January 2013 – Timothy Davis

Globalized Personali(z|s)ation – Baked in goodness

I’m going to assume you have an understanding of traditional WCM Deployment Patterns and recognize that the core that all OpenText Web Site Management(RedDot) is a baking machine. When OpenText WSM publishes it renders the approved final version of the content out statically to a location. That doesn’t mean its WCM journey is done. I’m about to describe a method to deploy a global personalization system. However, you could swap out where I have OpenText Delivery Server for ASP.Net, PHP, JSP, RoR, Django, or any language or framework you want. OpenText Professional services has a set of practices to help meld your development methodology with content creation to liberate your application developer. But back to the topic at hand. When I talk about Delivery Server it is often in the context of par-baking, which I have used before seeing Seth’s post or other sources. The following method of par-baking in particular allows you to optimize personalized delivery without segmenting user storage by location. This scenario has come up many times over the years. Here is a general answer:

By setting up N (you could assume 3) data center locations, with Global Traffic Management (GTM) routing systems could sufficiently route traffic to one of N data centers closest to the client. This would allow for optimal delivery speed of content, both personalized and not. For this discussion lets assume each data center location would have its own database server locally that does not have replication to the other database instances. Content would be replicated from WSM Management Server in the current data center out. This can include DynaMents or XSL configurations. Any configurations can be promoted from development to all N production data centers using Delivery Server transport packages. Users and personalization data remain a concern. WSM Delivery Server with the Developer Toolkit activates SOAP web services that expose an API to edit user data, as well as a SOAP based Web Services Connector in Delivery Server. With these services and connector, a Delivery Server DynaMent configuration can be developed such that when the profile of a user is updated, the change will be replicated to all data centers via Web Services DynaMents. The synchronization could be configured for optimal user experience: to occur asynchronously with the use of AJAX. This would prevent blocking of page loads for distant calls with longer write times.

For global companies performance of their sites is a factor in the User Experience. Having friends and colleagues in Australia and Germany I know this from feedback I’ve gotten working on shared servers. I’m lucky enough to have friends in Europe who now work at Compuware (Gomez) they’ve conveyed the experience gains of having your contents hosted in your region or country so there are real ROIs in investing in global infrastructure. This doesn’t rule out CDNs. In fact this works for active content and user profile synchronization with DR as well which is important to support a CDN strategy for your origin servers. Pairing up this approach with OpenText WSM multi-language capabilities to produce localized sites is always a great combo.

Have thoughts on the approach? Using a database level replication and having a good experience?

Responsive Web Site Management

Responsive Web Design (RWD) is a term bouncing around marketing and web teams. I’m going to assume you’ve read some articles or good books on the topic. Where it hasn’t been heard of yet I’ve injected it into the mind share of a few organizations. Why is this important? The ability to deliver to multiple channels is important and the concept has been in OpenText Web Site Management (WSM) for as long as I’ve worked with it. In WSM a multi-channel support mechanism allows publishing multiple copies of content with different markup in a system called “Project Variants”. Why would I write about this concept that reproduces what the product offers? The reason is it reduces publication effort on your servers, getting the same content onto different devices. This practice empowers your web designers/developers, simply change your CSS/JavaScript and with no changes to your WSM implementation you can support a new device.

Want to learn more about WSM & RWD? There is an upcoming webinar from the WSM product team.

The OpenText Global Services team is about to release information on a pre-built WSM project that incorporates a Responsive Web Design on Solution Exchange. Some notes on the goals of that solution:

Common Content Types
Common UI Elements that support most sites needs
Skinnable HTML5 Framework with an active community
OpenText Global Services standard practices for navigation, project structure, and editor UX
Launch a micro-site or start a site redesign faster
Reduce initial setup time to get to greater value features faster
Lower cost and risk than implementing WSM from scratch

There are number of partners, customers and of course OpenText Global Services working with Responsive Web Designs with WSM. Need help getting started reach out to your preferred integrator or OpenText for help. I’m looking forward to see more launches & relaunches in 2013.

Zombie Undead?

Note: This is a personal perspective, not the official response from OpenText Corporation.

Am I part of the Zombie Apocalypse?

