IBM released Cumulative Fix (CF) 14 for WebSphere Portal and Web Content Manager (WCM) in early July, 2017.  This fix will apply to either version 8.5 or 9.0.  IBM has moved to a continuous delivery model where they release cumulative fixes every few months to not only fix defects but also to deliver new capabilities.  Key capabilities of CF 14 include:

IBM Watson Content Hub

Watson Content Hub is IBM’s content as a service offering which allows you to easily manage content in the cloud while taking advantages of Watson’s cognitive tagging capabilities for your media.  Integration with Watson Content Hub is improved with WebSphere Portal and Web Content Manager in this CF.  See here for additional integration information.

Web Application Bridge Improvement

The Web Application Bridge allows you to easily integrate external websites and web applications into your site.  Improvements in this CF allow you to integrate multiple web applications within the same portal page.

Additional Social Rendering Templates for the Digital Data Connector (DDC)

Digital Experience and Web Content Manager integrates easily with IBM Connections, their enterprise social collaboration suite.  This is done through the DDC.  This CF contains additional improvements which allow easier and more feature rich integration capabilities with Connections.  See here for additional information on the social rendering templates.

Performance Improvements for Web Content Manager

A number of improvements have been included in WCM including faster queries of the JCR, additional WCMConfigService properties for tuning and additional access control parameters to reduce access control redundancy.

See this page for a comprehensive list of what is new in all CFs IBM has released.

Are you looking to upgrade top IBM DX 9.0 or simply looking to apply the latest CF?  See how we can help by emailing us at sales@perficient.com and download our portals guide for more information on how to build a leading digital experience.

As an elementary school student more than 20 years ago, one of my assignments was to raise money for the class through magazine subscriptions. Though our teachers no sales training, the accepted method for converting potential customers was to walk door-to-door or ask our parents to introduce us to interested friends. When sales were tallied up at the end of the campaign, usually the person who knocked on the most doors was the winner.

Such a sales tactic was once accepted across all industries – including elementary school fundraisers, but what was once the accepted buyer’s journey has now evolved. Magazines have faded away to other items and so have the sales tactics of yesteryear. With the rise of social media, customer portals, and mobile payment options, pursuing and converting leads now exists through a different approach that is more relationship-centric, digital, and on-the-go. Now the best magazine seller doesn’t necessarily need to walk the furthest, but rather only needs to have a large online reach.

Though different from selling door-to-door subscriptions, the buyer’s journey has transformed in similar ways for B2B enterprises. New digital technologies have transformed the building of relationships and development of pipeline in five different ways, which we cover in this blog.

1. A Modeled Approach: The sales model for years past was relatively simple: Work the phones, walk up to the door, gauge interest, and move forward. Much of this was also ad-hoc, with buyer information gathered real-time within the conversation. Today, the modeled approach as described by inbound marketing software HubSpot and others is focused on gathering information before, during, and after contact has been made. HubSpot themselves even defines it as the Awareness, Consideration, and Decision stage in this blog post.
2. Relationship-Centric: Rolodexes full of business cards were the norm for the pavement-hitting account executive just a decade and a half ago. Though business cards still remain popular as a way to offer contact information, the emergence of social networking sites has offered greater trust. According to LinkedIn, buyer-vendor relationships are strengthened through online connections. Their research indicates that buyers who use social are trusted 55% of the time, versus the 34% who do not.
3. Research-Driven: Twenty years ago, the internet was still a fairly nascent landscape. Not all organizations had websites, so doing research was tough. Today however, the story is different, with Google and other search engines offering near-real time information on anything and everything. For buyers, research is a key portion of their journey with any solution. According to Forrester, 74% of buyers conduct more than half of their research online before making an offline purchase or contact with a vendor. Having available information is more important than ever.
4. Customer Success: Even though the buyer’s journey may appear to cover everything prior to a sale, there are elements that come after, including customer success. Contrary to the past where software was sold as one-off licenses, the SaaS-driven subscription models of today have made their way into the buyer’s journey. Customer success is defined after the sale where accounts are assigned to representatives who are solely responsible for ensuring happiness as well as up-sell and cross-selling of features. According to research from UserIQ, customer success is a key part of B2B SaaS priorities this year, with 1% indicating that their goal is to increase retention rates and reduce churn.

