Category: Technology

WSM Blossoming in the Spring

The leaves are coming out, the flowers are in bloom, and OpenText Web Site Management (WSM) innovations on top of a refreshed core architecture are slated to roll out or have.

  • Find out about a pre-built HTML5 Responsive Web Design implementation for WSM: http://www.solutionexchange.info/2064.htm
  • SmartTree cross-browser & new public APIs in v11.1 – yes we listen to those ideas on Solution Exchange. # 1 & 2 items complete or on road map.
  • Find out what’s in the soon to be released v11.1 and road map of new features through 2015 https://knowledge.opentext.com/knowledge/cs.dll?func=ll&objId=34146964&objAction=browse
  • Watch Solution Exchange and Twitter for Manuel’s teasers of new features coming in v11.2 ( around Q4) like Tablet editing
  • A new version of Portal Site Management is pending as well. With exciting possibilities with what SAP has done with SAP UI5, and mobile portal. That isn’t the same old grey and orange portal I started working with about a decade ago.

It’s an exciting time to work with OpenText WSM and more to come. Also enjoy seeing the EIM strategy taking hold in R&D and there are exciting new plans to come that could help out customers get much better Customer Experiences as well.

 

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.

rwd-teaser

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.

OpenText WSM and Wave Together

What follows is a simple recipe for creating an OpenText Wave Application filled with content from OpenText Web Site Management.

Ingredients:
1 existing WSM Project with Articles Content Class, you may have 1 to many available
1 existing Wave Application Template with NewsList and NewStory XML Consumer

Take WSM Project

 

 

 

Add Articles Variant to convert HTML to text for native applications:

 

Here’s a view of the template, not much needed.

 

 

 

Publish that out.

This Delivery Server project already had target DynaMent’s delivering personalized news.

 

 

 

Made a minor change to the target DynaMent to use the variant content

 

 

Some minor tweaks were needed.  Then pointing the URL for the NewsList template to WSM Delivery Server and this is the resulting application:

 

 

 

 

Results:

Cross Platform Native Applications (iOS, Android, Blackberry providing content reuse in a different channel

Next steps:
1) Clean up the content for the application a bit.
2) Examine sharing sample configuration (DS Transport Package, MS Content Class Template export& Documentation) to SolEx. This took about 2 days effort scattered in amongst other tasks, having a sample configuration will dramatically cut development time.