate with one another, thus optimizing the customer experience and creating a seamless journey from start to finish.
So, when it comes to DXP 7.2, what’s new?

Personalized Experiences

Each of your customers is unique, with unique interests and unique needs. A one-size-fits-all approach to experience management isn’t going to cut it. Liferay created DXP 7.2 because they know personalization should be a core feature rather than a separate, add-on application to optimize the customer experience; to achieve this, audience targeting has been moved into the DXP core platform.
With this feature, marketers can now create personalized page experiences for the customer, including adding fragments, navigation updates, and widgets all customized to the appropriate audience, without having to hire developers. What’s more, the advanced segmentation management also integrates with Liferay Analytics Cloud.

Go Headless

Liferay DXP 7.2 gives developers freedom to go headless and create a cleaner omnichannel experience for customers and add content with ease and without limitations. DXP 7.2 can easily power native mobile applications with content and services, websites hosted entirely outside of Liferay DXP and IoT devices.

Streamline Business Operations

Not only will employees benefit from the new platform – your customers’ expectations are more easily met with better workflows, forms, and APIs that reduce bottlenecks and allow for more flexibility to create scalable business applications.
Taking your business to the next level is a terrifying and exhilarating concept that can be made easier by upgrading to Liferay DXP 7.2. As the customer continues to grow and evolve in their digital experience, so must platforms scale with them. To learn more, watch the webinar, Introducing Liferay DXP 7.2: Drive Personalization at Scale.

One of the most common content structures in Content Management is articles. Articles are self-contained pieces of content relating to a single subject. This can range from blog posts to knowledge base articles, to news articles.
Articles pose a challenge in Content Management as they don’t follow the content structure of the rest of the website, there usually is a large number of articles and articles still live within the site. In table or database based Content Management Systems, generating unique but usable URLs can be a challenge as the content is generally stored in a flat structure, but should have an SEO friendly URL.  In Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), the content is stored in the repository in a hierarchical Content Structure, and having too many child nodes can cause both authoring and performance problems, so articles can be especially challenging to support.
 

 

Principles for Organizing Articles

 
In order to design a Content Strategy for articles, there are some key considerations when organizing the articles:
The first thing to consider is the volume of content. This includes both the existing content and the expected growth of the content. Small
volumes simply may not need much of an organizational structure, as navigating the content tree is both quick and easy. On the opposite end, handling millions of articles requires significant thought on how to structure the content to ensure the number of child nodes is not a concern and the content structure is navigable and understandable to users.
As soon as you define how much content you expect to deal with, consider the nature of the articles you are publishing. Are they time based or are they organized or by concept or category? Does the parent hierarchy have meaning for search engine optimization? Usually, the nature of the articles will help determine what organizational structure is most helpful for categorizing.
Finally, you need to determine what could be an organizing data point. This data point must be immutable, singular and meaningful. Some examples could include publication date, primary category or business unit. You should also consider what data points can be used for searching or filtering articles. Although these data points may not be the primary data point, having a rich filtering capability helps users immensely.
Taking all of these pieces of information together, you can determine the content structure that best supports your needs.
 

 

Common Article Structures

Some common article content structures include:
 

Blog Posts

This can include traditional blocks as well as corporate messaging, which may not have all the blog features but is designed for the same short-form, date-sensitive articles as any other blog. Usually, blog posts are organized by date. Depending on the number of articles being published you may only need the year and the month unless you are publishing a large number of articles within a month. The advantage to having only the year and month is that you end up with shorter URLs and the content tree is easier to navigate for authors.
 

Press Releases

Press releases are another common type of content. Unlike blog content that is more social in nature, press releases are generally more infrequent, are often longer and have much more organizational impact. For many organizations merely providing a year would be sufficient for organizing press releases, as an organization rarely publishes enough press releases within a year to be difficult to navigate or to cause performance problems.
 