Do you see these trends in your own buyer journey mapping? Let us know in the comments section below.

Get Started On Your Buyer’s Journey

Are you a modern enterprise looking to better connect with your ideal customer? Email us with your challenges today at sales@perficient.com for more information and download our portals guide below for greater insights on boosting your buyer’s journey.

Learn more about our IBM practice.

Today’s organizations must be more connected to their customer than ever. As the buyer’s journey evolves, leaders must also adopt the right technologies to influence positive business outcomes. This post is a part of a series focused on helping enterprises develop the necessary strategies and best practices to better connect with their customers. Check out the other blogs in this series.  

The season of spring symbolizes renewal through spirit and business. In between cleaning out their homes and enjoying the fresh air, many are also reflecting upon how their goals are doing through the first quarter of the year.

One area business leaders are looking at this year is how to improve their customer experiences. With omni-channel experiences now front and center, keeping attention while driving revenue is a formidable challenge that brings down even the savviest of organizations.

IBM has been in the customer experience realm for the past decade and a half, pioneering the WebSphere platform. As a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant, the platform is used through a variety of industries and verticals.

If you’re looking to transform your organization’s customer experience this year, download our guide below, 3 Reasons to Upgrade to WebSphere 9. Let us know what you think and where you are in your priorities at sales@perficient.com. We look forward to hearing from you!

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.

2017 promises to bring new challenges for organizations looking to connect with customers and maintain relationships. As the web becomes an increasingly noisy space, selecting the right technologies can make all the difference between competition and irrelevance.

We believe that having a comprehensive digital experience is critical to business and communications continuity. Not only must digital experiences encompass the needs of marketing and communications teams, but they also must have social media integration, robust content management, and new user experiences which encourage digital transformation. Thus, we offer IBM’s Digital Experience platform, recently renamed as a leader by Gartner in the Digital Experience category.

With IBM’s release of WebSphere Portal 8.5, organizations are even more positioned to succeed in 2017 and beyond. In our latest guide, we explore the top 3 reasons organizations should consider in their upgrade strategy, including:

• What features to explore as you seek the ideal digital experience for your organization
• Which new features are the most critical to your WebSphere upgrade
• How our digital experience work has impacted organizations of all industries
• And much more!

If you or your leadership are looking to grow your customer footprint, download the guide and reach out to us at sales@perficient.com to start a conversation. Let’s get your organization to the next level in 2017!

Learn more about our IBM practice here.

The IBM Script Portlet facilitates easy and rapid portlet development using HTML, JavaScript and CSS. The Script Portlet uses the JavaScript library for any client side events and does not have features such as portlet wires or portlet events for inter-portlet communication.

This blog demonstrates the inter-portlet communication using public render parameters for passing dynamic data between two different script portlets on two different portal pages. Since the components of the IBM Script Portlet are all stored in the Web Content Manager,  this is deployed to other environments as part of syndication and we can leverage many of the WCM plug-in tags.

WCM plug-in tags,

1.RenderURL:

[Plugin:RenderURL copyCurrentParams=”” escape=”” uri=”” prefix.key=”” prefix.value=”” prefix.mode=”” prefix.type=””]

Plug-in to create portlet render URLs

copyCurrentParams:

• Accepts true or false value, default is false
• To specify current portal state and copy the encoded parameter in it to the URL.

escape:

• To specify the escaping used to write the URL.
• Accepts json, xml, javascript or none. Default is xml

The prefix before the key, value, type, and mode attributes refers to the same render parameter.

prefix.key:

• Sets the name of private or public render parameter

prefix.value:

• To set, add or remove the parameter value

prefix.type:

• Set the parameter type as private or public

prefix.mode:

• To determine what we want to do with the parameter
• Accepts set, add or remove

uri:

• To specify the valid uri that identifies the resource that we want to be resolved

Example

[Plugin:RenderURL uri=”nm:oid:pageid” pr.key=”{http://ibm.com}prp1″ pr.value=”value1″ pr.type=”public” pr.mode=”set”]

The above plugin creates the url that resolves the URI to an identified page and sets the public render parameter.

