• Adobe CQ5.5 Sneak Peek
• Adobe CQ5.5 Now Available

At the time of the announcement, Adobe also announced CQ 5.5 Social Communities, but had not yet shipped that feature.  Well, I missed the original shipping announcement, so I’m catching up to it now.

On May 15, 2012, Adobe announced that CQ 5.5 Social Communities was available.  Social Communities builds on to some existing features already available in Adobe CQ 5.5, such as “developing and managing blogs, forums, comments, and ratings, as well as connecting to social networks, across all aspects of an organization’s digital presence”.

You can now include login to CQ 5 using Twitter or Facebook and then personalize their experience using information from their profile or data from other systems.  Adobe has included several social plugins in CQ 5.5 that include:Activity feeds

• “Like” buttons
• Comments
• Twitter Share
• Twitter Follow
• Twitter Search

These new features will make it even easier for site managers to add social capabilities to their websites.

You can see a video of some of the social plugins on YouTube or inline below.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DVlaN_zcs0[/youtube]

The jump from CQ4 to CQ5 brought a considerable improvement in the product, wrapped with an elitist bow – aiming to enchant not only techie geeks, but marketers as well. Since then, Day overhauled its upper management echelons, kept up an aggressive research and product development schedule, expanded sales and marketing activities globally and, particularly, in North America, prettied up enough to get acquired by Adobe. Result? The product is now officially popular.

– RealStory Group, “CQ5 WCM development skills are hot — and scarce“

Adobe is a leader in Web Content Management, and CQ5 is a robust content management system. It integrates “multi-channel marketing planning, a social module for building communities and online forums and a targeting module that builds Ominture tools into CQ5 and enables marketers to better understand which campaigns are working and to target specific content,” according to Fierce Content Management.

Perficient is looking for CQ5 Web Content Management developers to develop, design, test and deploy WCM solutions and next generation web content management systems (WCMS) for our clients. You will work closely with clients, developers, system administrators, project managers, business analysts and end users to build a state-of-the-art WCMS systems and solutions. Learn more about the opportunity here.

First, Adobe purchased PhoneGap late in 2011 and has incorporated that tool into CQ5.5.  While in the past you could target CQ5 for multiple devices, with the inclusion of PhoneGap, CQ5.5 will take mobile to new heights.  In the demo, Adobe showed how easy it is to drop a camera widget on the mobile page and then preview the exact functionality via the device’s emulator.  So as you are building the mobile site, you can instantly see how each device will exactly render the page.

A second really nice feature is the Client Context view of your site.  Here you can open the site with a context viewer to see how the pages will look to various audiences.  In the context viewer, you can adjust user attributes to see how the page reacts.  You can click on a location in a map and the page will display based on that locale.  You can click on different devices and see how your page looks in that context.  This provides a great way to experiment visually with personalization rules.

Adobe is now including translations of your page into multiple languages.  For example, you can create a page in English, then click on the icon for French and have the page translated directly.  Translations can be configured to use Google Translation as the engine or you can integrate others.

One final new feature I like is the inclusion of Adobe Bridge.  This allows editors to seamlessly manage digital assets in CQ5.5 and keep them in-sync with other media efforts.  So from CQ5.5 you can open an image from the library, make changes to it through Photoshop and save the changes.  Or somebody on your creative team can make changes to an image in the digital asset library. Those changes immediately appear in CQ5.5 and then can be workflowed prior to publishing to the site.  Likewise, content and images used to generate brochures from inDesign can be reused in CQ5.5 directly.   The goal is to reduce the pain often associated with trying to sync the creative department with the web management team.

It will be exciting to see what else is coming in Adobe CQ5.5.

It is true that overall CQ5 has lots of traditional portal features.  However, unlike many other WCM systems, CQ5 has gone the extra step to include a portal server within its stack so you can run real portlets in the system.  So CQ5 can play dual roles of traditional content management and portal, just like traditional portal vendors IBM, Liferay, and SharePoint.

So the question is: can CQ5 offer the same level of portal capabilities as these other vendors?  From a pure portal point of view, I don’t think CQ5 is quite at the level of the major portal vendors.  I refer to CQ5 as more portal-lite because it does offer the ability to run standard portlets, but it lacks many of the features that the other systems provide.  Here is a small list of additional services that IBM’s portal offers that are not in CQ5:

• Credential Vault – when integrating with external sites, you sometimes need to store each user’s ID and password to pass along.  IBM provides a very secure implementation of a credential vault out of the box.
• Personalization engine access from within a portlet.  CQ5 offers personalization of content, but what if you have a custom portlet that needs to pull in personalized content.  IBM offers this service so portlets can define a content spot on the output of a portlet and that spot runs the rules engine to get personalized content.
• JSF or Struts frameworks.  Both frameworks are included in the IBM tooling for Portlets and are available in the server runtimes.  For CQ5 you will have to implement these frameworks yourself.
• Interportlet communications.  CQ5 runs JSR 286 portlets which now offer the ability to communicate with each other through portlet events.  But if you have older JSR 168 portlets that can’t do events, you have to come up with your own portlet communication system.  IBM has provided a strong portlet wiring service for a long time.
• Virtual portals in the IBM Portal provide the ability to distribute administration of portals without having to purchase separate hardware and software.  This feature allows for addressing multiple user directories when you want to keep your suppliers separate from your customers.

If you don’t plan to use these extra features, then Adobe’s CQ5 product may fit your portal needs just fine.  If these features are important, then you need to evaluate whether CQ5 should be your sole portal platform.

We often see the scenario where you have a content-heavy site for your public web presence, but you have an application-heavy secure site for customer self service.  In this case, its perfectly feasible to combine CQ5 for its great content management and digital marketing platform with a more traditional portal platform for the heavy application lifting.

For this scenario, content is managed in CQ5 for both marketing and secure sites.  Your application-heavy portal, say IBM Portal, can use the out of the box CQ5 content portlet to deliver content to the secure site.

Don’t get me wrong, I like what Adobe CQ5 offers from a WCM and Portal perspective. Many of our clients love it.  But as we see so many vendors trying to blur the lines between the technologies to offer a complete solution, I just see that the evolution is still under way.