Knowledge Bases

Knowledge bases are often poorly organized, so spending extra time here will yield tremendous increases in the usability of your knowledge base. If your knowledge base relates to content that is tied to a specific version of something, for example, a software product, including that version in the content structure will make it significantly easier for users to navigate. Leveraging AEM Live Copy or multi-site management can help with keeping those content structures in sync so you have all the relevant content for every version.
As knowledge base articles generally fall into a conceptual taxonomy, designating a primary category will allow for both organizing the articles for users and creating a clean content structure. Tags can be used as secondary categories for navigating between articles.

 

Next Steps

Content Production is the other key aspect to creating a well-functioning Content Management System. Having a well-defined Content Strategy will help you determine the Content Production strategy for producing and maintaining your articles. You can find out more in my white paper:
How to Find Zen in Content Production
 

We know the tipping point has passed: more web traffic comes from mobile devices than desktop. Still, your web content strategy, if it has embraced the “Mobile-First!” mantra, is probably in an early stage of transformation, most likely reflected in UX, design, and technology solutions to optimize how your content displays on mobile devices. Of course, the purpose of your mobile-friendly content—to convey information in words and images—needs to be considered and optimized as well.

 
Chances are, your site has amassed a substantial collection of legacy web pages authored under editorial best practices. A mobile-first strategy evolves best practices to include what we might call “Content Authoring Optimization,” an approach that aligns content strategy with UX, design, and technology optimization solutions.
Regardless of your state of digital transformation, using a mobile-first approach can help you review legacy content and ensure it aligns with the authoring optimization you are applying to new content. Also, a webpage-by-webpage review with analytics at hand provides you with a formal opportunity for assessing clarity, improving SEO, ensuring content supports business goals, and weeding out content that is no longer relevant.

Do We Really Need All This Stuff?

If content migration is in your future, you will especially benefit by evaluating the effectiveness and value of your legacy content.  A content audit with analytics is essential for guiding your decision-making and for tracking migration on a per-page basis.
But even if migration isn’t looming, an audit is a valuable tool for assessing your content from a mobile-first approach. Think of approaching your legacy content, then, as you do when preparing to move to a new home or a new workspace. All that stuff in the attic, basement, and garage, or in, on, and under your desk… Do you really need all of it?

The Mobility Now! Approach to Web Content

All that content seemed important once upon a time. That was then, when “more web content” was a strategy and the bandwidth for it expanded to the clouds. Recent content strategy trends, however, emphasize purposeful, targeted content “focusing on quality and actual value, as opposed to quantity or output,” as summarized in a Marketing Insiders Group outlook for 2018. Another view to consider in your evaluation is expressed in the Gartner post, “Think Mobility, Not Mobile,” where “Mobility” represents content optimized in its messaging and display for access from any source.
Those representative articles on content strategy trends are helpful for your evaluation of legacy content (keep what is valuable) and new content (create new content once for access on any sized screen). So, armed with analytics (measured value) and best practices (Content Authoring Optimization), it’s time to evaluate your legacy content.

The Four Rs for Evaluating Legacy Web Content

We recommend the “Four Rs” approach—Renew, Refresh, Repurpose, or Remove—for assessing and taking action on each webpage with legacy content.

Renew

The page is good as is. For this review outcome, think in terms of managing your personal subscriptions and making a formal decision to renew rather than having a subscription automatically renew through your complacency.

Refresh

The information is valuable, but the content is dated, requires scrolling on mobile devices without engaging headers to break up walls of text, and there are opportunities for improving SEO. If the content is worth keeping, it is worth refreshing.

Repurpose

You will find content that overlaps with the same topic on another page, one or two lines of text occupying a full page but associated with a larger topic, or lengthy passages without helpful context, including engaging headers. Consolidating content from multiple pages, guided by authoring optimization, is an excellent way to improve content, display, discoverability, and navigation. As a bonus, you will cut the number of web pages a user has to navigate and you will have fewer pages to maintain.