<form method=”get” action=”[Plugin:RenderURL copyCurrentParams=”true”]”>

<input type=”text” name=”param1″>

<input type=”submit” value=”Submit”>

</form>

This plugin  sets render parameter when the form is submitted, these parameters can be read by the portlets that are displayed on the form result page.

2.ResourceURL:

[Plugin:ResourceURL url=”” param=”” proxy=”” escape=””]

Generate the url to resources that we want to serve through WebSphere Portal Ajax proxy

url:

• Specifies the base url to which the query parameters are added

param:

• To specifiy the query parameters. Multiple values can be specified.

escape:

• To specify the escaping used to write the URL.
• Accepts json, xml, javascript or none. Default is xml

proxy:

• Specify to generate a URL that serves the resource that the URL addresses through the portal Ajax proxy or directly
• Accepts true or false. Default is false.

Example

[Plugin:ResourceURL url=”http://www.ibm.com ” param=”a=b” proxy=”true”]

This generates the URL that serves the resource http://www.ibm.com?a=b through the portal ajax proxy

3.RenderParam:

[Plugin:RenderParam key=”” type=”” defaultValue=”” separator=”” escape=””]

Used to access the public or private render parameter from the web content.

key:

• To specify the name of the render parameter to be accessed.

type:

• To specify the type of parameter to be read
• Accepts any, private, public or query

defaultValue:

• To specify the value to be returned if the addressed render parameter does not exist or has a value of null.

separator:

• to specify the separator used to separate the values of a render parameter that has more than one value

escape:

• To specify the escaping used to write the URL.
• Accepts json, xml, javascript or none. Default is xml

Example

[Plugin:RenderParam key=”key1″ type=”private” defaultValue=”defaultValue”]

Reads the render parameter with name key1, if null or does not exist returns defaultValue.

4.RequestParameter:

[Plugin:RequestParameter key=”” value=”” defaultValue=”” mode=””]

To print out the specified request parameter

key:

• Specifies the name of the parameter

value:

• Specify the parameter value

defaultValue:

• Returns the defaultValue if null or does not exist

mode:

• Specify a mode whether to set, delete or remove the parameter.

Example

[Plugin:RequestParameter key=”key1″ value=“value1″ defaultValue=”defaultValue”]

This creates the request parameter with name key1 and set the value as value1

Please visit the IBM WebSphere Portal Product Documentation to see list of all the tags available. We can create our own custom rendering plugin which can then be used by Script Portlet.

Sample

This example displays the world population by region chart in Population List page and the details of each country in Population Details page.

1. Create a Portal page Population List
2. Add the script portlet to the page
3. Add HTML and JavaScript code in their respective sections

[Plugin: RenderURL] plug-in tag is used to generate the portlet render URL and set the public render parameter to the populationDetails resource.

4. Save and close the editor.

5. Create another portal page Population Details

6. Set the page unique name as ibm.populationdetails

7. Add the script portlet to it

8. Add the code to read the public render parameter.

[Plugin: RenderParam] plug-in tag is used to read the public render parameter.

9. Save and close the editor

10. Now navigate to population details page from population list.

The above example demonstrate that Public Render Parameters can be used effectively to implement inter-portlet communication in Script Portlet. This can also be extended for inter-portlet communication between other JSR-286 portlets and Script portlets.

IBM has brought several product innovation and advancement with advent of WebSphere Portal in web-based projects. In particular, IBM has launched a JavaScript based portlet referred as IBM Script Portlet which would facilitate easy portlet development in WebSphere Portal server. Any novice web developer with minimal web development skills like HTML, JavaScript, and CSS can effortlessly create and deploy their application in WebSphere Portal server.