Tony is right he blogs about this product (OpenText Web Site Management, formerly RedDot CMS & LiveServer) at least once every few years (no news). He self-professed fell out of love in 2007 and has gone negative ever since. If this is the first article you’ve seen, from my perspective, RSG steadily puts out blog posts to stir up doubts in peoples current platforms or ones they may be contemplating for selection. These target not just OpenText, although our leadership in Enterprise Information Management (ECM, WCM, DAM, Portal, and more topics they cover) makes us a big target as a lead generation mechanism. All this comes with the not so subtle hint to select RSG for consulting to help pick your next vendor. I’ll steer clear of calling them sensational, but there are times I’ll read the articles myself for bulletin-board material whether on us or a competitor. I don’t mind he sees us as “undead”. Current and new customers realize to “… put technology of all types, especially content management, into its proper context — It’s neither the reason for success nor the reason for failure. “(Scott Liewehr, 2012). It seems Tony hasn’t noticed OpenText has formalized new channels for the Web Site Management product. Perhaps this calls into question the Portal reviews in comparison to his competitors who have us as part of the solution in the upper right corner (I’m not talking about OT Portal, but we do that too). Interesting when one analyst calls something out no multi-channel and another gives specific examples of web content with multi-channel reuse capabilities. There blog is free and they are selling something just like I am, I wish them the best of luck and I hope they are impartial in their selection process if not their editorial tone.

For me I look at the Vignette acquisition forced a pivot in 2009. OpenText as all the selection analysts say agrees that no single WCM fits every customer need. Many analysts say you may need multiple WCM systems for you enterprise. If that is true why wouldn’t vendors have and be able to maintain a series of solutions that fit more of the customers needs, OpenText have since 2006 on ECM (Document Management). In 2009-2010 OpenText discussed this as a continuum of WCM Maturity, similar to AIIM Maturity model for ECM. This is now really part of a spectrum of simple WCM to WEM. Both OpenText solutions have a place in Customer Experience Management for different organizations, sometimes in the same organization. Sure there are some overlaps but OpenText partners with organization to define when and where to use each or our tools. In 2012 I read The Innovators Dilemma and Understanding Michael Porter. This gave some perspective. What you see from many former mid-market solutions (SDL Tridion, Adobe CQ5, OpenText WSM, SiteCore) is they move up market as new lower cost followers enter the market. Sometimes they succeed or fail, often if they only focus on that up-market move not a core value proposition and the audience interested they won’t evolve and will later see disruption. Often there is quite a few challenges their customers face as they move up-market because resources are thin, partners are hoping on the bandwagon of the hot new WCM in town. With the Vignette acquisition OpenText stopped the WSM push to increasingly up-market and has been refocusing on the core value propositions and value chains. Why did our current customers acquire our software? We are an editor focused, multi-language, multi-variant (read multi-Channel for non-project builders), markup/development language agnostic, not requiring specific developer skills, solution with baking at its core that drew people to the solution in the first place. In the last two years R&D has focused on paying down our well documented technical debt (today’s Management Server release is a fully retooled 64-bit .Net 4 back-end). We aren’t done. We did this without a forced architectural/language switch like Vignette from v6 to v7 or Documentum, as was originally planned. This has allowed our customers to enjoy a refreshed SmartEdit UI, add-on of proven enterprise Social in OpenText Tempo Social, and a continued evolution. In North America we’ve refocused on our core, verticals, and Alliances (SAP & Microsoft).

For those of you who’ve picked RedDot or OpenText Web Site Management and long term active partners (OpenText, Enthink, or others) have for the most part seen great value in the solution. I have a view that IT/Software is a human process and always there is room for improvement. If you are a customer struggling I’d hope you’d reach out to renew your partnership with us or a partner we’d recommend to help you in a turn around. Sitting down with Arek and Wojtek (from Enthink) at Enterprise World in November we all saw a bright new era for our customers and prospects with what the OpenText’s EIM strategy can mean as OpenText are no longer scope locked on marketing/developing to support growth in ECM alone. This was a sentiment I got from the WSM customers I spoke with there as well. WCM (or pick your favorite acronym) isn’t the only part of your sites (internal, public or private), and never was.

Now can I look forward to another year as a “zombie” having my team work with our customers and partners. I look forward to the launch and relaunches of some exciting web properties, you want to know more just ask. My team will soon publicly launch a new solution to support redesigns, micro-sites and illustrate you our standard best practices at a price-point all can budget for. With that I guess I’ll close by saying Happy New Year & enjoy the brains!