Remove

The page has few recorded views over an extended period. If it serves a current business goal, then it’s time to refresh or repurpose. But, say to yourself, “if we are really moving forward with Content Authoring Optimization and Mobility Now!… Do we really need all this stuff?”
Upgrading your legacy content, including trimming excess, will result in a more holistic and cohesive content strategy that considers all access points and helps you prepare to evolve further as the next big thing comes along.

What’s the difference between a bounce and a conversion on your site? It all comes down to the quantity and quality of content that your customers find.
In a related post, we explored the importance of blending content and commerce to enhance the customer experience. In fact, Gartner estimates that by 2020, 25% of leading online sellers will enable “commerce that comes to you.” ¹
Being able to deliver a contextually relevant digital commerce experience requires a change in your organizational structure (more on that in an upcoming post) and finding the right technology to support your organization’s content and commerce initiative.

Solutions that Enable Content and Commerce

Organizational silos prevent many companies from delivering the best customer experience. Separate teams, processes, and technologies are major hurdles for commerce enterprises trying to respond to real-time business demands. As a result, vendors of web content management and commerce systems have upped their game, offering capabilities that blur the lines between web CMS and commerce.
The content and commerce technology ecosystem is changing because of overlapping features offered by vendors and the acquisition of standalone commerce solutions.² Forrester states that commerce solutions have evolved to support customer engagement features, such as page templates, navigation tools, site search, and personalization, while some web CMS now offer shopping carts, checkout workflows, and product catalog management.
Commerce platform vendors are at a crossroads, trying to determine if they should build out content management features or simply bolt them on. Or, they are partnering with the big players in web CMS to provide easy integration of content management into the commerce platform, allowing users to do more marketing, scheduling, and promotion of the content as well as personalization.
In our experience, organizations want to empower their marketing teams and business users with the ability to manage content and workload approvals. If these capabilities don’t exist within the commerce platform, then they opt for a best-of-breed approach, using platforms like Adobe, CoreMedia, and Sitecore for content management.

Content & Commerce Evolution

With an emphasis on creating more relevant, personalized, and engaging content, you need to consider platforms that provide advance capabilities for content creation and management. Additionally, product information management, site search, and content management features that have been traditionally bundled with commerce platforms have evolved as more specialized, standalone solutions. Figure 1 illustrates the shift from single content and commerce platforms since 2000 to the best-of-breed solutions you find today.

Because every organization has unique needs and challenges, most content and commerce solutions are built specifically to address those requirements.
In the next post, we’ll explore why breaking down organizational silos and establishing governance is crucial for content and commerce success.
 
Sources:
¹ Magic Quadrant for Digital Commerce, Gartner, 2017
² “Content and Commerce Technology: Traditional Marriage Dynamics Don’t Apply Anymore,” Forrester

We have a client that is going through the early stages of developing renderings for their Sitecore solution. Naturally, they have a ton of questions as they are learning as they go – which is great. One of the questions I received from them was how to change the default icon and thumbnail for their new components. I also had a similar conversation about author experience with another developer leading into the same topic.
Since I’ve been asked twice in a relatively short succession – time for a short blog post.
So to set up the example I created a new controller rendering from an existing rendering from an instance of Launch Sitecore.

For the new rendering, I just populated the Controller, Controller Action, Datasource Location, and Datasource Template from the original. You can see that the default icon of this is the infamous blue rectangle and no thumbnail exists.

To change this:
1) Make sure your Sitecore content editor View options include Standard fields.

2) Next we go to the rendering itself. Expand the Appearance section. There are two fields you care about here, Icon and Thumbnail. The original question was about adding thumbnails, but since you are here anyway, let us follow the preferred practice of using uniquely related icons to have your rendering stand out in the content editor as well.

3) Select a new icon….. (Want to insert custom icons? Ask me twice and another Sitecore Reminder blog post may be born.)


4) For the thumbnail, you have a few options. Take Screenshot/Browse/Media Library/Sitecore Image Editor/Clear and Refresh.
Clear and Refresh do as they say. They will clear your thumbnail entry and refresh the image based on a change.
The Browse option displays the Select Media dialog allowing you to select and/or upload images to utilize for thumbnails.