IBM Script portlet saves the components such as HTML, JavaScript and CSS in Web Content Manager. These components can be edited using the script portlet. Script portlet has access to the logged in user information, shared render parameter and portlet preferences. Portlets can be developed easily without Java or the JSR 286 portlet specification.

You can also import any existing web application and render existing portlets developed with IBM Web Experience Factory.

Installing the IBM Script Portlet

To download and install the IBM Script Portlet, refer IBM site – Installing IBM Script Portlet.

Sample

Let’s create a sample portlet to display monthly average rainfall chart using JavaScript framework jQuery and Highcharts. Login to your WebSphere Portal server and follow the steps.

1. Go to Administration and create a page
2. Add the Script Portlet to the page

3. Click edit to open the script editor

4. Add your HTML code and JavaScript code in their respective sections

5. Click save and preview the changes.

6. Now close the script editor to view the portlet.

The above example shows how to create a portlet without Java or the JSR 286 portlet specification.

Global companies have a unique advantage, with the ability to span all continents while remaining personal in their service to clients. Though companies can implement communications technologies that bring employees closer together, sometimes it isn’t enough to truly connect everyone.

Such a challenge was true of a global management consulting firm, who was challenged with a remote and disconnected workforce in addition to disparate and inefficient legacy communications and collaboration systems. Though management had always consulted other firms on their strategic needs, this time, the client was them.

We were brought in to drive organizational change and were tasked to build a mobile-supported version of their employee portal and deploy it in the cloud. Our digital agency designed user requirements to ensure that notifications, data, and search results were easily usable by all employees. Furthermore, we also designed the back-end of the employee portal by setting up the infrastructure, automation frameworks, notification systems, and discussion groups that the firm will be able to maintain during platform upgrades and tweaks.

Implementing the digital platform has been transformative for the consulting firm, which now has a unified, standardized, and scalable portal platform. Employees also have single-sign-on, personalization, and content management features while management can rest easy knowing that future upgrades will be simple, scalable, and effective.

With so many companies moving into portal-based technologies, what do you think are necessary features to help employees? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.

For more on Perficient’s expertise on IBM, click here.

The adage “Home is where the heart is” has been a bedrock of America for nearly a century, representing the emphasis that we place on living spaces. The best homes contain elements that speak to the presence of family while also offering individuality from room to room.

For home improvement vendors, their passion is helping homeowners move closer to accomplishing their remodeling dreams. With so many items to choose from, store associates and leadership must have easy access to product inventory, collaboration tools, and customer information to provide the best recommendations for completing the job. Such was the challenge of one home improvement retail leader as they looked to enhance their digital assets.

Remodeling the Retail Experience

Our client is one of the leading home improvement retailers, operating nearly 2,000 chains in the United States, Mexico, and Canada. With almost 300,000 employees, management had no way of managing store metrics or personalizing communication between employees. Furthermore, their technology assets consisted of 30 different applications, causing frustrations and inefficiencies preventing positive store experiences. In management’s discussion, they decided a unified solution was necessary if the company was to innovate and provide a better customer experience.

We were called in due to our deep understanding of digital transformation in the enterprise and our background in building portals. From our past client work, we believed that upgrading their implementation of IBM WebSphere Portal from v6.1 to v8.5 to enhance web content distribution and introducing DevOps/continuous integration to speed up service delivery and possibilities for innovation.

An Upgraded Tool Belt for Better Results

We were able to achieve our goal of helping our client unify their different technologies while creating increased visibility into store performance. This will allow management to further understand how to address their retail strategy, view sales summaries, and address customer needs on a more agile and responsive basis. Additionally, the implementation of DevOps and continuous integration also means that employees can login into all of their applications through a single sign-on.

For employees, an upgrade in technology means an upgrade in productivity. The added collaboration tools allow employees to manage their financial and health benefits while providing a single view to all employee information.

Your Turn:  How else do you think we can leverage portals or cloud solutions to improve the retail experience? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.

Learn More

Perficient and IBM are teaming up to bring a cloud event to Charlotte, North Carolina on May 24. Get the information you need about cloud migration and enjoy FREE beer brewery tour and tasting. Click here for more information.

For more on Perficient’s expertise on IBM, click here.

Beyond superior product offerings, a positive customer experience is an integral component of satisfaction and retention. This was the story of a regulated electric utility company in operation for over 100 years with almost a million customers in the southeastern region of the United States. Over time, the company had developed a network of separate websites, each serving a different segment of customers, leading to confusion and frustration. Customers also had no way of receiving notifications for new programs, products, and services. 

To create a more seamless experience, our client decided to build a single platform tying together all the features while also being compatible with mobile and desktop devices. They engaged Perficient to architect and deliver a new digital experience platform, leveraging IBM WebSphere Portal and Web Content management with TIBCO middleware to create an experience that will last for years to come.

Perficient was able to deliver immediate impacts for the client, ensuring the completion of business requirements. These included:

• Fully responsive design for mobile support.
• Enhanced functionality for marketing target programs and services to consumers.
• Technical consolidation of multiple sites to a single platform.
• Business-driven content management without IT intervention.

Perficient was able to deliver an IBM solution for our client that significantly improved customer experience with increased functionality, communications capabilities, and technological platforms, resulting in increased customer enrollment, loyalty, and cost savings. The new platform also enables the client to support a growing customer base with its already-existing power generating footprint.

Learn more about our expertise with IBM and how it can benefit your organization.

The term “Headless CMS” has come up in the past year and it has started to generate some buzz in the industry.  “Headless CMS” is basically a concept and not a product or technology. But it has potential to help in our digital transformation efforts by making content delivery and marketing more flexible.
Traditionally, content management systems have been built not only to create and manage content, but also to manage the entire web experience, from displaying content, to managing navigation, to tag management and so on.  As content management systems grow to take on more and more duties, they tend to become more rigid and limiting in how we build websites.  Say you want to implement a new, cool technique, but find that you can’t do that with your current CMS.  In the early days of responsive web design, many content management system could not provide this feature and left us with a lot of work arounds for our mobile sites.
This is where “Headless CMS” comes into the picture.  What if you could have a content management system that did a good job at managing content, but left the presentation of the content and the website (the “head”) up to somebody else?  In this case you could do anything you want when building the site, but still display content that is managed in a nice, clean way. Many years ago (before REST become popular) we developed a Content Services Framework at Perficient to help our customers with this concept.
Technologies like REST and Javascript frameworks have really pushed these ideas to the forefront.  If our CMS can produce RESTful forms of content, then I can use AngularJS, Node, etc. to build a truly custom and interactive site and pull in content when I need it.
To go further, what if I can produce a public API or content service that can be consumed by others?  I could potentially charge for that service (remember when news organizations did that? – they still do).  Advertisers work that way – here is an ad that you can embed on a website, just call this Javascript library.
So its not a stretch to think of a content management system as a content service.  That service can provide content to web sites, web applications, mobile applications, marketing tools, etc.  All you need is for your CMS to have a well defined service contract (API) so all these other applications know how to access content.
Before we get all nirvana on this idea, there are some real hurdles that enterprise content management systems have already overcome:

• Secure content – its fairly easy to secure content, but making sure permissions and user credentials are shared across all applications can be tricky.
• Content in context – sometimes snippets of content don’t mean a whole lot unless presented in a larger context.  For example, getting a description of a conference event doesn’t do a whole lot unless you also have the dates, times, speakers names, etc.
• Personalization and targeting – this is a two edged sword.  If the CMS knows a lot about the user, it can personalize content for them.  If your “head” is passing along a limited amount of information about the user, your content system may not be able to serve very personalized content back.  On the other hand, if you pass a good amount of user information to the CMS, it may slow down the submission.  Think of trying to pass along a list of pages the user visited on your site, plus their location, language, past buying habits, etc. so the CMS can present an offer on a page.
• Content formatting – content management systems have evolved to show previews of content, to edit content in the context of a page, etc. All this is done because content – the size of images or tables – can affect how a page is displayed.  If you are grabbing content through a service, you may not get a good looking page unless you do a lot of upfront work to anticipate this problem.