The Open Media library option will redirect the content editor to go to the media library content item representing the image to change any fields for the item.
Edit Image displays an image editor dialog to perform some basic graphical edits on the image and to save it back to the media library item.

The best option is to Take screenshot.

This allows you to do a preview rendering for a specific device for a Sitecore item in the content tree. Just select the item and device. You will want to select an item in which the rendering is attached and will render output. Or you can enter a URL as well.

After you select the portion for your thumbnail and click OK, you will see Sitecore places your captured image in media library/system/////<name>. Each of the asterisk represent the first four characters of the item ID.
**NOTE: Currently there is a known bug in Sitecore versions 8.2 Update-2 and Update-3 that you will need a fix for. Submit a ticket to Sitecore support and reference Patch 146497 in your ticket.
5) If you use Sitecore Rocks, which is highly recommended, you have all the same options.


While this is not as robust as the controls within the Sitecore content editor with scaling the size of the image for selection, it may suffice for your needs without having to leave your IDE.
So why do this?
Allowing your editors to better identify their renderings, whether using the Content Editor or the Experience Editor, allows for more efficient content management. When your content authors can quickly visualize their components. Spatial ability is the understanding and memory recall of relations among objects. In the case of our content authors, it is much the processing of how parts interact with an entire machine, being able to quickly make the association through use of logical reasoning, memory retrieval, and easy functional switch while putting together content.
Simply, it makes our author’s lives easier and more productive.
 

At IBM Amplify 2017, I gave a presentation on 7 ways to maximize ROI on your digital experience investment.  The presentation was geared mostly towards IBM Digital Experience / WebSphere Portal but the concepts apply to virtually any digital experience platform and are aligned with Perficient’s take on Digital Transformation.

The presentation is shared below but in summary, the 7 points are:

1. Don’t approach an implementation from a pure technology focus, include the user experience.
2. Digital Transformation is a journey, not a destination.
3. Always consider performance in every decision you make.
4. Agile development.
5. Think “Inside the Box” and leverage product capabilities instead of developing your own.
6. Use modern development techniques including modern UI frameworks.
7. DevOps – automate everything you can.

As a marketing manager, I understand the full importance of content in the buyer’s journey. Depending on where awareness occurs, a customer could either be getting to know the solution I’m promoting, interested in adoption, or curious about the sale. Either way, it’s up to me to provide the information in a compelling, useful, and actionable manner.

Being able to provide great content is only part of the marketing challenge, since the web has become an increasingly noisier place. Not only do end-users have less patience, they also want their information in short, succinct, and bite-size pieces that provide immediate value. Thus, having a robust web content management platform is just as key as knowing the right messaging.

Unfortunately, wading through the web content management solution space is a completely different story. Not only are there a handful of solutions, but each also come at their own price range, usability, feature set, and functionality. Luckily research firm Forrester did the leg work in their most recent report released in late January 2017.

Customer Desires and Wants

Forrester was very thorough in their assessment of the systems in the market, using a 25-criteria evaluation to identify the top 15 vendors on the market. In exploring the solutions and associated needs, Forrester found out the following:

1. Contextual content is a leader: Evergreen content is important, but support for context-driven content is becoming more salient in a saturated market that wants to be first. More and more platforms are driving towards support for rich media including video.
2. Dynamic platforms rule the day: Static websites are now a thing of the past, replaced with content that meets present customer demands. The new platform must be scalable, provide extensibility, support APIs, and is based in the cloud.
3. Content authors require support: The modern content platform also separates technology from the story. While writers and content creators should know their way around basic HTML, the emerging narrative is that structure and organization are more important, so that consumers can find the content they need faster.
4. Marketers also require optimization: Similarly, marketers also need the right support to succeed in their content marketing efforts. Providing built-in digital marketing tools that drive search engine optimization, social media integration, and mobile (to name a few) are great considerations to start.