In summary, headless CMS has a lot of potential benefits, but does pose some significant technical hurdles.  At this stage of the technology, if you don’t have great skills in the “head” area, then sticking with a full-featured CMS may be your best option for now. Luckily for us, many (or all) of the enterprise CMS vendors are including content RESTful services in their products.  These systems provide the option to use the CMS fully or to use it as a content service for your custom applications.

The term “Headless CMS” has come up in the past year and it has started to generate some buzz in the industry.  “Headless CMS” is basically a concept and not a product or technology. But it has potential to help in our digital transformation efforts by making content delivery and marketing more flexible.

Traditionally, content management systems have been built not only to create and manage content, but also to manage the entire web experience, from displaying content, to managing navigation, to tag management and so on.  As content management systems grow to take on more and more duties, they tend to become more rigid and limiting in how we build websites.  Say you want to implement a new, cool technique, but find that you can’t do that with your current CMS.  In the early days of responsive web design, many content management system could not provide this feature and left us with a lot of work arounds for our mobile sites.

This is where “Headless CMS” comes into the picture.  What if you could have a content management system that did a good job at managing content, but left the presentation of the content and the website (the “head”) up to somebody else?  In this case you could do anything you want when building the site, but still display content that is managed in a nice, clean way. Many years ago (before REST become popular) we developed a Content Services Framework at Perficient to help our customers with this concept.

Technologies like REST and Javascript frameworks have really pushed these ideas to the forefront.  If our CMS can produce RESTful forms of content, then I can use AngularJS, Node, etc. to build a truly custom and interactive site and pull in content when I need it.

To go further, what if I can produce a public API or content service that can be consumed by others?  I could potentially charge for that service (remember when news organizations did that? – they still do).  Advertisers work that way – here is an ad that you can embed on a website, just call this Javascript library.

So its not a stretch to think of a content management system as a content service.  That service can provide content to web sites, web applications, mobile applications, marketing tools, etc.  All you need is for your CMS to have a well defined service contract (API) so all these other applications know how to access content.

Before we get all nirvana on this idea, there are some real hurdles that enterprise content management systems have already overcome:

• Secure content – its fairly easy to secure content, but making sure permissions and user credentials are shared across all applications can be tricky.
• Content in context – sometimes snippets of content don’t mean a whole lot unless presented in a larger context.  For example, getting a description of a conference event doesn’t do a whole lot unless you also have the dates, times, speakers names, etc.
• Personalization and targeting – this is a two edged sword.  If the CMS knows a lot about the user, it can personalize content for them.  If your “head” is passing along a limited amount of information about the user, your content system may not be able to serve very personalized content back.  On the other hand, if you pass a good amount of user information to the CMS, it may slow down the submission.  Think of trying to pass along a list of pages the user visited on your site, plus their location, language, past buying habits, etc. so the CMS can present an offer on a page.
• Content formatting – content management systems have evolved to show previews of content, to edit content in the context of a page, etc. All this is done because content – the size of images or tables – can affect how a page is displayed.  If you are grabbing content through a service, you may not get a good looking page unless you do a lot of upfront work to anticipate this problem.

In summary, headless CMS has a lot of potential benefits, but does pose some significant technical hurdles.  At this stage of the technology, if you don’t have great skills in the “head” area, then sticking with a full-featured CMS may be your best option for now. Luckily for us, many (or all) of the enterprise CMS vendors are including content RESTful services in their products.  These systems provide the option to use the CMS fully or to use it as a content service for your custom applications.