IBM Digital Experience Manager is an Emerging Leader

Among their evaluations was IBM’s Digital Experience Manager, now shipped with Watson. According to Forrester, the new cognitive focus of the product aligns with the cloud priorities of IBM and is emergent due to its open source nature. Both provide opportunities and hope for customers looking to make the most of their content and platform adoption efforts.

Forrester also examined the platform and noted that Digital Experience Manager is a platform best suited for the enterprise, particularly for already-existing customers. With Watson Content Hub leading the way, the availability of machine learning will also mean that organizations can respond faster to customer needs.

You can download the guide here.

Perficient is a longtime IBM partner with expertise across a wide variety of related solutions including digital experience. With customers ranging in industries including healthcare, retail, finance, and automotive, we possess the expertise to help any organization achieve success. Reach out to us at sales@perficient.com and see how we can help you today.

Learn more about our IBM practice here.

As 2016 draws to a close, it’s time to reflect on all that happened with Digital Experience Platforms. Let’s recap the most-read posts for the year:

10 | (Re)defining Enterprise Search

Enterprise Search is transitioning to something more broad and powerful. It now means reducing friction in your business operations.

9 | Google Search Appliance Change Brings Opportunity

What’s next now that Google has decided to sunset the hardware-based Google Search Appliance to focus on cloud-based solutions?

8 | Four New Invaluable Translation Features in AEM 6.2

In advance of Adobe Experience Manager 6.2, Adobe has released a number of interesting updates to AEM’s translation feature to improve the user experience.

7 | Artificial Intelligence Could Replace Traditional Search

Artificial Intelligence is very good at classifying information. Could AI eventually replace traditional document search algorithms?

6 | Three Disadvantages of Cloud-Based Search Engines

To make the most educated decision for your business, make sure you consider issues around control, data privacy, and network bandwidth.

5 | Three Advantages of Cloud-Based Search Engines

What factors are prompting the growth of cloud-based search engines? And why are vendors continuing to go in this direction?

4 | AEM Infrastructure Series: Disaster Recovery Basics

Why redundancy and disaster recovery should be part of your Adobe Experience Manager stand-ups

3 | Using Frontend Technologies like Node, Grunt, and Sass with AEM

Adobe Experience Manager provides some out of the box functionality that allows developers to use Node, Grunt, and Sass plugins.

2 | Coveo Reveal is a Game Changer

See the beauty behind Coveo Reveal’s machine learning algorithms.

1 | My Initial Impressions of Google’s Cloud Vision API

How Google Cloud Vision API and artificial intelligence are impacting image search within digital asset management systems.
We’re looking forward to 2017! Stay up to date in the New Year with Digital Experience Platform news by subscribing to our weekly digest.

Through its Healthcare Marketing IMPACT awards, Modern Healthcare and its sister publication Advertising Age have been celebrating the healthcare industry’s best advertising, marketing, promotional and communications campaigns across all media platforms. Perficient client Cardinal Health was recently awarded the Silver Award for Website Campaign of the Year for Supplier/Vendor/Pharma.

Optimizing the Online Experience
Cardinal Health was growing quickly through acquisitions. As business units were added, the content and structure of the external-facing website grew more complex. Perficient was selected to implement the new website design to align with corporate rebranding. Using Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), Perficient constructed, tested and deployed a 1,200-page site that allowed business units to quickly update content without having to go through IT. The new site also enhances customers’ search experience and incorporates analytics to track behaviors. Cardinal Health plans to expand AEM to improve the operations of other business units.

Douglas Manger, Perficient, who manages the Cardinal Health relationship recently discussed the new Cardinal Health website, “Cardinal Health is committed to providing a top-notch experience for their customers and the new website does just that. In addition to delivering an enhanced customer experience the new website creates efficiencies for internal business units and strengthens the Cardinal Health brand.” Manger said.

Congratulations to Cardinal Health and the Perficient team on winning a Healthcare Marketing IMPACT Award.